DESIGNING SYSTEMS FOR ENTERPRISE USERS

Aim

Creating a North Star for licensing experience for Redgate from an end-user’s perspective.

Role

As a Senior product designer at Redgate, I led this project working with a multidisciplinary team of designers, engineers and business analysts. Understanding stakeholder needs & aspirations, user research, running co-creation workshops to create a 5 year vision for the company.

Outcome

A North Star vision which enables conversations with key stakeholders and helps make long term decisions. Thinking beyond just licensing, the project led to the creation of a holistic management system to allow enterprise users to have a single pane of glass view into their relationship with Redgate.

Conceptual wireframes to communicate the core ideas from the project.

THE PROBLEM SPACE

Redgate has rapidly grown into a mid size company with a lot of brand recognition and loyalty with its customer base in the world of Database management. The company’s five year goal is to:

  1. Pivot to a new market of large and enterprise organisations

  2. Move the entire product portfolio to a subscription based offering

However, a lot of its current systems including license management isn’t built for scale for either of these goals (complex organisations or a larger number of renewals with subscription). Apart from causing a lot of problems internally and externally, the company also started to lose some business over this. This clearly became a huge obstacle in being able to meet any long term goals.

Project timeline

Opportunity

Apart from looking at any usability issues with the existing portal to manage licenses, this project offered the opportunity to think more long term and create a system that would focus on where the company wanted to get to and serve our future customer needs better.

As a first step, I started by creating an ‘As-is User Journey’ (below). This helped consolidate any existing internal knowledge and created a baseline which we later validated with user research. We also captured other commercial systems underpinning this experience in a front to back mapping.

‘As-is' User Journey

 

User research

The first round of research consisted of speaking to 7 RG users of different backgrounds who needed to manage licenses for their organisations.

After the analysis, the biggest challenges for the user were:

  • Lack of context/ visibility about who is using what license and where in their organisation

  • High touch contact with Redgate for management tasks

  • Manual and repetitive work in viewing and managing licenses

  • Fragmented information/ lack of consistency in different RG products

These conversations get better insights to our key user persona and showed opportunities beyond immediate pain points.

 

Co- creation workshop

After gathering insights from the user research, I designed and conducted a 4 day design sprint consisting of 12 participants to co-create ideas for the north star vision. The workshop was a hybrid of both online and in-person activities with some remote participants.

After several activities including lightening talks, user journey mapping, ‘How Might We’ and ideation (above) , the participants did a ‘design the box’ exercise to share the core value proposition for the user (below).

 

ECOsystem

The project helped provide incredible clarity to the ecosystem within which this solution will operate. In a large complex organisation there are multiple people involved in different capacities and it is integral to surface relevant information to the right users.

 

Key aspects of the solution

The overall vision included several ideas and changes to improve the user’s experience and mitigate the challenges in our current systems.

1. Org-wide view of people & products

Single pane of glass: Clear overview of all RG products/ licenses and who uses it in their org.

Helps internal teams have a good understanding of users during the ‘needs analysis’ calls.

 

2. SELF- SERVE

Easy way to manage licenses & entitlements, not spend time on a repetitive task.

More than half the support team’s time is spent helping with license allotment.

 

3. INtegrating commercial info

Self-serve tools to align payment dates, manage payments & renewals for RG as a whole.

Helps prevent tedious repetitive work from internal Sales and Support teams and avoid human error.

 

IMPACT

This north star vision helped start conversations with C-level executives towards making both commercial and technological changes in the next 5 years. Thinking beyond just licensing, the project enabled the teams to think of a holistic way for enterprise customers to manage their relationship with RG.