Rubrik

Rubrik

At Rubrik, I was both a product designer and design operations lead. My team consisted of 7 product designers. I worked on three separate "pod" teams spanning across two desktop platforms, CDM and Polaris. As the design ops lead, I was responsible for creating and maintaining our design system using Abstract, as well as planning team activities and workshops.

Rubrik helps IT Administration teams manage the backup and recovery of data. We provided both hardware and software to help teams manage data.

01 Situation

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The product and design team hosted a technical advisory board with our top customers. We had some breakout sessions with a few customers to observe and interview their daily workflows. We were solving the key use cases for 2 of our core users, but IT Admins, our daily returning users, were not seeing the information they needed easily: what happened in the last 24 hours. This data was readily available and I was chosen to work in a war-room style solution team to revamp the homepage.

02 Obstacles

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I had 3 product managers, our VP of Product, VP of Design, and CTO on my team, so we had a lot of support to make this project happen. However, we also were only given 2 weeks to come up with solutions. The engineering team that was going to implement this was also on another project, so they were not involved until after the iterations were done.

03 Action

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I first did affinity mapping to identify the common themes across the feedback we got from the technical advisory board. Then, we prioritized what we could do in a 2 week timeframe, and started iterating. I would do whiteboard sessions with the team and daily feedback sessions with users were conducted as the design matured. I also took the designs to our Customer Success and Product Support teams to get their feedback throughout the process.

04 Results

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The new dashboard is still a work in progress, but the feedback we received from users, sales teams, and support was overwhelmingly positive.

What did I learn?

For this project, I learned how to observe and speak with a technical userbase, be an advocate for users in a very engineering heavy environment, and work on a tight deadline.

At Rubrik overall, I learned how organize workshops, plan team off-sites, implement and manage our design system, juggle multiple projects at once, and implement new tools to support a hyper-growth startup and design team.