Customer Interviews

The researcher interviewed 13 customers with roles spanning Data Protection, Infrastructure, and Cloud (including Cloud Architects). Some of the customers interviewed were Starbucks, Expedia, Qualcomm, and Southern California Edison.

Recommendations:

• Create a simple and flexible data protection framework for service delivery across hybrid environments

• Explore Cloud native and self-service tools that allow end users to execute use cases efficiently and autonomously instead of depending on their IT admins

• Explore one-pane-of-glass visibility to meet compliance, cost, and efficiency-management requirements​

Design thinking workshop with customers

Using data from the interviews, I spent time with the researcher and product managers to understand the customers’ cloud data protection journey, future strategy and challenges and created some problem statements. We wanted to validate these problem statements with the customers and involve them in the concepting phase for an outside-in approach focused on user’s needs. We wanted a collaborative brainstorming process based on common practices used by Google Design Sprints, IDEO, Lean Development, RDL (Rapid Design Lab), etc. The process’ core belief is that the user’s presence is essential in the creative process as the users provide insight into what is valuable to them.

Challenge: Audience Hesitancy to ideate. Veritas makes products for highly technical users. So when we conduct such participatory design workshops, our audiences tend to be technical folks - IT admins, Backup admins, Engineers, Cloud architects, etc. They do not necessarily think of themselves as “creative” types and often are intimidated or reluctant to participate fully in the Crazy 8 process. I once had to help run a workshop on another project where the engineer put down their pen during the Crazy 8 part, folded their hands and did not participate! I wanted to avoid that with this audience and make them comfortable enough to let their guard down and let the ideas flow.

Approach:

• I spent some time breaking through this barrier and talking about “creativity” means. It can be about brainstorming, whiteboarding and trying to figure out new ways to solve problems. A crazy 8 exercise is not about drawing pretty pictures and in fact, perfection is the enemy of speed (and hence progress) for this exercise. This exercise is about quieting the inner critic and giving our creative impulses space to flourish. It could go in any direction you want. The idea might seem weird, impossible and impractical but that’s okay. These ideas often give way to truly inspired ones.

• I gave a live demo using an example (finding a restaurant to eat at) and talked out loud about what I was thinking and doing.

Outcome:

• I was able to successfully make them comfortable enough to fully participate. There was lively and engaged discussion and debate when they were sharing their crazy 8s and storyboards!

• Validation and clarification of Problem Statement

• Outside-in approach helped reset & clarify assumptions, including from an architectural standpoint

Ideation

The workshops revealed a wide variety of use cases we could explore. I worked closely with Research and Product Management to prioritize which ones to focus on. We also used data from a “Jobs to be done” survey the researcher conducted to help figure out which use cases are important to our users but are not being solved for today.

With this prioritized list of use cases, the designers and I started working on various concepts. I divided up the project into the following workstreams

• NetBackup based : One designer designed concepts for flows launched from Veritas’ flagship Data Protection product (NetBackup).

• Standalone Cloud product : Another designer designed concepts launched from an independent stand-alone product for Cloud protection. This independent product had not been build yet, but we wanted to fully explore this direction as well in order to think blue sky. If it was a powerful concept, we might be able to get executive buy-in to build it. Or it might help determine creative ways to solve the problem even if it ended up being within NetBackup.

• Cloud Service Partner (CSP) Integration concepts for Deploy phase of customer journey

• CSP Integration for other journey phases: I worked on these concepts. I also reviewed the other designers’ work, gave them feedback and design direction, coached and mentored them on various topics (handling ambiguity in this phase of the project, collaborating with stakeholders, etc.)

Flowcharts

The designers reviewed their concepts with me and I would give them feedback and direction. They would then revise and review with the stakeholders (Product Management, Engineering and Research). We also started creating some flowcharts for the concepts to help explain the bigger story of the entire user flow or use case.

Refined concepts for concept testing (Role: Design Lead)

Once we had a good handle on the flowcharts and the storyboards, we started refining the concepts. Here are a few of the interesting ones that I gave design direction on.

Storage Lifecycle

Here is one example of my design direction that evolved the design over time. The use case was to provide the user with a simple way to set up storage tiering during the setup process. We need to design an intuitive and straightforward experience that would give user information on where the data was currently stored, predictive insights into how much this would approximately cost and recommend changes they can make to bring down the cost.

Cloud Service Provider Integration (My role: Designer)

We explored concepts around integration with Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) such as Azure, AWS and GCP. Research had shown that the user personas (App Admin, Department Admin, etc.) spend most of their days in the CSP apps and would like a Cloud native app experience around protection and recovery. They do not want to leave the CSP app experience and go to NetBackup to perform tasks related to backup, recovery, etc. We focused on Azure first

Direction 1 - Light Integration. The first round of concepts was around light integration of the NetBackup product and CSPs. So the user(s) would need to execute flows using both products.

Direction 2 - Deep integration with CSP, get inside the fabric of the CSP

After we started working on the concepts, it quickly became evident that this would be a problematic user experience as the user would have to execute pieces of the flows in two different products, so the experience would appear broken. Even if we were to use SSO so that once users logged into NBU, they would not have to log into the CSP and vice-versa, it would still be a less than ideal experience for the user. Product Management and Architecture started discussing conversations that they could have with the CSPs to explore deeper integrations for Veritas features (such as backup and recovery) within the CSP products. In order to facilitate these conversations with the CSPs, we created some concepts to help illustrate the value of the Veritas data protection and recovery features within the CSP and the extreme ease-of-use for the user.