Product management in a regulated, high-stakes environment
Overview
SS&C Intralinks is one of two dominant players in the Virtual Data Room space. The Virtual Data Room is a secure document collaboration platform for high-stakes financial transactions. M&A due diligence, where I worked, is the flagship use case, but the platform runs across capital raising, restructuring, IPOs, and anything else where confidential documents change hands under legal and regulatory pressure.
I joined as Senior Product Manager on the sell-side product, balancing market and client requirements against compliance constraints, while running multiple workstreams in parallel. This is a case study about one of them, the one I feel I can discuss without disclosing privileged information.
The problem
Intralinks VDR exported DRM-protected PDFs, access controlled by the platform, rather than a simple shareable password. When users tried to open one from an email or network share, the browser would attempt to render it inline.
Since browsers can't handle DRM-protected content this way, this resulted in a generic failure with little to no explanation. Most users assumed the feature was broken and stopped trying.
Looks like a cover page, but takes you to the future.
The approach
The fix had two parts. We replaced the generic PDF cover page with a designed one that included clear instructions for opening the file. We added a link back to the live document in the platform, so users who couldn't or didn't want to use Adobe Reader had an immediate alternative.
None of this was technically difficult in isolation. However, in a highly-regulated enterprise product with multiple stakeholder groups, this needed to be handled with everyone's requirements and timelines in mind.
The outcome
Protected PDF adoption increased by 35%.
This part of the experience felt more connected, and less like "using a legacy solution".
What I'd do differently
I'd generally set up monitoring for "broken promises". When the user begins a process (in this case, downloading a DRM-protected PDF) and there is no attempt to open that PDF.