01 Overview

In 2020 I joined JumpCloud’s devices teams to help kick off a net new feature to JumpCloud, Mobile Device Management (MDM). Our MVP was solely focused on supporting Apple’s MDM and Device Enrollment Program (DEP).

This push was a reaction from our organization to announcing that Apple would soon be locking down their devices that would prevent third party vendors from installing our JumpCloud agent without the device being managed by an MDM.

02 Research

There are many MDM vendors out there so first we had to learn how many admins were already using another vendor, if they would be willing to switch vendors, and what it would take for them to go through the arduous task of changing.

Our research was a bit limited in the early days because the organization did not yet want it to be public knowledge that we were investigating this feature. We relied heavily on internal SME’s and our own market research.

We met with 7 internal stakeholders and asked them 2 questions:

How would you define MDM?

What are the critical features?

03 User Flows

Now it was time to dig into solutions. The process of enrolling devices depended on if the device was user enrolled or if it was purchased through Apple Business Manager (ABM). Purchasing a device through ABM allows admins to enroll devices via DEP. Once a device is setup with MDM we can lay down 4 different security commands on those devices: lock, shutdown, restart, and wipe.

04 Customer Interviews

We were eventually cleared to chat with a few customers about our concepts. We went through some pretty similar exercises with them.

“Would need to meet requirements for high trust—and cover Android and iOS”

“Would be interested, it would have to incorporate iOS devices for me though, because otherwise I’d be stuck running MDM (wouldn’t want 2 systems)”

“Really interested”

05 MVP Designs

Once we had our MVP feature set figured out based on customer needs we started working on designs.

06 Early Access

After showing the original designs to internal stakeholders we learned that MDM would eventually support much more than just the two certificates and that we should probably split this out into it’s own page so that users would not need to relearn where to find this functionality.

We quickly went into EA and supplemented our user validation with a card on the page where users could provide feedback in the moment. This was linked to an internal slack channel that the UX/PM orgs both followed and anything submitted through this page was tagged as “MDM” so we could easily search the channel. This proved to be a huge benefit to the team in prioritizing follow on features.