Marcin Kurc Of Nobl9 On The 5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Make choices. This is an important underlying principle because you want to design explicitly, meaning you need some rules or guidelines. For example, as I mentioned before, you might say, “Everything users can do in the UI is going to have a deep link.” And that becomes a rule that is an explicit choice you’re making about what to expect from the product. If you can articulate what those choices are and abide by them, you’ll end up with a better, more elevated product.

In today’s competitive market, delivering an outstanding user experience (UX) is critical for product success. A well-designed UX can lead to higher user satisfaction, increased engagement, and ultimately, improved brand loyalty. But how can product designers, developers, and organizations create user experiences that truly stand out and make a lasting impression on users? In this interview series, we are talking to UX professionals, product designers, developers, and thought leaders to explore “The 5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience.” As part of this series, we had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Marcin Kurc.

Marcin Kurc is an accomplished serial entrepreneur currently serving as the co-founder and CEO of Nobl9. Marcin’s previous company, Orbitera, was acquired by Google. Prior to Orbitera, Marcin held leadership positions at Amazon Web Services and Novell.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I grew up in Poland and moved to the United States in my early twenties. I saw the technology sector as a huge opportunity and was hungry to learn whatever I could. I started working in data centers before the cloud even existed, and then I was part of the early Amazon Web Services (AWS) team. So, I’ve always wondered how to keep software systems running.

My last company focused on marketplaces for cloud and ISV software. When we sold that company to Google in 2016, my co-founder and I discovered their site reliability engineering (SRE) model, which was quite impressive and just in the early days of catching on. The SRE team came in and helped us rebuild our platform, and we thought this would be a fantastic approach to bring to market for enterprises that can’t build this technology themselves or, if they have it, it’s a homegrown solution. So, we started on the first area of this model, which was service level objectives (SLOs). And that’s how Nobl9 was born.

Do you have any mentors or experiences that have particularly influenced your approach to product development and user experience?

First, I rely on my co-founder and engineering team to focus on the product. As a CEO, I sleep like a baby — I wake up every two hours crying! The technical teams are the ones that understand the user’s pain and how to build solutions for it. But I always look up to people like Jeff Bezos and his approach to building culture.

At Nobl9, we wanted to ensure a strong culture from day one. For me, part of that is making sure everybody feels like they’re part of a single team, their goals are clear, and that they can speak up and share concerns or frustrations. That has helped the company and allowed us to focus on customer solutions. When I think about Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy, the culture they’ve created is all about building for the customer, which separated Amazon from other companies with these big, ambitious goals. It wasn’t just, “Let’s make cool technology.” We’ve all seen companies build amazing technology and then step back to ask, what is this for? Why did we build this? Who’s going to benefit from it? At AWS, I learned to start with the customer first and design the product around them. Then, we can build a culture that’s always curious about what end users will do, what problems they’re trying to solve, and what pain we can alleviate.

It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I think my mistake was starting the company in 2019 — we should have known better that there would be a pandemic and then an economic crisis and that all the startups would struggle to maintain revenue goals! If I hadn’t made that mistake, we’d be in a different situation today. No, but on a serious note, the best companies are born during difficult times.

Honestly, Nobl9 is stronger today because of the circumstances we found ourselves in. While everyone else was wondering how they would measure up to their valuations and live up to their hype, we were quietly building and creating — not just the products but a customer base, a fan base, and people who are truly benefiting from the value of Nobl9. It’s making their software more reliable and making it easier for their team to run smooth operations by understanding software reliability across their enterprises.

What do you feel has been your ‘career-defining’ moment? We’d love to hear the lead-up, what happened, and the impact it had on your life.

It may seem small, but a chance encounter with a guy named Brian Singer changed my career trajectory forever. As we collaborated in a few areas, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to work together? And that led to us working on two companies together, selling one to Google. I wouldn’t be able to build such a strong company with this excellent reputation, quality of product, and customer quality without my strong partnership with Brian.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

Founding Nobl9 in September 2019, just before the pandemic, was one of the most challenging things I’ve done. Suddenly, you couldn’t fly to visit customers or go to trade shows — there were no trade shows — you couldn’t even meet people for coffee. There were questions like, will we open an office or will our plans evaporate?

