Enterprise Readiness
Company Overview
MURAL is a digital workspace for visual collaboration that connects over 90 percent of Fortune 100 enterprises. Unicorn backed by Gradient Ventures (Google's AI-focused venture fund), Salesforce Fund, and others. Joined MURAL as early employee, supporting hyper-growth from seed stage through $23M Series A and $118M Series B investments.
Problem
With the growth of remote work during 2020-2021 and the expansion of both new and existing businesses, there is a critical need for enhanced enterprise billing transparency. Admin users are seeking more clarity on the Quarterly Engaged Members (QEMs) billing model and team adoption, while also desiring real-time insights without waiting for manual reports from Support and CSM teams.
Admin users is a newer persona we need to design for and understand as the company scale up. How might we show “collaboration” in metrics and also improve the product as we grow as a company?
V1 Dashboard was not catching up to Enterprise Readiness to communicate billing needs
Cross-Functional Understanding
Since we do not have an official understanding of what collaboration billing meant for Enterprise and it’s a new problem and user for us, I ran async/sync workshops with cross-functional partners with Sales, CS, Product, and Community team to understand major themes.
Virtual White Boarding sessions with our own product (company culture collaboration before this was mainstream 😛)
Goals
From the cross-functional understanding, here are the goals to achieve.
Customer and Customer-Facing team needs
Companies Admins need to measure and understand the Growth by measuring data of their workspace, by individual usage, team usage, to board usage
Each CSM would like to reduce submitting manual request to Data teams to send these reports to customers and let them self-serve
Product and Engineering Resources:
We need to standardized important things to show Enterprise Admins as we scale
Show only most common data request as first version towards Enterprise Readiness
User Research Process
The most challenging part was that feedback was all over the place with the organization to prioritize. I led the effort to centralize and prioritize scattered feedback across the organization. By focusing on understanding the key needs of our Admin Users, whom we knew little about, I took the following steps:
1. Internal Investigation of existing resources (customer feedback and requests)
2. Internal interviews of stakeholders (business needs from MURAL vs Customer perspectives)
3. Identify questions for external customers research
4. Interviews
5. Synthesis & JTBD
High-level view of centralizing company needs
Collaborate with product design to understand high level themes we need to design for Admin users
Jobs to be done
Admin users care about these metrics because they also need to sell internally to their stakeholders to demonstrate value of the tool and also find champions in within their companies to understand how they are using the tool to build workflows.
““ We are paying you a lot of money, and you are asking for more. I need to show this to my boss’s boss. Please help me here.””
Jobs-to-be-done from Admin users that we need to use as an organization to use as we scale for Enterprise.
Prioritization for V2 Dashboard
After understanding the users, goals and JBTD. Their asks were prioritized by impact and effort to get the “must-haves” on the v2 Dashboard. And added backlog improvements that are important to Enterprise Readiness Roadmap.
QEM (quarterly engaged members) for usage buying transparency
Top collaborators
List of workspaces and information
Total boards & templates in all workspaces
Most popular templates usage
Prototype Feedback to Final Design
Working with Product Designer to validate the V2 Dashboard with internal stakeholders and selected Admin Users.
💡 One of the key insights we learned that by displaying and communicating in visual that by charging them usage (Engaged Members) rather than all users (Signed In Users), it gives them comfort to :
Use this to make a business case for their stakeholders to demonstrate the value of use cases through data
Not blocking virality to prevent additional users from joining the product
Validating prototype with users
Final design for v2 Dashboard
Impact
Reduced manual reporting by customer-facing teams by 70%, streamlining operations and improving efficiency
Increased admin dashboard engagement by 40%, significantly boosting visibility and usage of key metrics
Received positive qualitative feedback from both admin users and customer-facing teams, enhancing overall user satisfaction
Learnings & Recommendations
Major impact was to centralize learnings to share with company as guiding principles for Enterprise Readiness.
Enterprise team adoption often needs active leadership, as leaders face higher expectations compared to individual users who try products on their own
Admin users (leaders/executives) are crucial for enabling collaboration and virality.
Scale requires designing for end-users, their teams, and their leaders
Share user research insights to guide improvements in areas like workspace management and templates
Personalize by segmenting customers to better address Admin needs across industries as we are a horizontal product
