Zylo

Improving SaaS Management Workflows

How do you keep track of, and manage, 100s of 1000s of applications?

Goal: To find a way to drive value within our app by offering insights and tracking actions within Zylo.
Team: Design Lead working with a Product Manager, 3 Backend Engineers, and 2 Frontend Engineers, 1 Data Scientist, 2 CSMs
Work: Customer interviews, Discovery, Design Sprint, Visual and Interaction Design, QA, and User Testing.

The Challenge

Think about how many employees there are at an enterprise-level company. Now think about all the applications they have to use and collaborate with every day. I'll save you the math, it's a huge number. It was that problem that plagued the procurement and IT teams at these companies as well.

When I joined Zylo as employee #7 this was one of the largest problems we needed to solve and I was tasked with creating an experience that would lighten the load of SaaS management at scale.

Identifying Painpoints

After speaking with our CSMs and our target users (IT Managers), we focused on a singular action of Deprovisioning licenses within an application.

They wanted to get accurate and timely data on unengaged or inactive users within their company.
They wanted to get value by reducing the amount of time this entire process took.
They wanted to have one channel within which they could manage all communications and data.

How might we make the deprovision process efficient?

Increase user adoption

By providing additional value that procurement managers could capitalize on, we should see growth in that persona group

Decrease time on task

By reducing the time the deprovision process currently takes it will free up procurement managers to focus on strategy

Drive more value

By enabling this much-needed capability it will enhance the value of our product in market and be a real differentiator

Competitive Analysis

While viewing the market, I found some interesting paths to accomplishing tasks within various applications.

There were some like Asana and Trello that focused on the task itself being the goal, while others like Mint and TurboTax saw each task as a means to get to your ultimate goal.
TurboTax allowed the user to focus on each step in the process without getting distracted by other tasks or other areas of the app.
There was also a smooth flow getting the user into and out of the app to complete various tasks that needed external processing or manual input.

Ideation

I started the design process by getting an understanding of our users’ current process, as well as getting a better understanding of the data that they refer to in making these decisions. Login info, license info, and other user data. This allowed me to learn from pain points that they experience within their flow and opportunities for us to provide value through alternative methods.

There were other challenges to overcome around surfacing the most important data to our users and allowing them to drive the workflow based on their processes. We experimented with multiple options and methods for how we could bring clarity to the data while maintaining a more general approach.

Solution: Inactivity Notifications

We were able to address the inactive users issue by:

Building user lists from the threshold set at the subscription level.
Filter out users through a suppression list.
Offer notifications for inactive licenses at renewal time or when over-provisioned.

This was a really important use case as users generally were too busy to perform this workflow unless a renewal was near or more licenses were needed.

Solution: Automate Process

We enabled our customers to reduce the project time by:

Setting a date to have users respond by end workflow.
Allowing them to skip the survey and move directly to de-provisioning.

This saved weeks, if not months, of back and forth work and provided great value to our Zylo champion.

Solution: Unify Channels

Customers had multiple channels where communications were held and this led to delayed projects and lost data. Through this process, we were able to help them unify their communication channels and allow a single point of ownership to be maintained.

We built a framework that allowed users to send and receive communications regarding renewals in our app.
We enabled IT managers to tie license utilization to contractual spend data in order to report on cost per license when making decisions.

Looking Ahead

There were many avenues that we did not explore deeper as we reach for an MVP. However as we continued to iterate on user feedback and data, we added enhancements, such as:

Lists based on user roles that would enable role-based de-provisioning
Further integrations with 3rd party apps
Automations around other workflows such as contract renewals
and more..

Zylo

Improving SaaS Management Workflows

How do you keep track of, and manage, 100s of 1000s of applications?

Goal: To find a way to drive value within our app by offering insights and tracking actions within Zylo.

Team: Design Lead working with a Product Manager, 3 Backend Engineers, and 2 Frontend Engineers, 1 Data Scientist, 2 CSMs

Work: Customer interviews, Discovery, Design Sprint, Visual and Interaction Design, QA, and User Testing.

The Challenge

Think about how many employees there are at an enterprise-level company. Now think about all the applications they have to use and collaborate with every day. I'll save you the math, it's a huge number. It was that problem that plagued the procurement and IT teams at these companies as well.

When I joined Zylo as employee #7 this was one of the largest problems we needed to solve and I was tasked with creating an experience that would lighten the load of SaaS management at scale.

Identifying Painpoints

After speaking with our CSMs and our target users (IT Managers), we focused on a singular action of Deprovisioning licenses within an application.

They wanted to get accurate and timely data on unengaged or inactive users within their company.

They wanted to get value by reducing the amount of time this entire process took.

They wanted to have one channel within which they could manage all communications and data.

How might we make the deprovision process efficient?

Increase user adoption

By providing additional value that procurement managers could capitalize on, we should see growth in that persona group

Decrease time on task

By reducing the time the deprovision process currently takes it will free up procurement managers to focus on strategy

Drive more value

By enabling this much-needed capability it will enhance the value of our product in market and be a real differentiator

Competitive Analysis

While viewing the market, I found some interesting paths to accomplishing tasks within various applications.

There were some like Asana and Trello that focused on the task itself being the goal, while others like Mint and TurboTax saw each task as a means to get to your ultimate goal.

TurboTax allowed the user to focus on each step in the process without getting distracted by other tasks or other areas of the app.

There was also a smooth flow getting the user into and out of the app to complete various tasks that needed external processing or manual input.

Ideation

There were other challenges to overcome around surfacing the most important data to our users and allowing them to drive the workflow based on their processes. We experimented with multiple options and methods for how we could bring clarity to the data while maintaining a more general approach.

Solution: Inactivity Notifications

We were able to address the inactive users issue by:

Building user lists from the threshold set at the subscription level.

Filter out users through a suppression list.

Offer notifications for inactive licenses at renewal time or when over-provisioned.

This was a really important use case as users generally were too busy to perform this workflow unless a renewal was near or more licenses were needed.

Solution: Automate Process

We enabled our customers to reduce the project time by:

Setting a date to have users respond by end workflow.

Allowing them to skip the survey and move directly to de-provisioning.

This saved weeks, if not months, of back and forth work and provided great value to our Zylo champion.

Solution: Unify Channels

Customers had multiple channels where communications were held and this led to delayed projects and lost data. Through this process, we were able to help them unify their communication channels and allow a single point of ownership to be maintained.

We built a framework that allowed users to send and receive communications regarding renewals in our app.

We enabled IT managers to tie license utilization to contractual spend data in order to report on cost per license when making decisions.

Looking Ahead

There were many avenues that we did not explore deeper as we reach for an MVP. However as we continued to iterate on user feedback and data, we added enhancements, such as:

Lists based on user roles that would enable role-based de-provisioning

Further integrations with 3rd party apps

Automations around other workflows such as contract renewals

and more..