 If you want to join our cybernetic army of the future, just get at me after the presentation. All right. So this presentation is about redesigning enterprise platforms at scale. And it's really meant for anybody in this room or watching this online that has ever wanted to take something bigger than themselves and make it a reality. Because this project I'm going to share with you took many years and thousands of people's efforts to make happen. And so you're going to find out what it really took and a lot of the struggles along the way from my perspective. So before I get into it, if you don't know about ServiceNow, we are basically the platform that the largest, most successful businesses in the world use to run their businesses. We are that operating system for enterprise workflows. We're used by 80% of the Fortune 500 companies, including companies like Disney, Siemens, CERN, NASA, you name it. It's a huge number of companies. And myself, I am the SVP of platform product experiences at ServiceNow. I also founded ServiceNow's design organization. So if you're wondering why a product guy snuck into your design conference, I can also do design. And we'll talk about design, don't worry. My opinion, someone who's great at design is great at product and vice versa when you're talking about UI products, products that have a front and for people. So it's the same coin, different side of that coin. So a lot of times when people ask me about platform and platform design, the way I try and explain it is it's like designing a city. And when you're designing a city, you have to think about things far in advance of their existence. You have to consider things like infrastructure, roads, sewage systems. Where will the industrial area be, trade, commerce, security services, fire protection, all these kinds of things need to be thought about. And when I joined ServiceNow back in 2013, we'd created a city. It was ServiceNow's platform experience. But it was a city of antiquity. It was a city with good bones, but it needed to be modernized. And so what we're going to do, what we're going to go through in this presentation is how we would be able to seemingly overnight transform the experience of those folks living in that city from one of antiquity to being in a city that is a modern metropolis. And it's going to be of zero effort for them, not going to get in the way of their lives. They're just going to wake up the next day and suddenly the experience of ServiceNow's platform is going to be an order of magnitude better for them than it had ever been before. Now, every story has a beginning, and for me the beginning was in 2013 here when I joined ServiceNow as a product manager working with a small team of top engineers, including the founder of the company, Fred Luddy. And I remember that week looking at ServiceNow's platform UI for the first time back in 2013. And I thought, what did I just sign up for? Because it was terrible. So I remember looking at this thing and Fred, the founder of the company, is on the other side of the room coding and I'm next to another engineer and I just motioned him to come over and I whispered to him, pointing at the screen, I said, this is terrible. And the guy's looking at the screen and he's like, yep. And at the time, the company wasn't the behemoth it is today, but it was still pretty big in 2013. And so I said, the next thing I said, I said, how is this company? And the guy's looking at the screen, still sort of smiling, I don't know. We didn't know. It didn't make any sense. He was pretty new to you at the time. But the great news was that I was going to learn why ServiceNow, even with this antiquated UI, had been so successful and well loved in the market. I would be going on an innovation journey with the founder of ServiceNow, Fred, here over the next couple of years and I learned that the extensibility, the customizability, the flexibility of this platform to be able to automate any workflow in any business was sort of the secret sauce. And you didn't need a degree in computer science to be able to make it work. If you knew how to use SQL, you were halfway there. So together, we ended up building a bunch of products designing and building them. So one was this task board system, visual task boards. Another one was our collaboration system inside our platform. It was a native platform capability, as well as our first mobile products. And a host of other ones, as well as improving, iteratively, the UI that I'd first seen my first week. And as we went through that journey together, the team of about eight people grew to something like 60, 70 folks. And is the way things go, the first people were really high quality, and so they ended up sort of self-selecting high quality people. So by the time we got to this much larger size for this accelerator team we'd built, it was just a really cracked team of folks. And they were all product-minded. So whether they were engineers or designers or QA folks or they were product managers or program managers, they're all very interested in the outcome for customers. And as we hired all these very high quality folks, one of the people we hired, a good friend of mine, pictured here, Aaron, showed a lot of talent for really casting out into the future. And for my money I would call this person a kind of a visual futurist. And Fred noticed this talent in Aaron early on. To the point that one day he just came up to Aaron and said, what would the ServiceNow