Privacy software · Global · 2023

Proton: launching a twelfth product without confusing the eleven you have

SECTOR

Privacy software

MARKET

Global

COMPANY

Proton

ROLE APPLIED FOR

Growth Product Manager

DATE

Oct 2023

DevTools

The situation

Proton Contacts would join an ecosystem that already included Mail, Drive, VPN, Calendar and Pass. The persona: a 36-year-old US software engineer, tech-savvy but not an ideologue, who buys on word-of-mouth and expert opinion and responds to companies with a mission.

Adding a product to a bundle is not the same as launching a product. Every new tile makes the pricing page harder to read and gives an existing subscriber one more thing to not understand.

This one is a growth brief, not a positioning brief: funnel, conversion and monetisation rather than category and message.

01 · What this engagement produced

6 of 34 outputs

Research

Competition

Segment, position and price

Message

Launch and enable

Measure and maintain

Solid is what the brief produced. Dashed is what it did not reach, and could not from outside.

02 · The decision

One feature gate doing three jobs.

Adding a product to a bundle is not the same as launching a product. Every new tile makes the pricing page harder to read and gives an existing subscriber one more thing to not understand.

So Contacts ships inside Proton Free: no acquisition friction, a stronger free tier, and another reason for the ecosystem to exist. But creating groups requires Plus or Unlimited. Hitting that wall does two things at once, it presents the upgrade at the exact moment the user has demonstrated intent, and it triggers a drip campaign that surfaces paid features across the rest of the ecosystem.

A single gate handling acquisition, conversion and cross-sell. In a bundle business the new product's real job is often to sell the other eleven, and the monetisation design should reflect that rather than trying to make the twelfth product profitable on its own.

03 · What I wasn't given

User interviews

Pricing test data

Products it had to fit beside

Not givenNo usage data and no roadmap, for a brief whose whole answer is where to put a paywall.

04 · The work

3 moves

A funnel built for one person.

01The persona, and the channels they trust

01 Research

A 36-year-old US software engineer: tech-savvy but not an ideologue, buys on word-of-mouth and expert opinion, responds to companies with a mission
Awareness through the outlets that persona actually reads, TechCrunch, TechRadar, Engadget, Wired, plus expert reviews, G2 and Trustpilot presence, and Reddit community engagement rather than paid social

02Consideration, loyalty, advocacy

04 Message · 05 Launch & enable

Product landing pages with real technical depth, comparison content, and use cases matched to a software engineer's actual day
Pre-launch MVP access for power users and customer advisory boards, so the loudest users arrive already invested
In-product referral for advocacy, because in a privacy business the referrer is the channel

03Name the problems before they become objections

06 Measure & maintain

User overwhelm, resource allocation, technical integration, user trust, support load and cannibalisation
Cannibalisation raised and then dismissed with a reason specific to contacts, rather than waved away

Where I pushed back

I designed the twelfth product to sell the other eleven.

The brief asked for the growth strategy for Contacts. The honest answer is that Contacts is not a business, and trying to make it one means gating things that should be free and adding friction to a product whose job is to make the bundle harder to leave.

Saying that means telling a company that its new product's success metric belongs to a different product. It is the right answer and it is not the flattering one.

05 · What I'd change

I'd have specified the drip campaign's exit conditions. A sequence that keeps surfacing paid features to someone who has decided not to upgrade is a churn risk in a product whose entire brand is we don't manipulate you. Getting that wrong costs more at Proton than it would anywhere else.

What happened next

PARTLY

The logic held. The product didn't ship.

Oct 2023

I presented this. Contacts was to be a twelfth application joining the ecosystem.

Jul 2024

Proton launched Proton Docs inside Proton Drive. proton.me

Jul 2025

Proton launched Lumo, a privacy-first AI assistant, free and usable without an account. proton.me

Dec 2025

Proton added spreadsheets with Proton Sheets.

Today

Contacts remains a part of Proton Mail rather than a standalone application.

Proton kept adding to the ecosystem, but through much bigger bets than a contacts manager, documents, spreadsheets, a wallet and an AI assistant, and each of them launched free-first with paid capability above it, which is the pattern the deck argued for.

The specific product never became a standalone launch, so the funnel I designed has nothing to be judged against. What the two years since do confirm is the premise underneath it: at Proton a new product's job is to make the bundle harder to leave, and the free tier is the acquisition surface rather than a sample.

The brief, as it was set

Brief set by Proton

October 2023

Growth Product Manager, take-home

Define the growth strategy and user journey funnel for a new Proton Contacts application, joining our existing ecosystem. Cover strategy, funnel, foreseen problems, product and UX, and what success looks like.

Summarised from the brief. Answered from public information only.

What I wasn't given

User interviews

Pricing test data

Products it had to fit beside

Not givenNo usage data and no roadmap, for a brief whose whole answer is where to put a paywall.

Set by the company.