Evolving platform strategy to unlock revenue at Salesforce
As COVID accelerated digital transformation and Salesforce acquired new B2B and B2C commerce products, the need to mature the Experience Cloud platform became a strategic priority.
This story focuses on content services, one of the four core pillars I led. I partnered closely with the team, guiding strategy and contributing hands-on to evolve the platform to drive growth.
Focus areas
This work brings together multiple dimensions of design leadership: shaping direction, elevating execution, and enabling success. This work emphasized shaping direction as the primary leadership dimension, closely followed by elevating execution.
It involved defining a unified vision, aligning cross-cloud stakeholders, and steering platform strategy, while also driving prioritization and execution through thoughtful design leadership.
Shaping direction
Elevating execution
Enabling Success
This one felt big. It was a rare chance to shape something from the ground up, laying a foundation based on principles, not just pixels. The opportunity was massive and the challenges, daunting. Adding to the rough waters was the uncertainty all around due to COVID-19.
Before we could design anything, I had to unpack what “maturing the platform” really meant and what it would take to rally folks to land the v1.
Overwhelmed but optimistic, I jumped in headfirst.
The opportunity and the challenges
Salesforce’s Experience Cloud was previously called community cloud, and their primary customers were other clouds – sales cloud, service cloud, etc. The content services platform was designed to be headless and the products were siloed. Integrating recent B2B and B2C commerce acquisitions was in full swing. Covid 19 accelerated the surge in digital transformation, which put the spotlight on our cloud, giving rise to Experience Cloud.
We had to pivot from headless to hybrid, adapt to the new expanded customer needs, and mature the content platform to make it more extensible and scalable to cater to the current and future needs.
Features enabling content creation, organization, orchestration across channels, collaboration and approval workflows etc took center stage to name a few.
It was a rough sail ahead, and the charter was to set the vision and steer the enterprise ship of content services in the right direction.
The sail ahead, how we tackled it.
Navigating the shift from a headless to hybrid content services platform required a meticulous approach. Before diving into building any sort of vision and execution plan, I felt it was crucial to first deeply understand the core issues, opportunities driving this change and what maturing the platform actually entails. Here’s how the story unfolded.
Unpacking the needs
Unpacking what maturing the product means, collaboratively. This would help us align with the product strategy, define what and break silos.
We had to dig deeper to understand what maturing a product meant and what new possibilities the re-architecture could unlock. This was our opportunity to influence the tech architecture of the product to optimize for user experience. To understand the product-centric perspective, we collaborated with the R&I team on Discovery Research, performed design-led competitive analysis, and spoke to the field.
We were able to get a good handle on what we were up against. And after socializing the findings, we landed on maturing the platform meant to make it – scalable, extensible, performant, and modern.
It was pretty evident that we had to navigate these waters methodically and cautiously to set sail our ship.
Deep dive
Few of the areas and artifacts we looked at and created during this phase:
Product Management documents (past and current)
Industry insights (the Forresters and the Gartners)
Past discovery research
New Designer-led competitor analysist
These weren't massive reorganizations but strategic shifts that positioned us to have greater impact with our existing resources.
Few of the artifacts from adjacency analysis for content services – headless, hybrid and content editors:
Establishing a unified vision
Once the needs were unpacked, we were better equipped to build a vision. One of the biggest areas was to build a unified vision while focusing on content services. The now of content services with a point of view of how the interplay with other products in the platform would playout.
It was a stiff challenge. We knew having everyone aligned throughout was paramount, so we doubled down on the collaboration with cross-functional partners as well as cross-cloud partners.
We went ahead and tackled this phase with the below initiatives:
Jobs to be done framework
We partnered with the Research & Insights team and rode the org-wide wave of defining JTBD to involve the key stakeholders across the cloud to define the core jobs to be done for the platform.
This was a highly collaborative exercise and we facilitated multiple workshops throughout this process.
Platform mental models
We kept the momentum gained with the Jobs to be done workshops and collaborated with the engineering partners, key architects and leads to clarify and define conceptual models and mental models.