platform UI be like if you could just reimagine it? And don't worry about our existing customers and technical constraints and all that sort of stuff with our existing data model. Just what would it be like? Do you think that's something you could take on? And Aaron said, yeah, I think you could do that. And then he said, well, how long would you need? And he said, well, just three months. So we're like, OK, we'll see you in three months. Three months later he comes back and he shows us this full motion prototype that really challenged a lot of our assumptions about ServiceNow's platform experience. And it personally really triggered a lot of the early thoughts I'd had when I joined about the old UI. And I started thinking about all the products we'd built along the way. And it really got me thinking that maybe now was the time for us to completely reimagine ServiceNow's experience on the platform. So I took some time off, went on a trip to a really remote region in Baja, Mexico, without internet or electricity or running water, any of those things. And I went surfing during the day. And in the evening I would just look up at the sky and think about all of our customers, their workflows, the internet, data, all the stuff that you do when you do that kind of thing. And I came back from that trip energized and super fired up because I had a vision of where we could take this company in 10 years from then. And it was called ServiceNow 2026. And I presented it to our product development organization. And basically it went through a few key points. One of the facts of the future was going to be that we'd have hundreds of products that we'd be selling to our customers by the year 2026. And they would be building thousands or maybe even millions because that was one of the things about our platform. You could build your own applications on it. And every customer ended up building hundreds, if not more, applications when they use ServiceNow. So there'd be so many applications on the platform. And then everything in the world was going to become connected. IoT was becoming a thing even in 2016. And every single thing would have an IP address. And so the world was going to get a lot smaller from a connectivity perspective. And then of course, as a result of all these items being connected, there'd be a lot more data. And if there was a lot more data, things would become much more complex. And that would cause us to need what we're talking about in much of this conference over the last couple of days, the need for AI, because you have all this data and you have all this complexity. But you need data to train AI. So one hand sort of washes the other in this case. But even back then, it was a thought we'd had. And it was realized that our platform UI was not ready for that future. So coming to the development organization and pushing this out there and saying, this is what the future will be like, it was very important. Because you can't make a future-proof product if you're not able to predict what the future will be like. So this was the prediction. And people were really excited, thought it was good. And so what were we going to do about it? Well, I propose we need to create a modern, scalable platform experience that we need a platform-first approach to designing and building cutting-edge products. So we need a design system that will be ready for that future. And that information would have to come to you intelligently. In a future world where there's so many products and so many devices and so much data, it just wasn't practical to expect people to go find what they need. The information has to come to you. So everybody was super excited by this. There was a lot of interest. Let's get this going. But right around that time, a couple unexpected curve balls were thrown. So Fred Lutty, the founder of ServiceNow, ended up retiring. And the executive team, who had built a really great relationship with, also ended up retiring. They'd been so successful that they felt like they'd accomplished what they'd set out to do. And so they all decided to retire at the same time. And a new executive team came in. And there was a period of a lot of disruption. And so the accelerator team that we had built, as part of that, ended up getting broken up. And the engineers in this team ended up going into engineering. The product managers ended up going into product management. And the designers, well, they ended up with me. So because we'd built design as part of our discipline, creating products at ServiceNow, the new management team leading ServiceNow. So Troy, you seem to know what you're doing with design. Why don't you continue building out design at ServiceNow? So it was a little bit of a disappointment to lose that team, especially when we were just about to embark on this exciting platform journey to reimagine ServiceNow's platform. But that happens. And so I went all in on building ServiceNow's design team. We acquired another agency in San Diego, California and combined our designers with the design agency designers. Worked out great, about, say, 80% to 85% of those folks are still with us today, six years later. So that's pretty good when that happens. And that became the core design team at ServiceNow. And now I want to say we have something like 650 folks in the design organization. It's very healthy. But it really started with this core team of, they're not all in this picture. It was probably about 70 to 80 people that were the core