In a Nutshell:
We adapted human-centered design methods to create the definition, vision and buy-in for a company-wide sales content ecosystem, including Cisco SalesConnect, the most dowloaded Cisco app.
SD-WAN Experience
Turning Usability Challenges into Business Growth
In a Nutshell:
I was asked to lead an additional UX team to improve the poor product experience of Cisco SD-WAN (formerly vManage) that was starting to impact sales. We re-built trust with customers and integrated UX into the product development process — resulting in a turn-around of the product’s UX perception internally and within the customer base.
Re-designed SD-WAN Dashboard
SD-WAN is a Must-Win for Cisco
SD-WAN is one of Cisco’s must-win bets in its evolution towards software-defined networking. Cisco had built a $1B annual SD-WAN business after acquiring start-up Viptela with its vManage product in 2017. However, in 2021, four years after the acquisition, customers grew frustrated with the complexity of the user experience.
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I was asked to lead the SD-WAN UX team in addition to my existing UX design and UI development teams. The ask: overcome the log-jam and get the long-postponed SD-WAN UX re-design project off the ground.
Prioritize Usability Issues That Move the Needle
Before my arrival the SD-WAN UX team had produced a large body of user research and design proposals spanning usability detail, information architecture and visual design. The work was good, but not boiled up enough to influence product planning.
I coached the team to distill findings down to three major themes:
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Poor Application Performance Monitoring
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Application traffic monitoring and traffic shaping is core to SD-WAN's value proposition.
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Long Time-to-Value
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Initial set-up complexity is costly for customers and shows poorly in customer demos
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Outdated Look-and-Feel
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Product had original pre-Cisco acquisition visual design
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The old, legacy SD-WAN dashboard
Quantify the Business Impact — Partner with Sales Leadership
"15 deals in our pipeline worth $34M+ have significant risk based on our vManage interface.
In addition, we have identified ~$45M of losses we have incurred that are fully, or partially, attributable to the UI."
From the Sales Leadership Business Case
("vManage" is the pre-acquisition product name for Cisco SD-WAN)
Within a week of taking over the SD-WAN UX team, the VP of sales shared with me the negative impacts of the poor SD-WAN user experience on customer demos and sales.
How might UX and Sales partner to show the product organization that fixing the user experience was as important as new features to compete for SD-WAN market share?
We decided on a two-part plan:
1. Quantify the sales impact of poor UX:
Sales leadership would create a business case with actual deal losses attributable to poor user experience and share it with the product development leadership to create priority and urgency.
2. Re-Instate customer confidence:
The UX team would engage with customers to create excitement around product design proposals that addressed their product experience feedback.
UX Meets with Customers: Bosch
In preparation for this successful customer meeting, I coached the UX lead on connecting the specific feedback Bosch had documented and sent to Cisco earlier with specific solutions from the UX design team.
For Bosch, the main problem was time-to-value. To set up their 1,000+ branches with SD-WAN, each branch had to be configured individually.
Solve the Time to Value Problem with Human-Centered Design
Bosch needed to set up 1000s of branches — but only required three types of branch configurations to be applied across their 1000s of branches.
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The UX team was able to validate its re-usable site profiles product design with Bosch. Customers could create a site profile for each of their handful of site types, then apply the same profile across thousands of branches. Bosch enthusiastically embraced this specific proposal of site profiles which would drastically simplify product set-up time and thus time-to-value. They also let the Cisco account team know, building customer demand for the SD-WAN product organization.
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We extended the site profile principle of "create once, use often" to other most frequently used tasks — as a collection of re-usable workflows.
Re-usable workflows were another design solution to enable customers to get to value faster with a re-designed SD-WAN product.
Success with Leadership
Our one-two plan of business case quantifying sales impact and customer validation of new product experience concepts was effective. The product development organization made product re-design a roadmap priority.
Making it Real with Software Architects
This re-design project was more involved than a change in look-look-and-feel.
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To realize the experience designs as working software, we knew we needed software architects to re-imagine data models and APIs, in addition to a new UI toolset.
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We set-up daily collaborations with senior software architects and a technical product manager.
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The magic of collaboration produced mutual empathy, innovation and back-end technical designs to enable the deeper product changes we had proposed.
Together, we evolved the idea of re-usable profiles with machine-generated tagging for more flexible configuration categorization and management.
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Engineering was able to re-design aspects of the software architecture in direct collaboration with the UX team. The UX team learnt a lot about technical architecture dependencies and opportunities in the process.
Incremental Delivery to Accelerate Time-to-Market
The next challenge was to accelerate the execution across a vast program involving 900 engineers across SD-WAN software and hardware. We partnered with engineering to change the product delivery process.
The project management organization began de-coupling SD-WAN device hardware form software release cycles. This de-coupling freed up the software development to deliver smaller releases to customers, providing continuous, incremental value. This shift provided the opportunity for the UX team to work with product management and engineering to develop a phased, incremental delivery plan for the product experience re-design.
My Role
I led the SD-WAN UX team in addition to my NaaS UX/UI team at the time. Under my leadership the SD-WAN UX re-design project became roadmap priority, resulted in a accelerated delivery and success with customers. In the process, we made UX an integral part of the product development and customer engagement cycle.
After leading the SD-WAN UX team for 12 months, Cisco re-organized its product business units. NaaS and SD-WAN were allocated to different BUs. I stayed with NaaS and left the SD-WAN UX team with new leadership, new operating models and a strong foundation of business relevance to the shipped product.