This document discusses how user-centered design was used to drive impactful products and services. It describes how VMware Pivotal Labs uses techniques like stakeholder interviews, user interviews, persona creation, prioritization, roadmapping, and design studios to understand user needs and inform the direction of projects. The goal is to start simply, learn through doing, and adapt based on new insights to build solutions that deliver business value. A navigator helps translate business problems into actionable user stories to guide development.

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How User-Centered
Design Drives
Impactful Products
and Services
From Navigator to App Modernization
Dani Sandoval, Product Designer
VMware Pivotal Labs
Lindsay Osaka, Tanzu Specialist
ON Public Service

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Starting Simple
At VMware Pivotal Labs
we learn just enough to
begin and let the work
inform the direction.

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Getting Started
What we learned from our Discovery Workshop
Deliver new
software capabilities
to automate an
existing manual
process
Ensure regulatory
compliance and
accurate financial
calculations
Come up with a
strategy for
delivering value
incrementally.
Teach [company]’s
teams how to
engineer, build and
deliver software in a
world class way.

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Reviewed existing research
Shared knowledge base around the steps and systems involved
in the existing business process.
SME/Stakeholder interviews
Quick feedback loops directly between team members and SMEs
End-user interviews
Allowed the team to discuss various approaches with project
leadership and align on the risks involved with each approach.
Identified unknown data integrity issues that could have impacted
the automated calculation.
Gathering context
Quickly onboarding the entire team
Shared understanding of the business events and pain
points that make up our problem domain.
Event Storming

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Personas
Summarized the key workflows and pain points. Used as reference
throughout the backlog and roadmap.
Prioritized Pain Points
2x2-style prioritization allowed the team to form a strong opinion on
what should be worked on first.
Outcome-oriented Roadmap
Used as a focal-point for stakeholder checkins, this style of roadmap
made it easy to discuss prioritization, dependency management, and
implementation tradeoffs.
Documenting learnings and prioritizing insights
Forced-ranking priorities let us focus on the most important problems first
Reframed workflows from the user’s perspective helped us
identify the key interactions and highlighted where we
needed to do additional research.
Service Blueprint

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Move fast and build things
r

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Had more business value
Move fast and build things

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Adapting to new insights
Breaking down learnings into actionable stories
For more complicated user
interactions or development
patterns, group brainstorming
sessions with all disciplines of the
project team helped identify (&
align on) potential solutions.
Design Studios
Created a map of how data flows within the existing system,
so that team members could quickly reference the existing
systems that support the product’s business context.
Validated with SMEs to gather info missing from event storm.
Context Maps
Like a linear BORIS, this artifact helped PMs break stories down into
vertical slices and align developers on business logic requirements
Process Flow(s)

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A Navigator empowers the team
to translate business problems
into actionable user stories

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Design
Are we solving a real
user need?
Development
Are we building
production-ready,
sustainable software?
Product
Management
Will this help the
business?
Product
Who’s doing this?
Compliance, Legal, Marketing
Other Supporting Roles
Stakeholders, Product Owners,
Testers

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Connect with us for an initial conversation around your
design & business objectives (apps/platform/continuous
delivery, etc) to determine where VMware Pivotal Labs can
help.
Lindsay Osaka (losaka@vmware.com)
Dani Sandoval (sandovald@vmware.com)
Next Steps