team at ServiceNow designing for the future. So as part of the acquisition, this other company that I led the acquisition on had some developers, too. So brought them in. And then I said, great. I've got engineers. I've got designers. There's a few program managers here. And I told the engineering team. I said, hey, let's work on ServiceNow's new platform experience. You guys know how to code. And we've got the designers. We can start this up and make it happen. So we started working on some prototypes. And then I got disruption coming in again. The folks leading ServiceNow thought that they should find somebody to lead design that had more experience. Because I never led a design organization before. And it was a tough time. Effectively, I ended up having someone to report to you that had a lot more experience leading design orgs. And it was a big bummer. I was really bummed out about it. But looking back, I also had a lot to learn. So becoming a more effective leader and also learning more about myself, an important part of leadership is self-awareness. So in that time period, I had some training, some executive training, and things of that nature that really helped me grow as a leader. And so in balance is probably a good thing. But it was difficult at the time. It was a difficult moment. So anyhow, eventually, as things started to accelerate, there was interest not in building out the new platform UI. I'd had a hard time selling that idea at the time. But there did become an interest in creating the design system. And I'd thought a lot about that problem in the context of ServiceNow's platform. And it was an interesting challenge. We needed to enable the creation of modern products. But we not only had to enable creation of our products, but as I mentioned earlier, all of our customers' products. And we don't know what they want to build, because that's the whole thing with a platform. You can do anything with it. So it makes it a lot tougher to build your design system when you're not sure who it's for. Because there's an infinite number of use cases. And you don't even know all the roles. Here's a great example, prompt engineer. If someone would have told you prompt engineer five, six years ago, you'd say, what? What's a prompt engineer? So there's always these new roles being created across all the industries. And so how do we do it? So effective, I won't get too much into this. But basically, the way around this whole problem of chasing after every single persona and every single use case is to look at the ways people solve problems, because there's only a finite number of ways you can solve problems, and then to allow all of the engineering teams to coalesce around the different problem solving techniques to build out the components that are needed with the designers. So initially, when I floated this idea, it was considered to be a little bit radical, and it was sort of put in as a plan B. But eventually, it was seen that would be the only way to get it done in a reasonable time frame. And so we got involved, myself and a few other brave folks, and led the creation of ServiceNow's design system. And this approach was 400% more efficient than the traditional persona-driven approach that you'd expect. It also leveraged the new tech stack we were building. And it was very helpful for me, because a new leadership team that had come in that had some thoughts about me thought, hey, actually, this is actually pretty good stuff. So that's great, because I was going to need that political capital to do some other things, like build out a new platform UI at ServiceNow. Because I still hadn't given up on this. I thought about it all the time. I'd come up with stuff on the weekend. I'd be whiteboarding. I couldn't stop after coming back from that trip. I couldn't stop thinking about how we needed to do this to future-proof this platform for our customers and to make sure the next generation of employees had something great they could work with. And finally, there was interest, because after we built the design system, lots of folks were building products inside ServiceNow that looked modern. But the customers are now seeing modern products that were all getting loaded into this super old clunky UI. And they were getting frustrated by that, saying this thing just seems really herky-jerky. We're not happy with it. And so the largest business unit or division at ServiceNow, they were seeing that as a big issue, because they sold a lot of products. And if they all had to go in the center of this old, outdated UI to go from one product to the other, customers were dismayed with that. And so they approached me and said, there's something you can do. Do you have any ideas on how we could fix this problem? We want your help to fix this problem. And I said, yes, I have a solution to that problem. And so with that, I then went back to the team of people that were interested in solving this problem at ServiceNow. And I said, great news. We're going to build a new platform UI. And I think it was like the third time, so they were probably like, oh, here he comes again. But no, I said, I'm serious. We're going to fix this. We're going to unify the experience of all the products on the platform. We're going to modernize the visual design. And we're going to take it farther than that, because those are the requirements that the division asked for. But we're going to take it to the next level. We're going to future-proof the platform