VMware Upgrade Planner
As a Product Designer on VMware's Upgrade Planner tool, my focus was designing a tool focused on supporting the maintenance of our enterprise customer's platforms, providing reliable upgrade pathways for products running on the VMware Tanzu Platform,
Product Designer
2020
Customer Impact
$1.578 billion (2019)
The what
If you operate any modern-day technology, then you know a little something about frequently upgrading software. The process can be any combination of seamless, painful, slow, or fast. While most consumers have their fair share of experiences, typically lasting minutes, enterprise companies live in a world where upgrading takes weeks to plan and months to implement.
As a Product Designer on VMware's Upgrade Planner tool, my focus was designing a tool focused on supporting the maintenance of our platforms keeping our enterprise customers compliant and secure.
The background
One of the core capabilities of VMware Tanzu is the ability to create a space for software developers to focus on writing good code, and not concern themselves with building and maintaining the infrastructure that their code runs on. Rather, their code runs on the infrastructure stack maintained and supported by platform engineers who create and maintain the environment upon which developers push their applications.
The problem
Upgrading the infrastructure/platform is often burdensome. It requires platform engineers to map out several dependencies for each bit of software, and then create an intricate and perfectly sequenced plan. Manually, this planning process can take up to 2 weeks. Additionally, if implemented incorrectly, major issues can occur leading to extended periods of downtime. 🥴
The vision
VMware Upgrade Planner’s mission is to ease the upgrading pain by creating straightforward and easy to manage upgrade processes for platform engineers
The strategy is to reduce surprises and toil by:
• Providing consistent and predictable upgrade paths
• Automating steps of the upgrade process
• Centralizing where upgrade information is found
• Surfacing surprises along upgrade paths
Our outcome-oriented roadmap set milestones by what we wanted platform engineers to be able to do by the end of the milestone
The persosnas
VMware Upgrade Planner has two primary personas, platform engineers, introduced earlier, and designated support engineer create and maintain the environment upon which developers push their applications. (Daisy is an internal VMware employee who are paired with customer platform engineers)
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We call our platform engineer persona, Paula
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We call our designated support engineer Daisy
The design & test process
One of our important outcomes was for Paula and Daisy to view the most important information needed to perform a platform upgrade without surprises, and to view it all in a central place. To achieve this, we designed and tested a series of features we believed would track towards that outcome. Here was our process:
Interview Designated Support Engineers and Platform Architects to understand needs around their platform upgrade experience.
Synthesize findings between interviews for similarities in user needs with my product manager.
Create prototypes of designs to solve prioritized user needs.
Test the prototypes with our target users.
Analyze usability feedback and feature requests. Here's a sample of our collection document – it's an iteration on Tomer Sharon's Rainbow Spreadsheet.
Write user stories for validated features.
Through this cycle, we validated and built many features into the tool, including:
Improvements to the plan creation algorithm that will detect unsupported combinations of products in Paula's existing platform and recommend backfills to those products as part of his upgrade plan so that his foundation is stable before upgrading.
Individual product releases that have notable breaking changes will be highlighted with a warning message and link to additional documentation so that Paula knows to anticipate downtime, make an important change to a setting, etc before upgrading.
Links to a product's release notes so Paula can read what features and bug fixes he'll gain by upgrading.
Each product's End of General Support (EOGS) date so Paula can time his upgrades to keep his platform in support (product releases have a shelf life of 9 months).
Links to platform-level upgrade checklists and breaking changes provided by the Documentation team, so Paula can know what he needs to do before and after the upgrade to ensure that it’s successful.
Below, you can see the feature of VMware Upgrade Planner
A brief note on the visual design
You'll notice that Upgrade Planner currently has a primitive UI. This was an intentional choice – we adopted the mindset of "Make it work first, then make it pretty", prioritizing the aspects of the experience that added the most value to our users, like the fidelity of the algorithm that generates plans and the completeness of the information in the plan. As we've increased our confidence in what we've built through our research (and the serendipitous introduction of VMWare's Clarity design system post-acquisition), we've started to prioritize a redesign of the app to pay off the design debt we've accumulated.
The research process
In addition to day-to-day feature development work, my product manager and design paired closely in conducting exploratory research to uncover new problem spaces for Upgrade Planner's roadmap. We structured our research using Discovery and Framing, a Design Thinking style framework that we use at Pivotal and can be summarized as follows:
1. Discover the problems a user type has in a domain
2. Prioritize those problems and focus on the top one(s)
3. Explore potential solutions to the top problems
4. Prioritize the top solution and develop a backlog for development
The beta testing feedback
We were excited and proud to see that the tool was very well received from our technical sales and support team members during Beta testing! Below of examples of feedback we received.
“The PCF Ops person in his team had conveyed that it would take him a few days to lay out an upgrade plan.
So I whipped out my Mac, went to https://upgrade-planner-client-acceptance.cfapps.io/, and showed him (and his team) your new tool.
Very, very timely! And, like I said yesterday, a great selling tool.”
Ralph Meira
Adv. Platform Architect | Pivotal
The look forward
Since our initial beta testing, we declared Upgrade Planner Generally Available and has become an invaluable tool for planning platform upgrades by both internal and customer platform teams. Upgrade Planner took on even more importance when VMWare declared that the platform was going into long-term support (LTS), since it helped customer navigate to long-term supported versions of the platform and services.