VMware is transitioning to a modern, multi-cloud SaaS company. The world of the past is gone - we must act now and accelerate our SaaS and Subscription business in FY’22 - or be left behind.
Fueled by our customer’s needs, and accelerated by Covid-19, our transition to SaaS continues to drive us forward, which we believe will drive company growth, customer satisfaction and shareholder value.
I'll share three efforts at different scale in the case study to show what we did to make the Subscription transition.
To comply with NDA, I have obfuscated confidential information in this case study. All information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of VMware.
vRealize Suite is the cloud management bundle in VMware that enables consistent deployment, operations and optimization of apps and infrastructure, from data to the edge and across clouds.
vRealize Suite used to be on-premise with perpetual licenses that needs to be renewed every 3-5 years. As we shift toward a Saas based delivery and 'pay as you go' model, we offer flexible subscription that could be used both on-prem and cloud for vRealize services to facilitate customers’ needs to move to Saas. Our business goal is to increase Saas adoption across the entire vRealize Cloud Suite.
We observed some early challenges for Q1, 2020 after we offer flexibile subscriptions:
- Low engagement levels for trials and customers compared to on-prem
- Low conversion rates across the vRealize Cloud Suite
In order to find out the reason for low adoption for our newly offered flexible subscription, we first reached out to our sales and customer success teams to get the secondary research information, set up the ground context of the general flow as well as getting potential pain points from their point of view. Then we reached out to our customers to validate our assumption and dive deeper into their mind to figure out where the gaps are.
Through research, we find out that there are several gaps existing in our sales-led purchasing experience which has become obvious transitioning into subscription.
To meet our agile pace for development, we worked together to prioritize the painpoints from the research and put the following three opportunities to be on our roadmap for the following 6 months:
Usage Visualization
Self-service Purchasing
Centralized Management
vRealize Suite is a bundle of several independent products, each offering different management capabilities for customers' cloud infrastructure. As a result of the constraints, each product has their own offerings and there was no way to start using them all together. What’s worse, each product has its own or even doesn't have a purchasing workflow, which has been quite cumbersome for customers since they need to contact sales all the time if they want to continue using the service. When our business goal comes to sell the bundle subscription (vRealize Cloud Universal - vRCU), there is no place to oversee the bundle subscription usage which has found to be a pain point for sales that affect our revenue.
How Might We bring all products together, transfer customers' minds from independent products into a uniformed solution and ultimately facilitate better selling for the bundle subscriptions?
After collaborating with PM, Engineers and cross-team stakeholders. We’ve decided to build the service/flow that can unify the end to end subscription experience across vRealize services.
To immediately address customer needs and quickly roll out our solution, we’ve decided to tackle the usage visualization and centralized managing first for MVP (Minimal Viable product), self-service purchasing is coming right after for 1.0.
To understand the mechanism and align with stakeholders conceptually. I started with putting all pieces of information together to form a big picture. The service that we are building is called ‘vRealize Subscription Manager’ (vRSM) that could collect both on-prem and Cloud license usage for vRealize products, calculate for the aggregated number, get the overage amount and report to Cloud Services Platform (CSP) to get overage charges for customers.
First iteration of hand sketches are getting the concepts into tangible flows, where we want centralized management and usage visualization to be integrated. Information architecture is also tackled here to bring our user a clear hierarchy so that they can naturally get into the place they want.
.png)
One of the most tricky parts in the process is how to clearly reveal the mystery of the bundle subscription calculation to users as well as helping them to understand where they are in order to take effective actions. To figure out the best design, I tried several options and iterated several times after collecting feedback from stakeholders. The final design is simple, navigable and provides users enough control to see levels of details in their subscriptions.
The final design is simple, navigable and provides users enough control to see levels of details in their subscriptions.
MVP of Subscription Manager was a quick turn out within 2 months, reaching 230% deal attainment of our target for vRealize Cloud Universal, which has impacted the Cloud Management Saas revenue for 44% growth for Q3, 2020.
The world has moved to self-service subscription models that put customers in control of their purchases and renewals. Hence it is an opportunity for VMware to get to self-purchase to connect to more customers through broadened go-to-market channels and accelerate SaaS adoption. vRealize Suite is also going to support the change and I’m the designer who took the leads.
To understand how customers are purchasing vRealize services and figure out where their pain points are, I conducted research for 18 customers, documented their procedures and synthesized with the PM to draw their journey. From the exercise we got to understand how customer teams collaborate to make successful purchases as well as what is needed for hands-on users to quickly make decisions.
The use cases that self-service purchase needs to support are:
- Trial conversion to paid
- Retention for subscription renewal
These two use cases directly addressed our business and financial goal to accelerate vRealize purchasing and adoption. How to remove friction in purchasing is the goal of the experience.
Leveraging what we have in design system and through rounds of iterations, we finally landed onto the end to end experience to enable self-service purchasing.
Challenges came out that to ensure a consistent purchasing experience, connecting multiple services is necessary, so I need to coordinate with multiple service teams to align them on the same page. Looking back into the journey, the unified purchasing flow can happen in different stages for customers, but services teams hardly get any transparency due to the constraints of team structure. In order for us to seamlessly connect, I drafted the overarching end to end journey that connects multiple stories so service teams can align their high level subscription goal, understand where they can connect with the unified purchasing flow, and plan in their roadmap for implementation for multiple stories in sequence.
