Launchpad
I joined the Customer Intelligence team at Dropbox as a Data Visualization Developer in early 2017. Over the last 3 years, I have evolved from being a developer to leading the design and innovation for my team. At the same time, the team has grown from 2 members to over 15 members - forming an interdisciplinary team of designers, front end engineers, full stack engineers, data scientists, data analysts & product manager.
My work has spanned front end development, product design, data visualization, user research and product strategy. I have worked on several projects, the flagship project being Launchpad, a data visualization product used by Dropbox’s Enterprise Sales & Customer Success Teams. The tool now boasts ~250 weekly active users and helps bring over $25 million revenue every quarter.
My work hasn’t been limited to that of a designer or an engineer: it has really been about developing a complex enterprise product for data visualization. This starts with picking the right UI & data visualization framework, deciding on the design tools to get the job done & help set the right product strategy for the team. Additionally I lead user research sessions, shadowed sales calls and conducted surveys to understand my users. I interviewed 75+ users during my time at Dropbox.
Our primary users are the enterprise sales & customer success teams at Dropbox. They leverage this data to understand use cases and share it with prospective/current customers to increase revenue. The product suite includes insights dashboards, collaboration maps, charts, network graphs, presentation builders & automation tools.
Domain Insights
Domain Insights was one of the features I designed and built out in Launchpad. It provided the account executives a birds eye view of a prospective customers Dropbox’s usage to determine if an account have enough valid Dropbox usage and growth. The insights were organized in a way to allow users to quickly scan over 80 metrics and charts to understand usage patterns. To do so, the data was chunked in meaningful sections and minimal UI elements were used to keep it simple. Initially I used react-vis for charts, but switched to recharts for better support. Account Executives were able to put together the best story with the data to present a use case to their potential customers.
We kept collecting feedback over time and realized another major user need - to use these metrics in paper docs and presentations. In order to do so, I designed and built “cheatsheet“ - a condensed view of the most important metrics and “slide builder“ - an interface that allowed users to create their own customizable data stories to share with prospect customers.
Visualizing data in different forms, solving for different use cases.
A sales representative requires a lot of data to quickly scan through and gather use cases. Creating a sustainable visualization system that is user friendly and scalable is key.
Maps
We created maps to visualize how Dropbox was helping break geographic silo’s of information at companies. We used uber’s deck.gl to visualize shared folder connections that were both internal and external to their companies domain. Users had the option to select total, internal and external connections - to focus on the strongest usage story.
Geographical Collaboration Maps, showing the internal & external collaboration for this domain.
Teams
As Launchpad achieved more success, our team mandate increased to providing support for customer success teams. While Account Executive’s depended on domain informations, customer success managers (CSM) were post sales - i.e Dropbox teams. CSM’s were able to view Team Information, Contract Timeline, License Information and Deployment Metrics to understand the health and status of a team. Eventually, we integrated Data Science models to monitor the health of the team and alert CSM’s if the team was at the risk of churn.
Dropbox Team Deployment Dashboard
Communities
Communities used data science models to identify groups of Dropbox users who were actively collaborating using Dropbox’s shared folders. These group of users would be great prospects to upsell or champions to connect AE’s to the IT team. Communities was used to visualize these groups and discover such users.
Over the last few years, Launchpad has gone through multiple iterations as we have add new features. I have strived to provide an exceptional & consistent user experience for my users. It’s pretty expansive now, here are some screenshots/gifs to showcase it.