MyVMware.com
Leading through a high-risk transition
Joining VMware in 2012, I stepped into a dual Product and Design Leadership role for MyVMware.com—an ambitious $50M customer and partner portal at the center of a new licensing model. The platform was critical to enterprise revenue, but launched with serious structural flaws that blended unrelated customer entitlements, causing confusion and trust issues. MyVMware became ground zero for resolving this breakdown, and I was tasked with leading the turnaround from day one.
Beyond the licensing crisis, MyVMware.com was riddled with critical usability issues across core functions like software downloads and support ticket management—frustrating users and straining support teams.
Even secondary features like training and certification were buried and difficult to navigate. My newly formed team and I were faced with untangling a complex, high-visibility product under intense scrutiny, where nearly every user journey required urgent redesign.
Some Basics
Team Size: 18
Geographies: 2 (US, India)
Disciplines led: 5 - Product Management, Design, Localization, CX Strategy, & Research
Budget Managed: $3M+
Key Metrics
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Increased customer satisfaction (CSAT) by 32% within one year across 5 major product releases by strategically prioritizing high-impact roadmap initiatives and optimizing UX investments across core app experiences.
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Increased usability for key customer tasks by 65%.
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Removed 3+ friction points in the software download process for customers.
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Delivered a single API solution that provided 100% coverage for the existing perpetual license customer base, enabling seamless integration and efficient license management across all products.
Leadership Challenge
Context
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Joined VMware during the critical post-launch phase of MyVMware, stepping into a high-stakes environment with no dedicated design team and significant customer satisfaction challenges.
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Took dual ownership of both product and design leadership, focusing on stabilizing key workflows tied directly to enterprise revenue—including entitlement management, support, and training.
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Prioritized high-impact user pain points and led strategic improvements that elevated CSAT scores from the 30s and 40s, transforming MyVMware into a trusted, business-critical platform.
Approach
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Identified highest-impact investment opportunities by leading a data-informed, customer-centric assessment of user pain points across key workflows.
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Conducted a text analysis of 30,000 CSAT and support verbatims to surface critical usability issues and prioritize roadmap initiatives with confidence.
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Developed and secured executive buy-in for a focused product and design roadmap, grounded in evidence and aligned to business outcomes.
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Launched rapid design and usability testing cycles to validate and iterate on solutions—ensuring each release delivered measurable user experience improvements.
Outcome &
Impact
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Led both product management and design to grow the My VMware Mobile app from under 100 downloads to 47,000 in just five releases over two years.
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Defined a focused product roadmap and eliminated key UX friction points, transforming the app into VMware’s 3rd most downloaded in 2014.
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Demonstrated the power of combining strategy and design leadership to deliver a product that evolved from functional to indispensable.
Product Roadmap Releases and CSAT Improvement
To drive meaningful improvement in customer satisfaction, each roadmap release was grounded in a structured product management approach focused on value, validation, and impact:
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Problem Framing: We began by clearly articulating and prioritizing customer pain points through data from CSAT, support cases, and product analytics.
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Solution Design & Validation: For each roadmap item, we defined success criteria, delivered design solutions, and validated improvements through user testing and feedback loops.
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Business Justification: I was responsible for making the business case—quantifying investment needs and projected impact to secure executive buy-in for each release.
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Outcome Tracking: After each release, we measured and reported on customer satisfaction gains, which consistently trended upward—demonstrating the ROI of our design and product strategy.
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Iterative Execution: For complex areas like license key management, we delivered improvements in a phased approach (Iterations 1–3), each building on validated learnings from the last.
MyVMware UIs
During my three-year tenure owning both Product and Design for MyVMware, I led a full-scale transformation of a high-stakes enterprise portal—eliminating critical usability issues while delivering strategic new capabilities like subscription purchasing, license management, and partner communications. The result: a significantly improved user experience, measurable CSAT gains with every release, and a product that became core to VMware’s enterprise customer operations.
Click on any image in the gallery to see it full screen.
MyVMware.com
Design Principles
In every stop along my career since I was at Microsoft (2008-2011), I've worked with organizations to define Design and Experience Principles.
Getting cross-functional team members to buy into experience design principles is crucial because it creates alignment around what quality looks like for the user.
When engineering, product, marketing, executive leadership, and support teams understand and embrace these principles, they make decisions that reinforce—not undermine—the user experience.
It leads to more consistent, cohesive, and intuitive products. It also reduces rework, accelerates development cycles, and increases the likelihood of delivering experiences that delight users and drive business outcomes. Simply put, shared principles lead to shared ownership of the experience.
CLEAN
Minimal design that stays out of the way—allowing users to focus fully on their content and tasks The chrome and visual embellishments should support and highlight the users’ task.
COHESIVE
Reduce & reuse don’t automatically reinvent. Work within the design system to reduce users’ need to re-learn concepts across pages, features, and products.
DELIGHTFUL
The littlest details lead to the greatest delight.
Anticipate users’ needs. Transitions through tasks/apps/sites should feel luxurious; credentials should be remembered, choices should be preserved, preferences should be leveraged, devices should be recognized, etc. such that the user feels like tipping the system for its excellent service.
CONFIDENCE BUILDING
Good design helps the product be understood. Optimize/reduce choices/concepts to make the user feel knowledgeable. The next choice or the meaning of an object should be Obvious to the user. When the user doesn’t have to guess, they feel powerful and in control.
PRODUCTIVE
Time matters. Always. Users should feel the experience saves them time rather than steals their time.