With roughly 8,000 business clients as its initial audience, Threema Conferencing removes a limitation that has shaped the product’s calling features: calls were possible only between Threema participants.
A decade of secure messaging, one closed circle
Threema has been a secure messenger for more than a decade and has since expanded into calling and other collaborative tools. Calls, however, have been limited to other Threema participants, and there has been no way to bring someone from outside the Threema ecosystem onto a call. Threema Conferencing addresses precisely that gap. Conferencing is one of several topics I have worked on at Threema and one of the few that can be disclosed; it accounted for about 10% of my time.
Borrowed patterns, secure constraints
Because conferencing has well-established patterns, the first requirements were drafted with Microsoft Teams, Jitsi and Skype as reference material. However, an established pattern is a starting point rather than a specification: the requirements, including the technical requirements on the protocol side, had to be written within the constraints of a secure communications product. The specifications were therefore the point at which familiar conferencing behaviour was reconciled with what a secure protocol permits.
Specification as the main instrument
Three responsibilities defined the role: (1) writing the specifications, including the protocol-side technical requirements; (2) drafting the first requirements from the reference products; and (3) coordinating implementation by three to four dedicated engineers and one UX designer, as product lead.
Business clients first
The release is targeted for Q4 2026, with Threema’s roughly 8,000 business clients as the initial audience, while private clients follow later through the desktop app. The sequence is itself a position: the existing business base supplies an immediate audience before the wider rollout is attempted. My assessment is that conferencing is a largely solved problem in feature terms, and that the remaining work for a product lead is to keep it solved within the constraints of a secure product.
Wireframes