Enabling the self-purchasing gives customers the freedom with subscription renewal, accelerates trial to paid conversion. It saves time and effort for the team coordinating with sales representatives and customer service. 1.0 was released in March, 2021, which helped us to achieve 150% attainment of the subscription target.
The effort begins when product teams start to do subscriptions. vRealize was one of the first three teams who got into subscription. Then we gradually find other products on the same topic. As we grow big, the problem starts to get more obvious. One is that it is hard to get design consistency, our high level story is similar, but turns out to be different designs which means we are delivering inconsistent experience to users. We also realized that it actually tooks us duplicated time for both design and development which is a waste of resources for VMware.
I was one of the three core members of this effort starting early 2021 and started to take the lead of it from August, 2021, the effort has 10 designers working for 7 different family of products across VMware.
We broke the boundary of Business Units and formed a group ‘Subscription task force’, which had representatives from each BU/product. In this way, we get to know what the VMware subscription portfolio looks like.
We all believe that the team effort can bring value to both customer and VMware. Our North Star is to deliver a simplified normalized core self-service subscription flow across all VMware products using subscription.
We first get together to get to know each other. We held workshops and did careful analysis of the 7 Known use cases belongs to different Services, get better understanding of differencies and similairities. And we came up with how normalized flow could be structured.
Apparently, we are following the same pattern from a high level End to End story. To find out the pattern for the self-service purchasing, we aggregated and optimized the flow that is suitable to all our known use cases, and could be also set up as a guideline for future services who are going to address subscription related topics. The exercise helped all of us to have an overview of where we are at and take actions on how we could push for consistency.
In order to set up standards for the ideal future self-service purchasing experience that could be used both for designers and developers. Our approach is to have guidelines for the flow and components that support guidelines, which clearly stating what to build and how to build. We are building a scalable normalized sharable core flow which offers a subscription pattern with a component library which is an extension for clarity (VMware design system) components.
As we are seeing more complicated use cases of the workflow, we find out that our current linear structure cannot meet our needs. The team gets together to explore more patterns to offer a much more scalable flow. Instead of endless steppers, we brainstormed and finally got into the horizontal process indicator proposal.
At the same time, two of the members starts to collect use cases and build component library.
The component library idea is well-received by the stakeholders to improve efficiency. However, we got push backs from cross-functional stakeholders for the 1.0 pattern solution for it has too many dependencies on other teams. Considering our current constraints, We finally agreed to land on the middle ground in a shorter run. We set up a framework based on what we have now as a flow guideline and build the component library for designers/developers to follow.
The framework has already successfully helped two product teams to build their subscription experience. It also continues to evolve and serves to help all VMware services to keep consistency in self-service purchasing flow.
Our effort continues! As VMware is going faster to the future with an increased focus on moving the company, our customers and our partners to a subscription model, we got the chance to look into the bigger picture to incorporate UX at a much higher level.
We historically have two challenges, which is also the constraints for us to push for UX evolution:
1. No holistic picture, which makes it hard to make changes from a higher level.
2. Pain points in enterprise ecosystem are usually a systematic problem, looking in silos at a specific experience from bottom up is not solving user problems.
As we are scoping in with the Saas and Subscription Commerce in VMware, it is crucial for us to understand how our product connects and unreveal the mystery about the VMware commerce model. I led the effort and collaborated with 6 designers, talked with 20+ consultants from different teams and mapped the as-is flow for VMware commerce journey. The entire effort for mapping and validation takes around 4 months.
We sent out surveys trying to get high level pain points . We got 141 surveys in total. Top 5 pain points are:
To dive deeper into paipoints, we targeted 28/141 users who have been directly involved in purchasing with us. We finally brought 4 into the 1:1 interview where we learned more details about what is the reason behind the survey result.
We find out that there are multiple personas included in the purchasing process from customers’ side, there is also conversation happening between VMware and customer, which is not represented in the implemented flow. From customer feedback, the non-integrated collaboration and approval goes in the background could be a huge impairment in the process completion.
With the as-is journey and solid data we collected from customers, the team got aligned on what value we want to bring to our user. This time we included PM and engineer representatives in our design process to co-design and brainstorming the vision workflow considering our current team structure. The new flow we proposed offers a common space for enterprise team members to put in their configuration together and check out at the same time to ensure expiration date alignment. 4 out of the top 5 pain points in the 1st round interview are getting addressed in the proposal.
Although the entire Saas Commerce experience needs front and backend work across different services and platforms internally on our side, the UX solution gracefully stitches them all together to bring our customer a seamless collaborating experience in their team.
The proposed workflow have the following advantages:
1. Wisely stitch workflow together with respect of flow ownership by existing team structure
.gif)
2. Have the flexibility for multiple users to put in their subscription configuration in one place to check out together, approval flow can also be integrated (for next iteration)
3. Familiar purchasing pattern from any type of consumer facing experience are borrowed so that people don’t need to learn new ways of purchasing
.gif)
The solution was well received by the design leadership team as it is of great value to our customer and also a remarkable experiment to break the boundary between services and teams to achieve the goal of ‘ONE VMware commerce experience’. With our PM and Engineering representatives’ voice, this time we got stronger pushes to the higher level leadership team as a vision level story to be incorporated in our future initiatives. As for the next step, we are looking to see how we can break down the flow to achieve step by step the vision we provide.
.png)
