by CAPRA J'NEVA
APS - Autodesk
Platform Services
The Situation
The team: 2-4 scrum teams, 2 product managers, 2-3 designers
My role: Experience Architect, Senior Manager, Director
Autodesk customers use a variety of software to complete their workflows. But a lot of their software uses proprietary formats that make it almost impossible to flow data between tools. The Data Exchange allows people to share exactly what matters across tools.
Timeline: 5 years
The data problem
With Autodesk's shift to cloud software, we wanted to put data at the center, and allow workflows that extended beyond the border of any single tool. If our data could move, we could help customers get more value out of it and extend the life of their data - instead of just documenting a design, the data could help them do a better job building and manufacturing - and ultimately, they could pass it to their clients to enable them to operate factories, buildings and even cities.
But Autodesk's data was locked in proprietary formats. We would have to make it both granular (Revit files are huge!) and enable it to move.
I joined a team that had been prototyping for a year.
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.
