Summary: Under a strict timeline and a singular engineering objective to migrate off a costly 3rd party service, stakeholders were speaking past each other with contradictory statements or talking about customers in generalities. To deliver value to customers in the new Developer Portal, I grounded the project in real customer voices.
To shift the conversation to user problems, I proposed a comprehensive research plan to learn about the motivations and needs of external developers. After selling stakeholders on needing research, I carried out all the following aspects of the plan:
Data analysis consisted of looking for themes that emerged from the voices across the conversations and records.
Leading research projects is an exercise in knowing when to skillfully allocate time and resources.
After analysis, the next step is to capitalize on the wealth of data collected and the team's emotions after listening directly to customer voices. In this project while presenting findings of the exploratory research, I paused to lead an alignment continuum exercise. Each stakeholder was asked to individually decide how they thought about the new GoTo developer site, to make visible their unstated differences of opinion. Clusters of responses led to establishing design principles; distributed responses led to further conversation.
I oversaw the research plan for this project as well as led the design for the Client Management Portal, a portion of the new site. Performing the research gave me the insights and empathy to craft the user experience for developers. In the Client Management Portal, 3rd party developers configure their apps that power integrations with LogMeIn's products and data.