We facilitated and run collaborative jam sessions to clarify key fundamental constructs around the products key features – creation, organization, orchestration, collaboration and workflows. Went deeper to the levels of how the mental models would look like for versioning, translations, variations, etc.
When the work was underway it was very enlightening on understanding the different perspectives. This exercise not only helped in defining the blueprint of the platform, but also built strong relationships with the engineering and product partners.
Comprehensive end-to-end narrative
While the work of defining the mental models was ongoing, we took on the endeavor to create an end-to-end presentation.
This would have a narrative from the customer perspective, walking the audience through a typical journey, unlike customer journeys focussed on the product and the details around the product. Creating something at this level that cuts across the products in the cloud is a massive project in itself. We worked with at least three VPs of product management, eight directors, and numerous stakeholders.
Customer-centric narrative: Shifted focus from product details to the customer's journey
Cross-product integration: Created a presentation that encompassed multiple products within the cloud
Extensive collaboration: Worked with multiple VPs, directors, and stakeholders to align on the final presentation
After resolving hundreds of comments, navigating a ton of slack group chats, and iterating multiple times, we finally shepherded the end-to-end steel thread.
Content services detailed screens
Along with the team we created multiple versions of the Experience cloud home, while we really focussed on refining the content services experience first.
The gallery below includes a mix of my hands-on design work and by the team.
Catalyzing prioritization
We had a solid idea of the scope and what it would entail and the next step was to prioritize the product areas to refine, fine-tune and get them release ready.
The prioritization was primarily PM-driven and we facilitated the conversations.
While there were few standard criteria that everyone agreed upon, UX had a strong view on a few things: foundational features, strategic direction, and philosophical/principle level constructs. We wanted to make sure that we had a crawl, walk, run approach and inadvertently did not paint ourselves into a corner. Few of the main criteria were:
Key prioritization criteria
Impact vs effort
Top VOCs & Paid customer requests
Foundational items
Key competitor differentiators based on industry intelligence
Cross cloud and cross functional dependencies
Visibility into crawl, walk and run approach
Streamlining execution
To enable smoother execution, balance the workload, thereby setting realistic expectations. This would prevent burn-outs and allow space for explorations.
We had a map and the fuel, but it was not so easy. We had few more considerations to address that would directly impact the team’s well-being, morale and workload.
Effort for design iterations – the designs are not final.
Change in schedules due to covid.
Reduced workforce capacity.
Making meaningful progress without losing sight of the big picture.
XFN Process modifications
We collaborated with a closer-knit CMS team and program managers and made some process modifications to accommodate those considerations.
Refined the release planning milestones with UX specific milestones.
Kept close track of the team capacity vs workload
Setup regular cadences for reviews and working sessions
Enhanced the PM one pager creation process incorporating UX conceptual models
Created the release vignettes based on the E2E narrative
What results did we achieve?
We did it; we could steer the ship out of the hard state and take a turn toward the right direction. The vision for the larger experience cloud for the next few releases was in place, and the bigger win was we had an immediate roadmap with detailed direction for the content services. We are continuously joining forces with the engineering team on rearchitecting this version and laying the foundation for a solid experience.
While we could see some immediate impact on revenue, team health, and product, some may take time to see, as this is a marathon
Business impact
Team Impact
Product Impact
What did I learn?
This project wouldn't have been possible without an incredible team that embraced ambiguity and rose to every challenge. I'm grateful for the opportunity to lead this transformation and came away with several insights that continue to shape my approach:
Technical knowledge becomes currency for trusted partnerships. Deep platform understanding gave us a seat at the technical table, transforming design from a service to a strategic partner.
Mental models bridge organizational divides. Creating visual frameworks gave cross-functional teams a shared language, aligning perspectives that previously seemed incompatible.
Strategic narratives unlock alignment at scale. Our comprehensive end-to-end storytelling created clarity across eight directors and three VPs when meetings and documents couldn't.
Team capacity directly impacts exploration quality. By actively managing workload against capability, we created space for meaningful innovation rather than just execution.
