by CAPRA J'NEVA
APS - Autodesk
Platform Services
The Situation
The team: 1200 engineers, product managers, 9 > 52 designers (experience, content, research over 6 business units and 42 products
Could a 40-year-old desktop software company transform themselves into a modern, cloud-based SaaS company to set up their business for long-term success? Could it learn to scale other businesses to materiality? With APS, we set out to do that - to gain stickiness for our software at first - and then we ultimately created a material business selling API access.
My role: Experience Architect, Senior Manager, Director
Timeline: 10 years
Transformation
Over a decade helping build Autodesk's platform, I worked to move the company from a fragmented, product-centered organization to a more collaborative, capabilities-based platform model.
Product companies work in siloes - often building clones of the same capabilities. Platform companies organize around those capabilities, and build them so any team can use them. But the challenge is getting people to switch off components and services they own, build in a way that allows generic services to be extended and customized, and to address 3 layers of customers: internal developers and product teams, external developers who build their businesses on the platform, and the end users who work in specialized ways that product teams understand best.
From the beginning, I identified commonalities between our 3 industry's workflows to make recommendations for platform components and services. I led early platform capability delivery teams as both PM and XD, unifying data sources, and also delivered highly-reused core UI components for data browsing in collaborations that worked across divisions to impact all major hero products. I helped teams understand how to make capabilities that were reusable, extensible and maintainable while shifting the culture from siloed delivery, to eager collaboration.
The biggest barriers
Through research, we found that the biggest barrier to alignment was teams' fear of losing control over roadmaps, ownership, and long-term maintenance, which resulted in disconnected experiences and duplicated solutions.
Additionally, the platform team was new, and didn't understand the role of design - it took consistent delivery and operationalization to demonstrate the value of UX in a tech-dominated team.
Culture change
I led cross-platform and cross-company research and design efforts, including the "6 Islands of Developer Experience" and service mapping initiatives, to create a shared view of gaps and priorities.
Designers on my team built a video wall sharing measurable service improvements to achieve 4 - 9s of availability, MTTR, MTTD that made platform progress visible to the whole company.
I partnered with engineering, product management and TPM leaders to establish clearer intake processes, platform standards, operational transparency, and cloud patterns, to address the fears around control of vital services.
And we helped nascient product managers grow into their role by creating a workshop series to build their vision, business model canvas and strategy.
Center developers
We also brought customer-centricity to the design of APIs, creating a program that trained hundreds of engineers, designers, product managers and technical writers across every division of the company.
As part of this program, I built a research track for our Devcon conference, and paired it with a site visit program in the days before and after the event. Hundreds of customers attended and loved these feedback sessions.
And lastly, I led the transition for a robust contribution system to our design system from its infancy into a robust tokenized system delivered in Figma libraries with full visibility on patterns in progress so people could collaborate instead of competing to create new functionality.
Success stories pave the way for companies to understand how to put the Autodesk Platform Services to work in their use cases, and the ROI it provides.
We measured API success on a 5-part rubric that measured how simple, clear, useful, supportive and performant each API was. Our work improved the APIs from D & F grades to A ratings. Our quality team started requiring APIs to achieve an A usability rating before release.
Outcomes
These efforts increased trust in the platform, accelerated adoption by reducing onboarding from months to days with automatic compliance with standards such as FedRamp, SOC2 and GDPR. Our team drove regionalization down from six months to under a week, and helped establish a collaborative platform strategy that made it easier for teams to build on shared capabilities.
This transformed company culture to being collaboration-oriented, improving velocity for development and adoption of new initiatives.
To our customers, we conveyed clearly the value they would get using the platform, and we built strong bonds by involving them in our work growing our research customer base to 20% of our customers - the highest percentage in the company.
Our APIs consistently received 70% better ratings from developers both inside and outside of the company, when designed iteratively with developers using our APIX process and measures. This translated to 15-23% YOY growth in monthly active users and resulted in material contributions to Autodesk’s business growing revenue from 2-10M in the first two years after we monetized our APIs.
