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Crossfunctional Collaboration

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Highly engaged customers are your biggest asset. I will walk you through the triumphant story of how I led NETGEAR to a ten-fold expansion of user engagement, through a service called Armor.

Armor is NETGEAR's premier security service that accompanies the NETGEAR hardware product lines such as Orbi, Nighthawk, and Nighthawk Pro Gaming. If you want to block malware, or keep yourself safe from phishing attacks or hackers, Armor is the product that does that for you. At least that was the original concept, but to make it valuable to our customers, it had to be much more than that.

This is the story of how I led a team to success, with an existing product concept, to completion.

When a user installed our app and set up their router, that was it. We would never see them again. We needed to increase our engagement. If we increased engagement, we would have our user's attention, and that meant we were valuable, which translates to a tangible metric for our shareholders as well as investors. The story we wanted to tell the world after Armor was, "we have a captive audience."

The NETGEAR customer varied from network novices to highly technical consumers, whom we affectionately called our technophiles. NETGEAR customers cared a lot about their privacy and wanted the highest quality hardware and services. They didn't mind paying a premium to get what they wanted. Armor needed to appeal to everyone but mostly our technophile customers, because they made the purchasing decisions.

My first focus was to understand what we were building. I set up a series of meetings with all the stakeholders and worked closely to drive towards clarity. The first meeting allowed me to discover who was needed in these sessions and who was missing. I like to build a Confluence page for this, which serves as our running list for anything that comes to mind, as well as important details that help us stay organized and focused.

Through these few days, new information emerged. I discovered we had an existing concept in the works. I worked with the design team to audit this concept and create information architecture based on what was already created.

The cross-functional team and I made a point of documenting and creating principles for how we sell services, to ensure we had a solid set of rules for all services going forward. This was used to guide us when we had ideas and helped keep us true to our core values in how the company sold services.

To keep the design team aligned, I wrote a mission, mantra, and vision that helped them focus and reorient themselves when needed. This is a great tool to use when the topic focus is derailed. The team was able to interject during heated discussions with, "...yes, but our mission is to build a service that shows extreme value and is highly engaging. This feature doesn't fit within that framework." Almost instantly, the issues would be quelled, and the team would refocus on getting the job done and not "rabbit hole" on new distractors.

Now that we had a high level of understanding of what we were building, I ran an exercise of mapping out Armor as a story map, using our ship date, and worked backwards to fill in the blanks based on the features we needed to build.

This gave us clarity to begin creating an epic in Jira. Through that process, we story pointed our tasks and subtasks. That level of granularity allowed us to see what we could commit to and not commit to. Some features were off the table. Our roadmap was clear.

With some clarity, structure, and a roadmap, I gathered the design and research team, and we began writing stories. These stories took our Jira tasks to the next level. They allowed us to add in the definition of done, definition of ready, and understand the jobs to be done.

In cases where we couldn't move forward and write a story, we marked down that task and made a running list of things we needed to test. I would then partner with user research to spin off a parallel project that helps unblock us by testing those assumptions.

After our stories were written, I held a grooming session with the cross-functional team to make sure we were clear on the roadmap and what we planned to deliver and what we wanted to group into sprints. This allowed the team to catch any issues, remove duplicate tasks, call out technical constraints, and align.

It's one thing to move fast, but if you don't document along the way, you will most certainly break things. I use repositories to help the team post their work up in a central location. This makes it easy to access and intuitive to search for. The best part is, over time, the organization knows where to go if they need an asset. The trick is to use a strict naming convention.

Now that we have a place to store our deliverables, I create a project-specific Traceability Matrix. This helps the team keep track of what they are turning in and what's left to be done.

Now is the time to send an email to the broader team or company to explain where we are at. I'll have the team create a Slack room, email alias, and send out a weekly update, to make sure we have visibility, and the organization has a chance to see our progress.

We have our roadmap, we have our user stories, now it's time to start designing. One key thing to note is the amount of planning and upfront work involved. We are like actors on a stage, we have rehearsed exhaustively and articulated what it is we are doing, so much, that the execution is almost second nature.

To be successful in design, you need to plan with the cross-functional teams and continuously go over flows, interactions, and mental models with them to gain consensus. This makes your design review go off without a hitch because engineering and product know what to expect and, in many cases, have contributed to the design.

The design process involved whiteboarding flows, creating diagrams, wireframing, and polishing the UI. This was done in close collaboration with the broader team to ensure alignment and validation.

In parallel, some of our design team would post specs on our design server, to document and freeze our decisions, by project or release. This allowed us to "freeze" work and work in releases, and not chaotically or ad-hoc.

Knowing that the design team and I were accountable for making Armor a success, I made sure to carefully define success criteria and implement measuring tools throughout the experience. This allowed us to closely monitor key performance indicators and make data-driven changes on the fly.
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Take a look at the table below to see what we tracked.

We also looked at broader engagement and retention metrics such as:

By closely monitoring this comprehensive set of KPIs, we were able to quickly identify opportunities to optimize the experience, iterate on designs, and ensure we were consistently meeting our success criteria. This data-driven approach was critical in making Armor a truly user-centric and high-performing product.

Jonathan's efforts in getting us to a V2 with Armor was huge but worth the effort! Armor would not have have been such a great success with out him!

Jennifer Khouri

VP, Software Operations

NETGEAR

Through my leadership and the hard work of my team, we were able to drive a ten-fold increase in user engagement for NETGEAR's Armor security service within just three weeks of launch. By deeply understanding our diverse customer base, ranging from network novices to technical enthusiasts, we crafted an experience that resonated with everyone.
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I led the discovery process, working closely with stakeholders to gain clarity on the product vision. I established principles and mantras to keep the cross-functional team aligned and focused on delivering maximum value. Through detailed roadmapping, story writing, and design collaboration, we were able to rapidly iterate and launch features that drew users back in, educated them on internet security, and provided a seamless way to purchase and use the service.
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The results speak for themselves - 150,000 new subscribers and $1 million in revenue in the first week. NETGEAR's Armor was recognized with multiple industry awards, including Outstanding Security Product and Editor's Choice accolades. Most importantly, the VP of Software Operations praised my efforts, stating that Armor's great success would not have been possible without me.

I learned that maintaining a high-level perspective and building advocates across the organization is key to driving true impact. Focusing on the vision, not just individual features, and empowering my talented team were critical to this project's triumph.

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