Centralising user management in Drova
June 2023 - November 2023
Summary
I designed and consolidated the user management across 3 disconnected, legacy and emerging products into 1 unified system.
See the final solution I handed off.
The problem
Supporting 3 different systems of managing users created growing system complexity and technical debt.
Product cross-sell was blocked because users could not easily access different products from the same platform.
My design process
Don't reinvent the wheel
Multi product, platform user management is a solved problem.
Large enterprises with more products and resources already have the frameworks and models that can be leveraged to tackle this problem.
For me, the priority then was to make sense of the existing models and identify the complex, design and technical constraints from Drova's legacy product that our team and I had to account for and somehow, scale.
Create shared problem understanding
Fundamentally, this project was a complex technical and business challenge.
The technical constraints needed to be clear and documented; and senior stakeholders needed to be confident that the solution could enable product growth and adoption across the platform.
To achieve this, I led frequent design reviews and facilitated alignment on user and team management models that could be used to tackle the problem. A variety of concepts were explored, but the key variables we needed to maintain…
Lean into Engineering
The biggest difficulty of this project was in navigating the ambiguity of how our solution could retro-fit the legacy product where Drova's major revenue and customer base was.
To drive progress, our team chunked up the problem and I designed improvements based on the requirements that were most feasible and defined. Requirements or goals that were unclear, were resolved in parallel as we delivered what was certain.
By working in parallel with engineering to ship improvements, this created a buffer for myself and the Product Manager to report to stakeholders with progress updates and enabled us to shape up other problems without blocking project progress.
Outcome
My design enabled existing and new customers to establish their users in a single centralised location.
Team view
People view
Role-Based Access Control: Maintained the concept of 'Role' to ensure backwards compatibility with legacy product (TrilineGRC).
Teams vs. Security Groups: Replaced "Security Groups" with "Teams”. Administrators ca assign people to multiple teams without needing to create security groups per category of usage, simplifying access rights management.
People and Teams view: Drova targeted SME’s with typically 6-15 people, so we implemented a view switcher to simplify how users and teams can be managed.
Connect with me anytime on Linkedin or email (chan.heiron@gmail.com)
Centralising user management in Drova
June 2023 - November 2023
Connect with me anytime on Linkedin or email (chan.heiron@gmail.com)
Outcome
My design enabled existing and new customers to establish their users in a single centralised location.
Team view
People view
Role-Based Access Control: Maintained the concept of 'Role' to ensure backwards compatibility with legacy product (TrilineGRC).
Teams vs. Security Groups: Replaced "Security Groups" with "Teams”. Administrators ca assign people to multiple teams without needing to create security groups per category of usage, simplifying access rights management.
People and Teams view: Drova targeted SME’s with typically 6-15 people, so we implemented a view switcher to simplify how users and teams can be managed.
My design process
Don't reinvent the wheel
Multi product, platform user management is a solved problem.
Large enterprises with more products and resources already have the frameworks and models that can be leveraged to tackle this problem.
For me, the priority then was to make sense of the existing models and identify the complex, design and technical constraints from Drova's legacy product that our team and I had to account for and somehow, scale.
Create shared problem understanding
Fundamentally, this project was a complex technical and business challenge.
The technical constraints needed to be clear and documented; and senior stakeholders needed to be confident that the solution could enable product growth and adoption across the platform.
To achieve this, I led frequent design reviews and facilitated alignment on user and team management models that could be used to tackle the problem. A variety of concepts were explored, but the key variables we needed to maintain…
Delivering a solution that scales
Leveraging what we learnt from the validation sessions, I made adjustments to designs to ensure the solutions were maximally desired yet feasible.
With the value clear and our team confident, the next action was sequencing how we delivered our series of improvements to customers. The first and highest priority was to eliminate setup friction with automated workflows.