architecture, the UX of the architecture. And we're going to effectively create the operating system of the enterprise. That would be the goal. And so with my leadership team, we spent a lot of time figuring out how to describe this when we landed on the operating system of the enterprise. So with that, I started a bunch of lanes of work, because I'd gotten funding effectively to chase down this problem of a disjointed experience across products. And I was going to solve it with a new platform UI. And set up a team to do research. Obviously, we had visual design explorations here. We wanted to create a different feel for the UI and not have it look so dated. And then the UX architecture team started doing analysis of how we could properly scale this thing for the future. And everything was going great. But there was one problem. And that was our navigator. So this horrible, really gross UI, some customers ended up falling in love with it over time. It's like Stockholm syndrome. You fall in love with your kidnapper. That's what this is. And it didn't matter what I did. They loved it. OK. Now, here's the deal. We're talking about, at that time, probably $5 or $6 billion in revenue a year. I'm not going to tell them no. But on the other hand, it's gross. So big problem, because they loved it. But new customers said this is ugly and it's hard to use. And we needed one solution. I didn't want to do what some other competitors had done in this space and make some clunky like this and that UI, like slack mule force. So you go into classic and lightning, and I was like, no, no, no, no. And so at this point, Aaron and I started collaborating pretty closely. It got pretty heated. We spent a few months going back and forth on what to do. And it got to the point where, and there's a good lesson in here where I thought, I need to go to somebody who's just like these customers who like the old UI. So I went to the service now's CTO. Definitely not a design guy. He would tell you that. But he had a perspective. And so we sat down with him over the course of a few meetings and really got his point of view. And if we could just blow up the old UI and just start over or not, and he was adamant, no way. I love our old UI. So with that, those few meetings, Aaron and I were walking back to the design studio one Friday evening. And while we were walking, I was talking with him and I said, you know, while we're in our last meeting there, I noticed a flash of inspiration in your eyes. And I said, I think I've got something of my own up my sleeves. I said, why don't you think about it over the week and we'll meet on Monday morning. And so we ended up getting together on Monday and working on a new UI experience that would form the basis for service now's new platform navigation. And so as you can see here, what this allowed us to do was keep that old left nav UI that customers have gotten used to, but it also allowed you to pin and unpin it. And so if you're into the old UI, you can keep it pinned. It's just like it used to be in 2004 or whatever. And if you're a new user or into a more modern experience, you can unpin it and get it out of the way and just use a pull-down menu. And so with this design, we were able to satisfy the needs of both existing customers that like things to be in the past and also excite new customers, since things wouldn't look so dated. And it also had the added bonus of when you move it out of the way, it lets you just control Canvas. So with that, we were super excited. And we went to the president of Service Now and the GMs of all the different divisions and presented the pitch for the new platform UI. And of course, when you do something like this, it sounds scary because it's a huge investment and it's risky. But I explained during the pitch, I said, hey, we're not doing anything others haven't done before. Microsoft, Apple, and a host of others, all of them have gone on this journey. And this is part of the journey of a company becoming a permanent fixture in the ecosystem. And so by the end of the presentation, everybody was on board. Funding secured. We're in good shape. Except this is like right when COVID hit. COVID hit like two weeks later. And not only that, I ended up getting a new boss and we had a new CEO about a month or two before then. And so everything was thrown into disarray as I'm sure all of you remember. And it was at that point one of my employees came to me and said, do you really think you'll be able to pull this off? And I said, yes, there's no question because we are certain about what we're setting out to do. And in a time of uncertainty, certainly pays dividends. And so I saw this as an opportunity. Never waste a good crisis. Everybody had to work from home. Everybody's distracted. And we had a crystal clear plan of what we wanted to build and why. And that plan was to make a more productive platform experience to modernize and look and feel, to make it personalized and contextual, and it'll work for all of our customers old and new. So while everybody was a bit discombobulated due to COVID, of course, we had clarity. And so from there, we started to mobilize all of service now in this new remote world with those clear marching orders. And it ended up becoming the largest engineering project in the history of the company. We had a few thousand people working on this at support across the entire organization. And it was driven from design because I was still working in the design