B2B SAAS - PAST 5 YEARS
CODA is the product I’ve been working on from the ground up since 2019. It is a specialized B2B product designed to assist those who work with the ServiceNow platform. It began as a development best practices analysis tool and has since evolved to add value at various stages of the user’s journey. CODA evolved to a maturity level where it delivers a 10% increase on ServiceNow developers productivity.
Responsibilities: technical leadership, end-to-end design process (research, wireframing, prototyping, metrics), design ops, strategic design, data-driven design, stakeholders alignment, GTM strategy
Concepting
The first challenge we faced early on was that it is a niche product, so there wasn’t much we could rely on to understand what the market had already tested or not. Our first benchmarks were mostly with analogous solutions because the competitors we found had much more technical proposals and didn’t care as much about the users. Finding these competitors, on the other hand, helped us validate that there was a market demand for this type of product. We also spoke with several ServiceNow developers from within the company to learn about their daily routines and challenges.
Our next task was to determine which features we thought were essential at launch. With such a small team, it was critical to strike a balance between the number of features and the time to market. We came to an agreement after some discussions with the technical team.
The defined strategy was to begin with a simple product while maintaining our competitive advantages. We had the benefit of being able to test a slightly less polished version with our internal ServiceNow team before releasing it to the general public, which is exactly what we did.
The technical team was always involved since the initial wireframes to ensure that we didn’t fall into the trap of building an overly complicated product. Despite simplifying everything possible, we were still able to have a collaborative and highly productive design process. Another approach we took to increase agility was to define design tokens and create some components from the start, thereby moving us closer to a design system. This decision proved to be correct, as we were soon benefiting from the advantages of component reuse and design consistency.
Delivering & Assessing
We had already implemented Hotjar at the time of launch, so we could see screen recordings of people using the product, and we had some data on the most useful features thanks to the heatmaps. We noticed something unpleasant after the first few weeks of the product being out in the wild, based on Hotjar data and conversations with users: people praised the product and said it was useful, but few used it on a daily basis (at that time only internal users were using the product). We then concentrated our efforts on identifying why people were not using it.
We discovered that developers didn’t use it because their technical leaders didn’t instruct or encourage them to do so, and they were hesitant to take the initiative. To address this issue, we broadened our horizons to include features designed for technical leaders and instance administrators, bringing more people into the product and stimulating the ecosystem. In other words, for the technical leader to get the most out of CODA, developers must use it, and thus it is natural to have this influence coming from the technical leaders.
We noticed another interesting behavior after we started having paying customers: customers interacted with the product differently than internal users. While internal users were resistant, paying customers consumed as much of the product as they could. It was a sure sign that we were on the right track.
With this new understanding, we began to look at the product in a much more holistic view, taking into account developers, technical leaders, and instance administrators, all of whom had different characteristics between internal users and paying customers.
From the beginning, we conducted frequent user interviews and usability tests, which undoubtedly contributed to the product’s success. Despite the challenge of being an extremely restricted and niche market, I estimate that we have spoken with over 150 users since the beginning of the project.
Maturing
Following the development of additional features, we implemented Mixpanel to collect deeper metrics about the events triggered by users: which buttons were clicked, which filters were applied, and so on. The knowledge gained from this has been extremely useful in guiding exploratory conversations about new features. We’ve reached a maturity where almost every new feature goes through the validation step.
Another important milestone is that we’re now much closer to the business areas, allowing us to anticipate the biggest pain points that clients have.
We have now a coded design system in place with more than 50 components split into atoms, molecules and organisms, which allows us to have a faster time-to-market and therefore being more competitive, without losing quality and consistency.
Our product is now generating revenue and is part of the daily routine of dozens of people thanks to the efforts of the entire team.
