Role: Product Manager

Project: DAAnE

Background

WWT generates value for its clients in three primary service categories: OEM hardware resale, custom designed server racks, and supply chain logistics. These endeavors yield substantial revenues, but their profit margins are relatively modest, ranging between 2% and 5%. Starting around 2015, WWT began to notice major disruptions to their business due to the popularity of cloud services and began to pivot their business model to be "services led."

In late 2018, WWT was in the process of executing this new strategy and was actively seeking opportunities to differentiate their new services in the market. For WWT's digital transformation services, the differentiator would soon be WWT's Data Aggregation and Analysis Engine aka. DAAnE.

Business Strategy Alignment

Product Background & Value Prop

Organizations lack a complete understanding of their technological landscapes, frequently resulting in unforeseen consequences and operational disruptions. These disruptions negatively impact customer experience and satisfaction, in addition to incurring substantial costs as well as other painful consequences.

DAAnE is designed to address this challenge. It harmonizes data from diverse sources, encompassing existing systems of record, network telemetry, and human insights, to provide organizations with an accurate and comprehensive understanding of their technology ecosystems and the interdependencies within them. This knowledge forms the foundation essential to successfully execute any digital transformation endeavor, ranging from pivotal tasks like cloud migrations to the intricate network security segmentation and beyond.

Goals

• Generate competitive advantage for digital transformation based professional services
• Provide end-service value sooner by automating manual and time intensive application dependency mapping efforts
• Decrease service delivery errors caused by “unknown unknowns” within the organization's technology ecosystem

The Team

My Role(s)

Product Management

As the Product Manager for DAAnE, my role was pivotal in steering the product from an initial concept to a market-ready solution that delivered a competitive edge. At the heart of my approach was a deep understanding of our target market and user needs, which guided every phase of product development. I led a cross-functional team, harmonizing the efforts of engineers, designers, and marketers to ensure that each feature of DAAnE not only met but exceeded our customers' expectations. My focus was on creating a product that was not just technologically advanced but also user-friendly and aligned with the evolving demands of the market.

In driving DAAnE's product strategy, I employed a data-driven approach, integrating market insights and customer feedback into every decision. This was crucial in developing a product that was not only innovative but also relevant and user-centric. I ensured that DAAnE offered unique value propositions that set it apart in a crowded marketplace of service providers.

As I was in a blended PM/UX role, I was also instrumental in fostering a culture of continuous improvement and agile response within the team. I advocated for and implemented regular usability testing and customer feedback loops, which enabled us to refine and evolve DAAnE rapidly in alignment with user preferences and emerging industry trends. Under my leadership, DAAnE not only achieved its business objectives but also established a strong foundation for future growth and innovation. My role as Product Manager was not just about managing a product; it was about leading a vision and transforming it into a tangible solution that resonated with our users and contributed significantly to the organization's success.

To make this happen, I relied on my process of:

Discovery & Stakeholder Alignment

Kicking off a new product development initiative with all stakeholders aligned to a common vision and goals is crucial. This alignment fosters a sense of ownership and commitment among team members, enhancing morale and encouraging innovative thinking. It facilitates clear communication, reduces the risk of project scope creep, and ensures efficient resource allocation.

With this in mind, I facilitated a product kickoff workshop that offered a dedicated space for all stakeholder to contribute their insights as we discovered:

• What specifically was driving the need for DAAnE?
• Who are the core users?
• What are the desired business outcomes?
• How do we align the user outcomes to meet our business goals?
• What are our riskiest assumptions and what is the fastest/cheapest way to discover if they are wrong?

Challenges

Through the course of the kickoff workshop, we identified many potential hurdles to DAAnE's future success. As the Product Manager, I face three big hurdles in developing DAAnE's UX strategy:

Research

With our primary stakeholders aligned to a north-star vision, my next objective was to discover user needs and craft a holistic experience strategy that seamlessly bridged together the threads of the business strategy, user-centric design, and desirable customer outcomes.

Research Artifacts

User Interviews

Ideate

We quickly moved to ideate and refine. As part of DAAnE's kickoff workshop, we formed a core product advisory group to collaboratively design early iterations of the product and provide feedback on future ideas.I primarily concentrated on the following:

• Streamlining the massive amounts of data collected and presented
• Utilizing color and hierarchy to elevate the most valuable information
• Telling a visual story of the complex connections and relationships between the organization's environment hardware and software

Collaborative Design

Iterate

Sketches in hand and with a strong understanding of our users and the contexts they would be using DAAnE, I crafted wireframes. I went through several rounds while gathering feedback.

Key Insights

Product Design

Conclusion

Introduced in the summer of 2019, DAAnE marked a pivotal moment in the way WWT brought digital transformation services to the market. Its initial launch involved two key partners whose collaborations proved highly successful and laid the groundwork for dozens of clients to successfully navigate their digital transformation efforts. DAAnE's unique ability to illuminate application ecosystems continues to be actively developed today and with each new partnership, it continues to evolve and adapt, leaving a trail of success stories that showcase its transformative power.