Overview
I joined Sumo Logic to help establish a UX function. Sumo Logic was an early-stage Series D startup evaluated at $300M and an ARR of $22M. It is now a late stage company with over $100M in annual revenue, over a $1 Billion valuation, and a multi-cloud data analytics leader for DevSecOps with over 2000 customers. UX has matured from a two member team to a global 20 member UX org with Research, UX Writing, DevOps, Design System, and Product Design.
Part of evangelizing UX was to become transparent by taking up space to create an inclusive approach to design
Summary of Accomplishments at Sumo Logic
Revenue
Helped the company grow and increase revenue from $22M to $122M, by helping deliver on customer requests and improvements to our product offerings
Grew account relationships by creating a cross-functional research program with Sales and Product Management aimed at listening to our customers.
NPS
I served in the NPS committee that helped increase our score by analyzing pain points and designing multiple targeted solutions.
Retention
Helped increase company retention from 82% to 87% by by creating programs aimed at listening and responding to customer pain points.
Increased customer adoption by implementing UX initiatives aimed at improving the user experience of our core product offering, resulting in helping Sumo Logic grow from an early stage $22M ARR to becoming a late stage $180M+ ‘tech unicorn’ ($1B+ evaluation).
Matured UX From adhoc task to a scaleable operation
When I first joined Sumo Logic, UX was not a formed. One designer did adhoc UI design per needs and requirements. Every year we aimed to mature UX as a function in the organization to improve our product, process, and talent.
Global UX Team
Grew the team from 2 to 20 across two geo-locations (U.S. and India)
Established and grew the UX Design & Research department to a mature global team of 20 members spanning the U.S. and Delhi, India.
Established a Design system (code name ‘Yama’) which released its first 1.0 in 6 months. This resulted in reducing development speed and increasing usability quality and consistency, and adopted on all major initiatives.
Established UX DesignOps processes and rigor in project planning, UX writing, guidelines, UX readiness criteria, and strong UX principles.
Culture
I am a big believer that success stems from a culture that fosters a team spirit comprised of motivated and driven individuals. As such I helped foster an inclusive, collaborative, and transparent design culture within the organization which resulted in strong cross-functional bonds with Sales, Customer Success, Product Development, and Marketing. UX received many accolades for its rich culture.
I also helped champion and establish a Talent Committee with a mission to attract, grow and retain top talent and leaders in the Engineering department (UX reporting structure). My brief thoughts on leadership can be found here.
“Hey Daniel!
It’s been so great working with you!!
I remember when I first joined, one of the groups of people I immediately felt comfortable around was the design team. Thank you for cultivating that culture. It’s something I really admire that about your management style — how you really care about people.
I used to think that I wanted to be slightly more aloof of a person and not always be showing emotions on my face. But that’s changed! Now I really value friendliness and approachability as it makes for easier/better communication. Didn’t realize that until I started working but that was super cool since it was something that made me feel more comfortable with myself. ☺
Wishing you well!”
Introduced Personas and Customer experience Journey
NPS Focused UX Improvements aka Project Jiro
Andre's (primary persona) pain is reflected in several places. Directly, we saw extremely negative sentiment in Andre's commentary in NPS surveys and in his conversations on intercom.io. Many of the commonly appearing terms in his comments reflect his struggles when using Sumo Logic: "difficult," "query," "query language," "usability," and "learning curve."
I created project “Jiro” with the primary goal of improving our service until Andre loves Sumo Logic. Andre is the persona who represents customers with an ambivalent attitude towards Sumo Logic. Andres have a low incentive and little time to learn how to write the Sumo Logic query language.
The approach to improve NPS was not limited to one solution. Instead we introduced a series of features such as a landing view, improved type assist, templates for complex operations, and improvements to the dashboards
Full Product Redesign with Sharing
I directed a full product redesign (aka Bento) which resulted in a 90% initial adoption and 85% retention. The redesign resulted in cleanup of 100+ reported usability issues, contributed to an increase in NPS, and decrease of customer support issues.
After the redesign, we made content a first class citizen and provided a “workspace” that allowed customers to open multiple instances to compare or jump between workflows.
Before the UI was very clumsy, buggy, with poor information architecture which created a feeling of being lost with every transition between content.
New Product Offering of Monitoring using metrics
Currently I am helping Sumo Logic enter two $50 billion dollar markets in the operational and security analytics space. Ensured the operational rigor and design delivery for a monitoring solution and SIEM in the cloud.
Establish Process and rigor
Championed operational and strategic improvements to our product development process that moved the organization towards a more outcome driven JTBD framework resulting in dramatic improvements to the efficiency and quality of our delivered solutions.
Defined a custom UX Process for Sumo Logic. Read this Medium article for an explanation.
UX Debt System
One of the first things that I established was a process to evangelize a mindset of caring about the “little big things” through a org wide inclusive UX debt process. At first it was a wall with post-its that anyone in the organization could contribute to. Eventually this matured to a system with designers on an on-call rotation, Jira tracking, and full UI team participation. Once a quarter we would do a “Shoyu-Palooza” sprints to close as many tickets as possible. In 2018 we closed close to 287 tickets! Participation from the organization is very high due to our simple, loose, yet effective approach.
The original UX Debt wall was intended to show that no issue is too small for a better user experience. It was also a very visible way to show we care about everyone’s input.
Designers are on-call and on rotation. We have a 24hr SLA and a customer support approach to ensure we are responding to our “internal customers”. This in turn will keep our external customers happy.
Sumo10 star experience Vision
As part of creating a “North Star” for Sumo, I went on a customer tour with a team to understand the journey and envision a ten star experience.
Hackathons
The UX team spent a day with the CTO to capture his vision for optimizing the troubleshooting experience. This resulted in a number of ideas for hackathons that the UX team championed, participated, and expanded through continued research and design.
Read more in our Sumo UX Medium Blog