Image Management
Brief
A critical component of virtual computing are the virtual hard drives known as Images, which contain the OS and apps users will use on their remote PCs or apps. Customers typically use five to a dozen images to support various organizational functions on-premises. Each of these images has multiple versions as a backup in case something goes wrong when an image is updated, which can become challenging to keep organized.
When our customers transition from on-premises environments to the cloud, this problem only gets bigger. To help our “hybrid” customers manage their on-premises and cloud images seamlessly, leadership set forth an initiative to create a tool eventually known as “portability service,” and I was tapped to help the group come up with a solution.
When our customers transition from on-premises environments to the cloud, this problem only gets bigger. To help our “hybrid” customers manage their on-premises and cloud images seamlessly, leadership set forth an initiative to create a tool eventually known as “portability service,” and I was tapped to help the group come up with a solution.
Role
Product design manager / lead
Team
2 UX designers
1 Researcher
1 Documentation
3 Project Mnanagers
12+ engineers
1 Researcher
1 Documentation
3 Project Mnanagers
12+ engineers
Year
2021
Understanding the flows
Remote design sprint
Understanding the journey
Triaging the work to be done
To understand the task, I set up several meetings with PM and Engineering, where we exchanged enough information to understand what the business wanted to achieve and to explore some of the engineering ideas floating around to solve this.
I used these meetings to create a social network for Tyler, my newest report, whom I onboarded a month prior. This way, he could start interacting with his future partners while shadowing my interactions with them, setting up the model for collaboration so that he could, at some point, carry out the daily design work by himself.
Onboard new designer
My first task as manager was to assign the work to a designer, which ended up being a great opportunity to ramp him up.
Create a social network
Much of a designer's success depends on how quickly they can become part of the product team. I do my best to shortcut this process.
Finding agreement
It's important to create win-win situations where everyone compromises a little in order to achieve our common goals.
Delivering solution
Our job is to fail as soon as possible and test solutions with real users to get rapid feedback and create customer empathy.
Facilitating collaboration
I organized a 3-day compressed design sprint including PM, engineering architects, leads of the different engineering teams, and our researcher. I believe in the power of adapting to individual characters and circumstances without losing the principle of the methodology to get the most collaboration out of the group.
To me, the most important part of any workshop is to get buy-in from the group and establish trust in the process. If a team believes in the process there's a high chance for extreme collaboration.
The agreement is in the details
At some point during the first day of the sprint, we spoke about automation. Each team had a completely different concept of what it meant for its practical application — for me brushing away this discussion and dismissing it as semantics is equivalent to ignoring a fracture in the central column of a big building that continues to get buildout. It is vital to agree on essential concepts early on to keep group unity and cohesion until the outcome is realized.
Creating a clearly defined research plan
After wrapping up the sprint, I jumped to work with PM and research as we had several questions ranging from Who will use this? Why would they use this? To better understand our target audience among a sea of personal opinions dominating the conversations at the time.
I love being an active part of the research sessions. Through the many interviews, we found enough information to understand a wide set of use cases, their value and to validate our initial prototypes.
The hardest part of research is finding insights that aren't actionable, like having to defer some of the automation capabilities and interactions users expect to see, due to the engineering constraints of creating an MVP.
I love being an active part of the research sessions. Through the many interviews, we found enough information to understand a wide set of use cases, their value and to validate our initial prototypes.
The hardest part of research is finding insights that aren't actionable, like having to defer some of the automation capabilities and interactions users expect to see, due to the engineering constraints of creating an MVP.
Creating an effective research plan involves a lot of collaboration between PM and design. I always welcome the expert opinions of researchers regarding the final plan and spend much time with them to bring them up to speed. In this instance, I invited our team's researcher to participate in the Sprint to get him the most information possible.
After the research readouts were communicated to the team, the data we collected served as a north star at every decision point.
Much work went into ensuring that onboarding the solution used terms customers would understand.
For example, the term Portability meant very little to our users so we dropped it in favor of just calling this new section "Images". Or having to drop the term import image as users associate it with an automatic upload, or using the word "Template" to describe an image definition which is a wrapper for multiple image types
After the research readouts were communicated to the team, the data we collected served as a north star at every decision point.
Much work went into ensuring that onboarding the solution used terms customers would understand.
For example, the term Portability meant very little to our users so we dropped it in favor of just calling this new section "Images". Or having to drop the term import image as users associate it with an automatic upload, or using the word "Template" to describe an image definition which is a wrapper for multiple image types
Leading the design
As lead or manager, my first job is to empower product designers to be autonomous and to guide them through established patterns in our design system. If they need to create a new view or pattern, they must demonstrate that the existing elements can’t fill the need.
Tyler showed the need for a three-pane view to prioritize the details when managing multiple images. Much like a reading pane is to the message list on most email clients, I thought this would be intuitive enough and fits within the framework we currently have.
Tyler showed the need for a three-pane view to prioritize the details when managing multiple images. Much like a reading pane is to the message list on most email clients, I thought this would be intuitive enough and fits within the framework we currently have.
Results
The project was a great success. The week after our initial Sprint, I set up a weekly three-in-a-box (a collaboration format including PM, engineering, content, and design) which the new designer could handle independently, collaborating effectively with multiple teams in Boston, Fort Lauderdale, and Nanjing, China.
My team's workshops are very well regarded by our PM and engineering teams, who repeatedly request our help when setting out new tasks and projects.
Onboarded a new designer to an effective team in less than a month.
Design research was key for PM to understand essential use cases.
Key collaboration for Engineering to realize their architectural roadmap
MVP launched on-time
