Building a cohesive experience for Cloud Management to grow revenue by $300M+ and moving to SaaS.

Context

Cloud management provides products for monitoring and governing cloud.

Problem

Product satisfaction scores were declining for a couple of years.

When I joined VMware’s Cloud Management unit, satisfaction with vRealize Operations Manager was steadily declining. As the unit’s cash cow, leadership feared this could impact revenue. We had also lost deals to competitors due to poor user experience.

Research revealed that 60% of customers—who received the product through the VMware Cloud Foundation Suite—weren’t using it due to its complex setup. This was especially alarming as we transitioned to SaaS, where customers could easily cancel subscriptions.

I also observed that product teams worked in isolation, focusing on short-term revenue-driven features rather than a holistic product strategy.

Approach

Foster a customer-centric culture to keep VMware's cloud management relevant.

With market share at risk and revenue threatened, leadership prioritized product satisfaction. While the team had plans to improve scores, past incremental efforts had failed to shift customer perception.

Recognizing the pressing experience challenges in the unit’s cash cow, I drove a customer-centric culture, establishing processes, metrics, and a vision to make VMware's Cloud Management competitive.

Over the next four years, my focus areas included:

Improving the product satisfaction

Established product satisfaction framework

Drive cohesive experiences

Improving product satisfaction: focusing on what customers want.

Product teams prioritized features in silos, so my team led a "buy a feature" exercise with 40+ customers and cross-functional teams, identifying capacity planning workflows as a key gap. I aligned product leadership on balancing revenue-driven features with user experience improvements, dedicating 70% of resources to capacity planning.

Over six months, we collaborated with product teams to redesign and implement the capacity planning experience. Research revealed capacity planners as a new persona struggling with reactive insights, forcing them into firefightingand reliance on Excel. To enhance workflow cohesion, we introduced an end-to-end story framework and walk-the-wall sessions for continuous feedback and iteration with leadership.

With the capacity planning release, we saw a 12% jump in the product satisfaction score.

Setting up a framework to continously improve customer satisfaction.

Building on our first release, I established a predictable, customer-centric framework for future releases. We expanded research to detractors, using surveys and design studio sessions to assess ease of use and business importance, where vRealize Operations Manager struggled.

I aligned UX and product teams to plan releases three months in advance, ensuring prioritization was driven by customer insights. We formalized a measurement framework focusing on time-on-task and error rates, refining features before GA. Partnering with CX, we leveraged hands-on labs for real-world usability testing.

Over the next three releases, we enhanced troubleshooting, task automation, and application monitoring, improving product satisfaction in key areas and overall score by 21%.

Building end-to-end experiences: Taking a holistic view of infrastructure management.

Despite steady improvements in product satisfaction, a significant portion of the suite remained shelfware, raising concerns as VMware transitioned to subscription-based licensing. While we were aware of interoperability issueswithin the VMware stack, concrete steps hadn't been taken to address them.

I developed a unified cloud management vision to enhance interoperability, driving feature discovery and adoptionacross the suite. With the shift to public cloud management and recent acquisitions, we identified duplicated functionality and an opportunity to unify experiences around broader jobs to be done. Though ambitious, this vision sparked discussions with product leadership and other business units.

Extensive research on cloud infrastructure, tools, and team dynamics revealed disconnects between IT, security, cloud, dev, and finance teams—each had a fragmented view of the cloud environment. VMware’s disconnected products and overlapping functionalities further complicated this.

Partnering with product teams, we prioritized integration in three areas: discovery and setup to improve product awareness and seamless installation, ecosystem integration to connect tools used by the same teams, and business outcome-driven integration to provide C-suite visibility into key cloud management metrics.

Outcomes