Building a Detection Engineering Roadmap in 12 Weeks

Week 1–2: Baseline the Noise In the first fortnight, map every log source feeding your SIEM and grade them by fidelity. Remove redundant feeds that add cost without context. Establish a shared schema so detections can reference fields consistently.

Week 3–4: Prioritize Threat Scenarios Work with incident response to list the top five attacks your organization fears. Translate each scenario into detection requirements: signals, thresholds, enrichment needs. Document assumptions and remotely accessible datasets.

Week 5–8: Ship Detections With Testing Harnesses For every new analytic, develop a unit test that replays historical data or synthetic events. Use CI pipelines to block untested detections from production. Pair hunters with engineers so they can iterate quickly on false positives.

Week 9–12: Measure and Optimize Deploy dashboards that track detection dwell time, alert volume per analyst, and coverage across MITRE ATT&CK tactics. Host a cross-team show-and-tell to surface wins and backlog realities. At the end of twelve weeks, you will have a repeatable rhythm for adding, testing, and tuning detections.

Conclusion A roadmap anchors detection engineering in reality. Focus on visibility, automation, and measurable outcomes—you will move from reactive alerting to proactive security operations.