organization at that time, but it wasn't driven through design. And what I mean by that is it wasn't just about the design. It was about creating value for customers. And when we would interact with other departments, I would make an effort to speak with them in a language they would understand. Let me give you an example here. This is the multi-year project plan for the new platform UI. And I put this together over a weekend, simply so I could share it with our program management teams so they could get an understanding of how many teams this would take, how long it would take, who'd be involved. Of course, they'd do something far better than this. But it was a bridge, right? It was a bridge. And similar efforts were made with folks in product management, of course, and in engineering. And so then after about, you know, by that time I'd say, you know, close to 20 months of work, we ended up releasing ServiceNow's new platform UI to great fanfare. It's not normally the kind of thing you see for a platform experience. And because of all the great coordination we'd done as a company on it, it wasn't just the platform UI. So we'd had the platform UI, but as part of the release, we'd shipped out over two dozen applications with the release that leveraged all the great tech improvement of Next Experience. And it was really just an awesome show of everybody working together to get to an outcome that mattered to customers. And some of the things we heard from customers they were in awe, you know, that it's just a huge improvement. And my favorite one, shut up and take my money. So no one ever says that about a platform experience. So that one really meant a lot to me. And it wasn't just, you know, these sorts of qualitative, we love it. You know, after we'd gotten this into production with customers, we saw approximately a 33% improvement in wayfinding productivity. So not only did it look and feel a lot better, it actually made them more productive, which was, you know, just as important. And I think we're on track by end of year. We're at two years now to see 90% adoption, which is unheard of in the enterprise platform space. 90% of our customers will be on Next Experience because they opt in. So for 90% of your customers to opt in to, you know, going with the new experience, that's good. Okay, so long project, lots of things, you know, lots of up and down. So what are the major takeaways? What are the things that I think everybody here should keep in mind when you take on trying to make a large project happen and take it to a successful conclusion? Well, the first one is you have to lead with a vision people can believe in. You have to take the time to really craft that vision that people can get behind because that's the difference between people just showing up and people bringing their best. Gotta have a vision they can believe in. Two, great outcomes are a team sport. They really are. It has to feel like it's a team. You cannot do it all on your own. That's something that I learned in spades during this super complex project. This one's super important in particular with design, you know, but it's true for all disciplines. Don't fall in love with your design. Fall in love with the customer. Fall in love with the customer. Fall in love with the customer. If you love the customer, you understand the customer. If you understand the customer, you will come up with the right design. Next, you have to know what you're saying yes to. If you know what you're saying yes to, you can say no to anything else. There's people I had to work with on this project I didn't get along with that well. Of course, a couple thousand people, there'll be a couple in there, right? But if I'm signing up for making sure that we're successful as a team to make this happen, that means I'm not gonna let those things get in the way. You have to focus on what's important. Know what you're saying yes to. And then the last one here is, you know, any big thing that becomes successful is really about persistence and resilience. You know, people will come to you during a project like this and say, you know, I don't think we can do it, or what if it doesn't work? You know, and you have to be there for them and let them know we're gonna do it, and it will work. And if it doesn't work, we'll figure out another way and it'll work anyways. You know, you are the one that people are counting on. You are a dealer in hope. And you'll know you're the leader on the project if you look behind you and there's no one there. Because sometimes it comes down to you. You have to believe in yourself. It's super important. Okay, looks like we have just a little bit of time left. Thank you. I hope this is of use to you guys. And it's great seeing everybody. Check, check. Any questions, please raise your hands. We'll pass on the mic. Can we pass on the mic, please? Hey, hi. I'm Pratika. So I just have one question. So with any kind of design revamp, there is always some sort of a learning curve involved. How do we really ensure that the learning curve is not too steep, but at the same time, we're also not deviating from the existing user's mental model? I couldn't really hear. I'm gonna just hang out by this big speaker so I can hear that better. Repeat it, please. Yeah, so I would like to know with any kind of UX revamp, there's always some sort of a learning curve involved. Yeah. Right? So how do we ensure that the learning curve is not too steep? I mean, it's not very difficult