Avira Security for Windows

Summary

Avira Security for Windows is Avira’s highly awarded, recently renovated flagship product. It protects millions of devices.

As Director Product & Engineering, I was leading the cross functional team who defined, developed and operated the solution.

Highlights: migrated all customers from old to new client, replaced AV engine with API based version and integrated UX. 50 M€ revenue responsibility. CLV increased. Retention improved.

Major Activities

• Leading of the Avira Windows Consumer Suites team, a cross-functional-team of 30-40 passionate product managers, product designers, user experience designers, data analysts, development managers and windows developers
• Revenue responsibility and revenue forecasting
• Creation of Product Vision and Roadmap
• Quarterly planning based on OKR method including capacity planning. Regular status updates during quarter and final evaluation of achievements after quarter
• Design sprints: participation at design sprints in different roles (participant, moderator, decider)
• Design system: definition and maintenance of design system
• User research and testing: building empathy with the user, understanding competitors and users, user testing of new features before implementation
• Implementation highlights
  • Migration of complete customer base from old windows client to new integrated client
  • Implementation of new integrated Antivirus user experience incl heavy experimentation and migration of all users
  • Implementation of Firewall
  • Implementation of Game Booster
  • Replacement of Software Updater backend provider
  • Implementation of in-product-messaging-client and definition and implementation of messaging campaigns
• Experimentation: definition of experiments, preparation and execution of experiments, analysis of experiment results and decision how to proceed.
• Data analytics: regular analysis of usage telemetry, definition of standard reports and dashboards, data analytics of newly rolled out features and experiments, deep dive in case of problems. All decisions done based on data.
• Collaboration with customer support: solution of customer issues, product improvements based on customer feedback, rollout of new features
• Collaboration with marketing: marketing campaigns, marketing experiments
• Collaboration with public relations: rollout of new features, analysis and reaction on external product reviews
• Improved engineering excellence: security measures, test automation, bug processing rules, build success rates, performance tests etc.

Keys to success

Key to success: Design Sprints

A Design Sprint is leveraging the Design Thinking method and is “squeezing” the process of “Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test” with a small and diverse team into a 5 day or even a 4 day cycle.

We used this method for large visonary topics to shape the product vision and also for individual features and I have to state that it provides tremendous results.

The huge focus of the team members, the constant time pressure, the switch between being creative, creating choices and taking decisions and finally the prototyping and user testing are making the difference in comparison to traditional concept work in parallel to normal daily work.

Over time, I acted in all three roles: participant, moderator and decider.

Key to success: Thorough UX approach

When building a B2C solution, users are not as close as in case of B2B. A thorough UX approach helps to get close to users.

Before starting a new topic, we typically built empathy with users by doing deep user research and also competitor research. We both used qualitative and quantitative methods. All in all it is very important to understand what problem a user has before starting with the concept work and provide solution options.

We also invested a lot into user testing. We did not start implementation before a user flow was properly tested and approved.

What is also very important is a constructive internal critics culture where concepts, designs, user flows, specifications, etc are reviewed internally at an early stage to ensure the expertise and creativity of the whole team is captured.

Key to success: Design System

A solid design system makes the life of product definition so much easier. I previously had a situation where we had to define a new design system with an inexperienced team along the product development and we were overwhelmed with this challenge and failed in many aspects. Having a good design system available enables the team to focus creating good user flows in an efficient manner.

Key to success: Experimentation

Even with the best UX approach one cannot state that things will turn out well for all users especially if the user base is in the millions. We therefore established an experimentation approach and ran constant experiments on a small subset of the user base before releasing topics to the full base. We took decisions based on data and statistical significance.

Key to success: Data Analytics

Analyzing anonymized usage data is anothter key element of building empathy with the users. It is important to know what features a user is using and how they are using a feature in order to improve the experience and feature set. Additionally, data analytics helps in finding issues quickly both ad-hoc but also based on standard reports which are shared and monitored by the whole team.

What is very important is to establish a culture where decisions are based on data and not on feelings. At the beginning, this was a fundamental shift of my work style as before I mostly relied on my feelings in the absence of data. And this often led to political issues when trying to convince others about my proposals and decisions.

It is so much easier to convey decisions when they are backed by solid and statistical significant data.

Selected Screens

Avira Security for Windows is a freemium solution. The smart scan is the most important conversion mechanism of the solution as it combines and shows all important features.

Below, you can find the screenshots of the smart scan alogn with other selected product UIs. 

Next>