SHAPE Design Conference
Shaping One Experience-Led VMware
Coauthored by Lynette Bian and Ofir Levy
On April 1st, we hosted SHAPE, our annual internal design conference. Different animals across VMware — tigers, pandas, flamingos — gathered for talks and workshops about the value of design and its role at VMware.
And no, that was not entirely an April fool’s day joke.
SHAPE took place at our Palo Alto headquarters over the course of three days, and more than 200 hundred VMware employees from various teams and disciplines participated. This year’s theme was “One Experience, One Team, All Users.” We centered our conversations on strengthening the design culture at VMware through these pillars.
And while there weren’t real animals at SHAPE, we kicked off the conference by splitting everyone into teams of animals (ex: #shapetiger) and asked everyone to find their team mates by making their animal sounds.
Why did we host an internal design conference?
One of the key priorities for VMware this year is “One VMware.” Like many other large enterprises, teams at VMware sometimes become silo-ed. To accomplish “One VMware,” we need a shared commitment and prioritization to execute our vision across VMware.
Our design team is uniquely positioned to help VMware achieve that goal because we work in centralized partnerships with different products teams and business units. This means that we work on specific products and services with individual cross-functional teams, but we report functionally to a single design organization. We realized that to unify global stakeholders and team members, it’s important for people to meet face-to-face and share a common understanding of the role of design in product development. While the conference focuses on design, it’s not an event only for designers. Among all of the participants, half of them were designers, 21% were engineers, and 13% percent were product managers. What about the rest of the 16%? Maybe aliens 👽.
The design conference also helped unify our fast-expanding design team. Half of the designers have only been on the team for less than a year. When we asked our team members what we could have done better at the end of 2018, the top response was keeping the team connected and retaining a strong team culture. This is why we flew in designers from our global offices in Bulgaria, Armenia, and India so that for the first time, all of our designers had a chance to meet in person.
Day 1: One experience-led VMware ☝️
The first day of the conference focused on the vision of one experience-led VMware. The focus of our design efforts should be on end-to-end user stories that enable customers to achieve their goals while blurring the experience lines between business units and technologies. The fact that our products are powered by different technologies and created by different teams should not compromise a consistent experience across the board.
Our company executives kicked off the conference with a clear message: we need to deliver a consistent experience managing and operating infrastructure and applications to achieve our vision of the hybrid cloud. Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education at InVision, gave the keynote talk to highlight how the quality of the connection between different teams directly impacts the quality of products. Because “design does not exist in a vacuum”, we need to build relationships with our customers as well as the rest of the company to deliver products of consistently high quality.
Cross-functional collaboration is an art that our designers practice every single day. Pamel Khara, a designer working on the Workload Platform team of vSphere, invited her product team to share how they collaborated effectively and delivered an MVP product in just eight months. Kevin McBride, our UX lead for VMware Cloud, shared the importance of telling end-to-end design stories that involve layers of customers, technology, and business. In the afternoon breakout session, Abbey Wang, a designer working on vSAN (VMware’s software-defined storage product), told the story of how she builds trust with engineers in global offices and nurtures an experience-driven mindset within the team.
Day 2: One continuous focus on user insights 🔍
We kicked off our second conference day with the goal of one continuous focus on user insights. This was a day fully dedicated to our users and highlight the central role they play in designing our products. We lined up the agenda with presentations featuring user characteristics and how those should critically affect our everyday design decisions.
Manesh Samuel John, one of our senior product design managers, kicked off the day with a powerful talk underlining user empathy and how it shapes design decisions. Designers should always apply empathy to better relate to what our users are saying, feeling, or thinking, and to make a stronger connection between them and the products. Being sensitive to our users’ pain points is how we should construct and simplify our flows and help them complete their tasks with ease and enjoyment.
Empathy should extend beyond our average users, as day 2 continued with a presentation about users with disabilities. The talk was presented by Sheri Byrne-Haber, Head of Accessibility at VMware. Sheri discussed the importance of running user research with people with disabilities to better understand how they use our products.
Another day 2 intriguing talk about how we can better understand our users was presented by Xi Bi, a VMware interaction designer. Xi described how she physically embeds herself in her users’ environment to truly understand their problems. Her immersive experience changed her perspective of her users and she was later able to apply her research, make additional conclusions, and tweak her design approach to improve the product.
Day 3: One inclusive and empowered team 🙌
Day 3 was all about one inclusive and empowered team. We dedicated the entire day on our design team’s objectives as we look ahead to the coming year. Since our team is rapidly growing, and across the globe, this conference presented a golden opportunity for all of us to convene, reacquaint with one another, network across product teams, identify our common bonds and objectives, share design best practices, and, of course, socialize and have fun.
Throughout the day, our designers broke into separate guided discussion groups. Individuals reflected on what is important to them at work, their team operation, and on topics they would like to improve on or change. The groups also shared design and organizational tips and tricks to improve work efficiency and communication.
As it always is with designers, the spirit was high and positive, but we had a clear objective of learning about and from each other to strengthen team connections and improve internal communication for the coming year and beyond.
One VMware Design team!
SHAPE was a meaningful event for our design team. It provided a great opportunity for us to collaborate on a common project. We pulled together our creative minds and organized a signature event in a relatively short amount of time. It felt like a celebration of some sort because we were able to meet almost all of our designers from different parts of the globe — even though a lot of us have never met each other, it instantly felt like a reunion.
More than anything else, the conference was also a reminder. It highlights our impact on the organization so far as well as our path forward to unify the different teams in our organization. SHAPE reminded everyone that we all have the power and impact to shape “One VMware”.
We’re hiring!
The VMware Design team is looking for talented designers to help us continue transforming enterprise design. Check out our open positions!