for the users to learn the new products. And at the same time, how do we ensure that we don't deviate from the existing user behavior and mental model? Because of course, the customers and users, they are already in love with their product. So how do we ensure? I would just like to know your experience. How did you go about managing that? Yeah, so, you know, there's... Yeah, so when it comes to improving an existing product experience that's working, one of the techniques I employ is to go out to where the customer is and see how they're using it. As an example, it was not uncommon for me during this project and previous projects to go to a customer site and I'd ask them to see the most efficient person, the most productive person. The most productive person may be more clever than the other employees, but as a designer, you can democratize that cleverness by bringing it into the product. For example, they might have a notepad they set up or they might turn their screen 90 degrees or have a secondary application they're using or whatever the case may be. And so that's how I would usually look at how do I improve this product is I would go see what's going on and who is doing better with it and then it bring into the product any kind of innovation they had sort of made on their own. And I'm also very sensitive to just the fundamental truth which is in the enterprise space, it's about productivity. So if we can measurably demonstrate that the productivity increases by this instead of that, then we go forward with it. And if we cannot do that, then I typically am in much less game to making a change because as you mentioned, people get used to it and they love it and it becomes very important to honor that, to honor their productivity. Yeah, I can hear you, I can recite it. So how the designers and the developers work together. So for our design system team, we have an engineering team that's dedicated to creating the reasonable components and we also have a core design system design team that creates the core components. Because the company is fairly large and we create products as well as a platform, many of the design system components though, the more complex ones are actually built by the business units outside of the core platform and their designers, the ones that aren't part of the platform itself will end up designing those as well. That can be challenging and it is a challenge we have sometimes because you'll often see a case where two different businesses in service now will build a very similar component for themselves and then we need to go in and organize that situation but for the core platform componentry, it's all done correctly and there's a code base you can pull from and then we have all of our components are in the Figma library for the designers to be able to leverage as well. So it's definitely challenging. I won't tell you it's not without its challenges but at this point, we do have a true design system where a new designer, for example, can come in and within a few hours and they're putting something together as well as somebody who's in engineering. It's just we need to the more complex design component, design system components that are part of the BUs that business units that you may see some overlap. Hello. This is Soham. So I had a question that in most of the cases, the UI revamps in companies and large scale organizations that happen are very top driven ideas. Now, how do you ensure that everyone in the team is empowered to share the ideas in which the baby product can be more revamped? So does the revamp has to be always top driven or how do you ensure that others in the team members are also like empowered to, you know? No. What's the set up like? The revamp doesn't have to be top driven, you know? I mean, I wasn't, I mean, I'm still not running service now. I'm not at the top. You know, service now does a really good job of caring about the customer, very serious about customers. And so that in our culture is a very effective avenue to initiate change. So, you know, I had a challenge early on with this because I didn't do a great job of explaining what the problem was because I thought everybody understood. And sometimes folks at the top may not be as close to the products. And so I learned over time to take the time to explain the problem more before jumping into what the solution needed to be. So in the case of this project, there was a point where I ended up getting like, I don't know, like 200 comments from customers, you know, with a few folks on the team that gathered 200 comments where they were frustrated with the, you know, 20 year old user interface. And I ended up leveraging all that data as part of the pitch deck to the president of the company. I said, all these customers are really sick of this interface. And that was very helpful. So yeah, I guess the important thing here is, and I don't bring it up in the presentation, but one thing I learned is the selling is so important. You have to know how to sell. If you're gonna pitch something and it doesn't matter what it is, you've got to know how to sell. And that means you have to know who your customer is. And the customer in this case is that audience. And so learning that those customers, being let's say the top people at the company, that their interest was customer feedback more than like Troy's hunch was an important thing to unlock so that when I'd speak with them, I would always speak with the customers is saying.