One of the unexpected consequences of the pandemic was the acceleration of digital transformation; what had been a buzzword for so many years suddenly became a reality. We saw many large enterprises realize that to survive, they needed to get serious about digitizing — our software reliability product helps with that. As companies started to adopt these new practices, we could insert ourselves, so we had to get smart about bringing our people together.

During the pandemic, we would get a Zoom call together, and everybody would get on and bring whichever meal they happened to be eating — breakfast, lunch, or dinner, depending on their time zone. We would sit and talk. That created a teamwork mentality — these kinds of traditions are where a company’s culture comes from. It helps build connection and perseverance, even though we’re spread out all over the world and not sure what we’re going to be able to do.

Digital transformation is not just about cool technology but something that will help people get food, and power, pay their bills, invest in the stock market, or buy event tickets. All those processes are digital. They need to be reliable, they need monitoring for teams to support them and keep the world’s infrastructure running, and that’s what we’re out to do. The pandemic accelerated it; what was initially a huge setback when starting our company became a huge opportunity for us regarding the value we could deliver to the world.

Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. How do you prioritize user experience when developing a new product, and what steps do you take to ensure that the final product meets the needs and expectations of your target users?

It may seem simple, but the biggest thing is to assume you don’t know and ask real users to give you feedback. And make sure that you listen. You have to monitor how people use the product, how they say they use it, or why they’re not using it. Those are the basics, but executing the basics well is the key for us. We do a few things that set us apart.

First, we make sure that when building a core feature, we have specific customer names listed — not just the companies, but people within those companies that we know we can work with. Cultivating design partners for every feature is essential.

Second, we always build high-fidelity mock-ups, and we have UX designers on the team whose sole job is to map out how the features will work. Before we write a single line of code, we make sure those mock-ups are battle-tested with key end users that we get feedback from. Once we have the product in place, we release it as a marked beta feature for 30 days, which allows us to set expectations before it goes live.

If they request it, we also give our customers a sandbox environment to try out new features before they affect them in production. Since we offer a product on software reliability, unexpected change can be problematic — even if it works perfectly, it can be a surprise. So, enabling customers to try a product in a sandbox environment helps. Those are some of the critical things we do to ensure the design process is well-executed and well-received by customers.

Can you share any strategies you have for effectively gathering and analyzing user feedback?

Listening to customers is one part, but how you ask the question also matters because it can lead the witness. We spend a lot of time watching their product usage through our monitoring tools, and we can see what people are clicking on and how long they stay on pages. Also, our product is not necessarily used by humans through our web interface. Nobl9 is an engine, a command line tool, or a set of APIs — all these other ways to interact. So we have to understand a complete picture of usage, not just where customers are clicking.

The configuration-as-code or SLOs-as-code, all of that needs to be accounted for. We refer to this as the “reliability experience” or RX — what does it take to build reliable software in your company? We want to optimize the end user’s RX, which means not just our product but how it fits into their workflow. Are they using GitHub or GitLab? Are they using testing tools or feature flagging? Are they using ServiceNow or PagerDuty? All of those pieces fit into the overall reliability experience, and that’s how we have to think about our software design. Taking more of a holistic view; not just the traditional UX or GUI, but the entire end-to-end experience, from design to the customer’s perspective, is crucial. Enabling end-to-end RX is why we built SLODLC, the SLO Development Lifecycle, an open-source set of practices for defining reliability.

Can you share an example of a time when you received user feedback that prompted you to make significant changes to a product’s user experience, and how did you approach incorporating that feedback into the development process?

We launched a capability called SLI analyzer, which gives you historical data from a data source and proposes a default SLO. We thought this was pretty cool — it turned out to be incredibly popular, and because people were using it so much, we had to change the user interface to let people use it much more. What we thought was a tool people would use occasionally became something they’re using pretty much all the time. Now, it’s the primary way people create SLOs within the platform. Because of that, we had to reduce the number of configurations to make it simpler to use and provide better defaults.

How do you balance the need for simplicity and ease-of-use with more complex or advanced features in a product, and what strategies do you use to make sure that users can navigate those features without getting overwhelmed?

