Lifelock

Lifelock

Background

 

LifeLock offers identity theft protection service. It has its main office located in Tempe, Arizona, USA. LifeLock is a public traded company since its IPO in 2012. In 2017, LifeLock was acquired by Symantec for 2.3 Billion dollars.

LifeLock offers identity theft protection services such as scan, alerts, restore and reimburse – creating an extended process to secure the identity for its customers. The meeting with LifeLock took place at the Symantec campus in Silicon Valley with Peter Levinson, SVP Product & Technology at LifeLock. Peter spoke passionately about how LifeLock is constantly improving their product and their technology with a great focus on their customers. He mentioned LifeLock to be a customer-oriented, cloud-based service with the purpose of always trying to solve their customer’s´ identity theft protection challenges. Furthermore, the customer-oriented approach is tightly integrated with their innovation strategies – to find out what the product to best for its customers and understand what it solves to improve always improve its future product. The daily and continuous innovation from LifeLock happens when focusing on their users – trying to understand how they use a product today, how a new product will help them in the future, and what the users will do after a new product or process has been implemented.

 

Innovation

Input

Lifelock has its main focus on driving “successful” innovation. To do this they first focus on the customer and the customer’s problems. Projects are bound with a specific constraints and the timeline for delivery is also strategically made. At Lifelock, innovation is more tightly managed. Lifelock has a innovation program which focuses on existing customers and new customers. Projects can either be labelled as incremental, architectural, or discontinuous. There must be a strategic plan of action documented prior to development of a most viable product. At Lifelock there is surely a more controlled environment around approval of innovation. However, ideas are highly encouraged to be brought to life and shared.

 

Process

Lifelock focuses on metrics to provide feedback as to where resources need to be allocated. Email metrics are important to the company. Any new idea need to demonstrate that there is a business case for the idea itself.

Teams are given ‘Innovation metrics’ for success, with large boundaries to work within. Boundaries can be as simple as “I am working on this customer problem X, and it will be completed by date Y”, having a timeline for delivery is one of the keys to successful innovation.

Peter Levinson at LifeLock mentioned that LifeLock is focusing a lot of its metrics on feedback and customer satisfaction. As a customer-oriented company, it measures its success a lot around its users and customers, but also other key areas around the overall project. The key metrics for success at LifeLock are:

  • Number of customers signed up
  • Feedback – through feedback, is the user convinced the product works and convinced LifeLock will secure their personal information
  • Analysis – optimizing product use (using algorithms)
  • Revenue
  • General Customer feedback

 

Output

The feedback is usually received through alert messages via emails. The feedback is categorized through both open feedback, closed questions and satisfaction after use of product. The feedback is then analyzed through various scores and measures to keep pushing through successful projects – including new and/or improved product or services.

When deciding who and when to exit the project if successful vs failed, LifeLock has the goal off exit/kill the project off as early as possible with the help of its used metrics. The decision on exit a project also depend on the type of project. The differences between projects could be the amount of funding and impact on overall strategy for the company. A project with more funding and/or a bigger overall impact will be killed off earlier if decided to do so. In other words, it depends on the amount of funding as well as if the project has a great impact on the strategic goals of the company.

The decision to exit a project has two key things included in the decision. These two factors are are added on after the metrics of success. Indeed, the two factors looked at when deciding to exit a project are:

  1. Not valuable – it is not valuable for the company nor for LifeLock´s customers
  2. Too much cost – the cost will be too high compared to its revenue (not high enough ROI)

 

lifelock.