A Brand New Product
Goal: Create a brand new Saas Network Security product from a blank whiteboard.
My Roles: Product designer, researcher, strategist
Impact: Product currently earning >$10M/year.
Ivanti Patch for Neurons
Situation
Ivanti and its predecessor companies have been leaders in network security software for nearly two decades.
In particular, Ivanti dominates patching – the automatic installation of security updates.
This is an incredibly complex domain: patching a big network is potentially the most disruptive, destructive activity a systems administrator can do on a network.
Ivanti’s security products had always been “on-premises”, Windows-based software. But there is a market imperative to put that capability in the cloud.
During a “Hackathon” in 2019, I was involved in a “demonstration of concept” that would allow a cloud-based system to assume control of its patching management software remotely.
Using the “Inspired” model, I joined a product manager and a tech lead in developing the concept for “Patch for Neurons”
Some of the many whiteboard (and greenboard) sketches that led to the final design, and some of my teammates discussing them.
Task
Actions
Starting from the metaphorical plain white sheet of paper, design a cloud based enterprise patch management solution.
Design went through three phases:
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The Hackathon
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The Whiteboard
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The Engineering Team
The Hackathon
The project started as a “hackathon” – a two day event allowing teams of engineers 16 uninterrupted hours to solve an engineering problem.
Our problem: could a web client could exert real-time control over remote consoles in secure environments?
After two days, the answer was “Yes – now what?”
One of our design iterations. It was not a successful one – it was no advance over the on-premises version. It took minutes to design, andseconds to dispose of. (Pardon the image quality – after five years, it’s a screenshot of a screenshot).
I designed an extremely simple web UI for the hackathon – basically listing the applicable consoles, and the results of a “Scan” for updated patches that the console triggered on them.
The Hackathon showed it was possible to remotely control on-premises consoles.
The next question was “What do we do turn this engineer’s party trick into a marketable product?
That led to the next step.
T
The list of “endpoints” – machines – in the network, including the level of “risk” =, reflecting the devices current patch states. This was the day-to-day information the users really needed. It looks complex. It was complex. But it tested well; users are used to complexity, but need the right information.
This was one of six primary pages in Patch for Neurons.
The Whiteboard
The next phase involved a three person “Inspired” model team – a product manager, a tech lead and me – working on iterating the concept from its hackathon state into something that could go to development – and to market.
We spent several weeks iterating the design, working toward the following goals:
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Stripping the patching domain down to the 20% of functionality that did 80% of the work.
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Detaching the experience from the existing “on-premises” applications.
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Designing something our customers could easily adapt to.
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Designing something users who weren’t yet customers would actually buy.
So we started designing.
We went through dozens of design iterations. In each case:
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We found a nagging problem
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We “solved” it
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We tested the solution with some people around the office who knew their way around patching, to make sure we actually solved it
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We repeated the process.
The Patch Settings configuration page.
This is one of the later iterations. As new features and requirements – ring deployment, maintenance windows, user surveys – have crept into the product, the formerly relatively simple page has become very long and complex. This is the subject of a redsign that we’ll in a separate section of this portfolio.
After a few weeks, we had an application that we could test with real users.Then came the hard part: winning the political fight. This was going to be a major investment, if the company decided to go ahead with it.
To win the political fight, we did a couple of rounds of research:
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A classic “Laboratory” usability test, making sure that sample users could actually do the job easily and effectively.
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Market viability research; would non-customers actually buy it?
The answers to both were “Yes, but…”
Which led to our next design iterations – with a development team.
With The Development Team
In the summer of 2020, the organization built a development team around our project.
The design from the “whiteboard” phase design carried forward – mostly.
But we included an entirely new feature, entirely because of our usability testing, which had had two discoveries, one expected, the other a complete surprise.
First – Users biggest complaint about their existing products was bad reporting tools.
A Compliance Report. This conveyed to the user how compliant their network was to company and regulatory security policies. It rates its own section of the portfolio.
Users main goal wasn’t just a healthy network; it was also proving to their management, and in some cases their regulators, that they had a healthy network.
This led us to an innovation: the Compliance Report view – which we’ll cover in a separate case study (see the next section).
This leveraged the constant stream of scanning data to build a continuous report that not only allowed the user to report to management at the end of a cycle,but in fact gave the user a motive to drive their actions at the beginning, or any other time, in the cycle.
This turned out to be a major innovation, leading to three engineering patents (two of them granted as this is written
Results
The project, which started as three guys working in a back conference room working on a whiteboard, is currently in development by a multinational team of nearly 25.
It began deploying early 2022, serving a “sweet spot” of customers with up to 10,000 endpoints (desktop, laptop and server computers).
Today, it is one of two products on Ivanti’s Neurons cloud platform that’s making any money (and I designed the other one, too).
Four patent applications are currently in the works.