PRODUCT LED GROWTH

The problem

Thousands of users of other paid GCP products (i.e. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Compute Engine (GCE), VM manager etc.) had access to the Standard tier of SCC included in their existing packages but either weren’t aware of it or were not utilizing their security coverage fully. Our team saw this as an opportunity to include in context SCC security findings to other GCP products in an effort to increase usership of the Standard tier of SCC and drive adoption of the paid tiers.

The vision

Prior research conducted in cross-selling and up-selling security users showed that our users had incredible ad blindness and were well-versed in ignoring advertisements even if they were deeply embedded in their environments. UXR recommended we demonstrate some sort of added value in order to convince users to learn more.

Added challenge

We planned to start with three GCP products:

• Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)

• Google Compute Engine (GCE)

• Virtual Machine (VM) Manager

As each of the three GCP offerings we were planning to embed into had different users with different priorities and also entirely different UIs, there was no standardized way to integrate into each of them. So instead, I met with crossfunctional partners on each team to better understand the motivations and security needs of each of the target users for each product. While most teams didn’t have a well-informed sense of the security needs of their users, we were able to parse high level differentiators and that threat detection was a high value add for all users.

Understanding our options

I met with cross-functional partners on each discrete product team in order to better understand the motivations and security needs of each of the target users

• Product partners provided insight into the primary jobs to be done and user motivations

• Engineering partners clarified what information each product actually had access to along with what the design constraints for their respective platforms were (i.e. some modular layouts had restrictions on sizing and interaction patterns)

• Sales and marketing team members were able to create packages for specific products encouraging adoption of higher tiers 

With this wealth of information, I identified specific categories of findings that were most relevant to users of each product and creating widgets for them

Mapping outcomes

There were several different potential outcomes and states for each of the different products depending on:

• The GCP product in question

• The individual user’s access level 

• Their SCC subscription tier

• Whether or not SCC had been enabled at all

• Whether they qualified for upsell or cross-sell (i.e. free trial or threats preview)

I mapped out the various potentially states for each of these—it was quite a tangled web of potential outcomes