Datto
A vision for digital evolution.
Challenge
Align a multimillion dollar tech company to a vision of digital transformation and demonstrate the transformation in an applied and understandable way.
Solution
Develop a manifesto that clearly articulates digital transformation and a path for the company to achieve it. Design and produce a clickable mobile prototype that demonstrates the impact of digital transformation.
Role
Experience Director leading experience strategy, UX, UI, and visual design
Agency: Bounteous
Introduction
Datto is a cybersecurity company that enables MSPs (managed service providers) to protect small and medium-sized businesses against threats and data loss and minimize business downtime. Datto offers a suite of hardware and software products to provide data backup and recovery solutions.
The Challenge
Datto needed to evolve its business in order to keep ahead of more nimble startups. Like many technology companies, they had grown rapidly by acquiring technology solutions to round out their product offering. Because of this, their end-to-end user experience was disjointed, complicated and oftentimes unworkable. This resulted in friction with their current loyal MSP partners. My team was brought in to first help them align, as a company, around a unified vision of digital transformation, and then to help them establish product and design principles and methods to elevate their current and future product offerings. Finally, the plan was to help them build teams to enable a culture of innovation.
The Approach
Building an Understanding
We first needed to discern if there was a common understanding of the company's direction among the Datto team. We also needed to understand what their MPS partners thought about the current state of Datto and where they thought the company needed to go. Datto was very reluctant to have us talk with actual MSP partners because they were concerned about revealing their intended direction before they were ready. We convinced them it was critical that we talk with actual customers and not just internal proxies. Ultimately we interviewed:
10 internal stakeholders from departments across the enterprise - engineering, marketing, design, leadership, etc.
2 clients
Insights from the research
From the Datto team, we learned that there was no alignment on what digital transformation meant, especially in context of some of the company’s stated long-term goals. This provided an opportunity to clearly define and articulate a vision, and to rally the company around that vision.
From the MSP partners, we learned that they LOVED Datto, but they were frustrated that the rapid growth had, while providing some great solutions, put up obstacles that negatively impacted their businesses. They were willing to go along with Datto on its journey, but they wanted more insight and inclusion into what was to come so they could plan for how it might their businesses.
Workshopping The Why and Beyond
The company was focused on “Horizon 1” challenges–fixing what was broken and creating a more unified user experience across all their products. To help them take a step back and think more broadly towards the ideas of innovation and digital transformation, I designed a workshop to first help ground them in their “Why” (Simon Sinek, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action”), and then to challenge them to think about the “Art of Possible.”
Crafting a Manifesto
With the research and workshops complete, the Strategy Lead drafted the manifesto, while I focused on the prototype to express certain tenets of the manifesto. I collaborated with the Strategy Lead on the manifesto along the way and oversaw the visual design.
Prototyping a Vision
To tell the impact story of digital transformation, we at first thought we needed to share a larger vision in the form of a narrative to align and excite internal stakeholders. I had originally planned a video that would express the intended outcome of transformation. As we talked more with our client at Datto, we realized that what he really wanted was to express the vision of transformation in a real and applied way - to show transformation (or what transformation could look like), not merely talk about it. We quickly shifted focus to a prototype that would address some of their major use cases in a forward-leaning way illustrating how digital transformation could manifest in a concrete example. From our research and our workshop, we defined a persona that aligned with an MSP partner to guide the prototype:
Building on our first workshop, we collaborated with our client stakeholders to map out several key use cases that we could use to express the idea of digital transformation in an applied way. After prioritizing several options against key business goals, we ended up focusing on the eCommerce flow. In that flow, we could hit on several critical interactions that spoke to a deeper reorganization of the business around the needs of MSPs. For this exercise all participants were remote, so we used Miro’s real-time whiteboard capabilities to facilitate the collaboration.
Using wireframes produced in Figma, we worked out the flow based on the use case, and tested it with several stakeholders (and a few colleagues as well…).
We designed a visual UI language that leaned into a future vision for the brand established and expressed in the manifesto.
And we produced a clickable Figma prototype that our client could have on his smartphone to support his narrative of digital transformation as he shared it with others in the organization.
Outcomes
The manifesto was presented to the company in a series of town halls and was met with a resounding expression of excitement and alignment around the vision.
Our client used the prototype to further solidify that vision by showing an applied example of what transformation could look like.
“The prototype was a game changer! Once I walked my colleagues through the flow and explained how it illustrated deeper changes in the business, they got it. It was like a lightbulb went off…!”
For our next step, I mapped out two parallel efforts with Datto. The first was to establish a design system to bring consistency and rigor to all digital products and digital touchpoints in the Datto digital ecosystem. This was a critical element in solving their immediate challenge of a disjointed digital experience. The second was to establish an innovation team. This team would dive further into researching partner experiences and developing partner journey maps. They would then identify and prioritize key opportunities with the client. The innovation team would prototype, test, and iterate on these opportunities, which would then be queued up for implementation.
Unfortunately (for us) very soon after that point Datto was purchased by another company, which put a halt on further efforts with them.