I don’t think there’s one correct answer to this. I believe an elegant experience occurs when users can come in and relatively intuitively understand what to do. Still, you can peel back the covers and give them more configuration options. In the early days of Nobl9, we erred towards complexity because the users we interacted with were innovators who deeply understood SLOs. Many had tried and failed to build internal solutions at their company. I would advise leaders developing a new category or building a disruptive product that if you’re engaging with innovators and early adopters, it’s okay to give them a lot of knobs and switches to play with the product.

Optimizing for simplicity too early is a mistake because you end up building a simple product before you know what the product is and where the “goat paths” are that you need to pave. Once you have those early adopters who are using the product in complex ways, the patterns will emerge, and you can start to give them simplifications with smarter defaults and more condensed views.

We recently released our Reliability Rollup Report, which gives you a reliability score and allows you to aggregate data across a massive enterprise quickly. If we had started with that, nobody would’ve trusted that data or understood what it meant.

But we can provide trustworthy reliability summary scores because we build complexity and detail at every level, and have rich data that we can aggregate. If you’re just concealing complexity without giving users the ability to drill deep when they want to, it’s not very useful. The simplification comes through brilliant design, understanding what users want to see at a glance and what they need to see when diving deep. So my advice is to start with something complicated and simplify over time because you’ll have a richer product experience. On the other hand, if you start with a simple design and add more complexity it’s less likely, in my experience that you’ll build an elegant product.

What are some of the strategies you’ve used to make your product ‘stickier’ and increase user retention?

One of the simplest things we did to make the Nobl9 platform stickier was to include deep links everywhere. That means a URL for any page you can navigate to in the Nobl9 dashboard. These deep links encourage people to include them in Slack messages, documents, and other places to refer back to Nobl9 pages. We still see people taking screenshots of the product, which is great, but it’s even better when they can insert a link that lets a new user enter Nobl9 and experience it for the first time. That has helped make it sticky, expand within a company quickly, and become part of the daily workflow.

In your experience, what are some of the most effective ways to measure the success of a product’s user experience, and how can this data be used to continuously improve the product over time?

Our product team recently devised a “product North Star” based on “useful SLOs.” What we found in the early days of the product is that we simply wanted to help our customers build more SLOs. And that was great to a point, but once we got past a certain level of adoption, we noticed that this KPI was not necessarily leading to the best behavior. We saw people increase the number of SLOs, but then they would go stale.

There’s a natural journey that customers go through where it’s all about collecting their data, getting set up, and getting users trained. Then, as they become more sophisticated, they want to start measuring the useful SLOs to get the most value out of Nobl9.

Based on your experience, what are your “5 Best Ways to Elevate Your Product’s User Experience”?

1. Make choices. This is an important underlying principle because you want to design explicitly, meaning you need some rules or guidelines. For example, as I mentioned before, you might say, “Everything users can do in the UI is going to have a deep link.” And that becomes a rule that is an explicit choice you’re making about what to expect from the product. If you can articulate what those choices are and abide by them, you’ll end up with a better, more elevated product.

2. You need to listen, which means you need to know who to listen to and how. You have to do it actively and constantly because things change. So it’s crucial to have that core design partner group; maybe you set up a customer advisory board, or perhaps you set up UX studies. If you don’t invest in it, it won’t happen, and your user experience will suffer.

3. Build a holistic user experience. Don’t just think about your product; think about where users come from before getting to it. What other tools are they using? What other products are they using in conjunction with yours? And how does that affect the user experience? If you don’t have that mapped out clearly, then it’s challenging to understand the user’s context.

4. Understand different personas. Not everyone is the same, and not everyone has the same expectations for a product. I sell to enterprises with many employees touching the product who all have different jobs. A data scientist might expect something other than a reliability engineer, who expects something different from an executive. Understanding who they are, prioritizing them, and deciding how the product will be available to them is critical to successful adoption.

5. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention privacy. It’s crucial to make a product that people trust — people today are increasingly concerned with data privacy, so Nobl9 has committed to GDPR and SOC 2 compliance to ensure we respect our customers’ privacy and data. The difficulty is that nobody likes passwords, and nobody likes multifactor authentication. It’s a huge pain. However, putting the privacy and safety of your users first is critical. Additionally, staying up to date with the latest and greatest methods for authenticating users and providing security is paramount.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!