Native Access

Native Instruments

The improved way to manage all your Native Instruments software.

Purpose

Native Access was refactored to improve the rate at which features, fixes and improvements could be shipped to customers. The software itself allows digital musicians to manage their plugin and instrument suite, from the licenses they own to the products their subscription enables them access to. From the user side, the goal was to smoothly and efficiently install, manage, and update their product. From the business side, it was to protect our products from piracy and provide customers with the ability to access their product suite.

Responsibilities

As a Product Manager, my first 6 months were spent stabilizing the application. By identifying crucial paint points in the user experience we were able to establish more concrete KPI's, and committed to an aggressive 2-week delivery schedule.

We identified that our state management infrastructure was largely to blame for performance issues, and after a refactor were able to reduce load times from minutes to mere seconds. This inadvertently also affected page transitions and several features as well.

After this, we continued fixes, but slowly adopted new features and solutions. The business had accumulated around 400,000 monthly active users and millions of logins. To leverage these figures, I implemented a simple UX connection to our store to identify opportunity to connect ecommerce features, and as a result, we had 8% of our website sales attributed to this product, with a staggering 4% conversion rate (up to 8% during sales). We then implemented a sales banner to further drive attention to our product offers, leading to significantly improved conversion rates across the advertised products.

We also shipped more features to deliver on our promise to improve customer experience. We had a sizeable a11y-dependent customer base, whom we supported through a huge refactor in how these customers navigate the platform and how downloads are transcribed to screenreader-dependent users, reducing cognitive overload significantly and only providing updates when these users explicitly ask for it. Additionally, being our most requested feature, we shipped light mode alongside our default dark mode experience, improved customer support needs by adding features that helps diagnose problems, and most importantly, after 12 years, finally offered customers the ability to uninstall their products.

Throughout this time, we also introduced 3 new companies to the Native Instruments umbrella brand, each with their own registration and authorization technologies that needed to be unified, and by connecting our products we were able to launch new bundles and license types, most notably NI 360, a one stop shop for music producers to get access to top tier production tools in all phases of production. We updated our registration technology to accommodate all these products, and unified these tech stacks to get our users funneling to Native Access to register and use these products.

In addition to all the requirements for the product, I also led an initiative to introduce headless ecommerce experiences throughout our larger applications, including Native Access. This initiative is ongoing but soon to ship in late 2025. This was to leverage new strategic possibilities and leverage the already higher purchasing power that Native Access has potential to hold.

In addition, multiple efforts to support larger IT infrastructures have been brainstorms, with my time running out to kickstart the development for this initiative.