Redesigning a Platform Experience at Scale

Troy Azmoon at UXDX USA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XC_WvNtRz5Q

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Setting context: ServiceNow and the platform

[00:00:00] Hello everyone, my name is Troy Azmoon and I'm here today to talk with you about redesigning the platform experience at scale.

[00:00:12] Before I begin this talk, to set context a little bit, I work for a company called ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a large company that works with some of the biggest names in business, Fortune 2000, to digitize their workflows, digitize their businesses through process automation, workflow automation. Our customers include everything from Disney and entertainment to UnitedHealth Group, several multinational banks, as well as governments, Department of the Navy, United States, several others. Quite a wide array of customers using ServiceNow to run their mission critical business applications.

[00:00:56] Now, the platform which I'm going to be talking about redesigning is used by over 70 million people on a daily basis. These folks are often referred to as technologists, developers, knowledge workers, service agents. But also ServiceNow is used by hundreds of millions of people, including many of those of you that are watching this presentation, to do things like make a request for IT services, HR requests, customer support, any number of activities you do as an employee or even as a consumer in your lives every day.

[00:01:35] As for myself, I joined ServiceNow at the end of 2013 and came to the company as a product manager, later co-founding the platform product accelerator group, and then subsequently founding the design and research organizations. Today I hold the title of vice president of platform design.

[00:02:03] For those of you that are curious about what it is a VP of platform design does, one way I like to think about it is, imagine a city. When you think of a city, you have to think about the designer, somebody or some group of people, who did a master planning activity to create the city. Where should it be placed, is it close to water, other resources? As well as the planning of the city, so think about things like infrastructure, roads, bridges, utilities. Also commerce, so harbors, airports, areas of trade, urban development, downtown section, services like fire, medical, police and security, and so forth.

[00:02:54] Thinking about all this as you design your city, of course, is very critical, because it has to be architected in such a way that over time your city can go from being relatively small to much larger and grow in a vibrant and scalable way.

[00:03:10] And so our story begins when the platform experience in ServiceNow is a vibrant, well-liked city, but a classical city, and our job is going to be to transform that experience of living in that city from one of classical antiquity to a modern major metropolis, where the existing inhabitants are not disrupted by this what seems to be an overnight transformation to them, and in addition it also accelerates and attracts more population to this metropolis, and subsequent generations can continue building upon this new city of the future, if you will.

[00:03:59] And it's a long story. Even though it will appear to our users as an overnight success, it involves thousands of people across ServiceNow, millions of hours of investment, and a total dedication to realizing the dream of transforming the city from one of antiquity to one of the future.

2013: a successful company with an antiquated interface

[00:04:22] So let's start this story where, for me, I consider it to be the beginning, and that's at the end of 2013, when I took a job at ServiceNow as a product manager assigned to work with a small team, about eight engineers, led by the company founder and chief product officer, Fred Luddy.

[00:04:50] This team was located in a tiny corner conference room, the room could hold about 12 people total, and we got to know each other very well very quickly. I can still remember that first week I was there. I was looking at the platform UI, which I was product manager for, and I was a bit surprised, because even in 2013 this looked a bit antiquated to my eyes. It was hard to use, a lot of white space where there didn't need to be, things were convoluted where they shouldn't be. I was concerned. I was very concerned for the experience as it related to people trying to be productive working through their workflows and processes on this platform.

[00:05:42] A few weeks prior, one of those engineers had been hired and we got along pretty well, and I motioned for him to come over to my area and take a look at my screen. We're only about 10 or 15 feet away from the founder of the company, he's happily coding behind us, and I remember whispering to him, pointing at the screen, and saying something. He looks at the screen and kind of nods his head and he goes, I know. So I look back over at him — and we're still trying to keep this on the down low here, don't want to upset Fred — and I said, how is this worth ten billion dollars? And he shakes his head and he goes, I don't know.

[00:06:26] It was crazy, because here we had this super successful company, and there was this antiquated, out of date, hard to use platform interface to work with these automated, digitized workflows. And it really confused me, because from what I could tell these people seemed very bright. In fact these are some of the smartest people I'd ever worked with, and that just didn't make sense. How could such smart people let this interface languish in a prior age?

[00:07:06] So I came up with three possibilities. One, they fooled me, they're not very bright, it's some very clever intelligence Ponzi scheme where everybody is pretending the other people are really bright and I'm just in the middle of this crucible and I'm being fooled. Secondly, maybe I'm a super genius. Maybe only I can see what's wrong with this platform experience and how it's getting in the way of productivity, and it's very obvious how to fix this and just no one else really gets it. Or C, I don't understand the problem well enough yet.

[00:07:43] Within a few seconds I came to the conclusion that the most likely answer was going to be C, because even though the interface was a bit of a challenge to use for regular people, there was a lot of things to like about the ServiceNow platform and it was already very successful and well loved by the companies that adopted it. I would come to learn that the way in which you were able to digitize any workflow, any process, and bring it into the platform, and how easy it was with a low level of programmatic skill to bring those experiences into the platform, put those workflows in there — you could declaratively edit and modify some of the experience with very little programming knowledge — were strong attractors to the platform, despite the clunkiness of the UI in some areas.

Three years with Fred, and a provocation

[00:08:37] Over the next three years I would work directly for Fred Luddy, the founder of the company. He took me under his wing, became my mentor, and that was an awesome experience. I learned so much about how to build products, also about the platform itself, the data model, our customers, why things were the way they were, what could be better, what made us so great at what we were doing.

[00:09:05] With this awesome team, this core team of eight or so engineers, we started to create a successful string of products, starting with Visual Task Boards, which is a Kanban based experience on the ServiceNow platform, but followed up by ServiceNow Connect, which is a real-time workflow collaboration experience, and then ServiceNow Mobile, the mobile experience, several different iterations of that, and the classic UI, where we did make incremental improvements to it. Hugely valuable to understanding the way work got done on our platform and the way customers used it and extended it and so forth. This was a great time. Learned a ton, built a ton of products, all of them very successful with the customer base.

[00:09:54] At the same time, the team of eight people grew by an order of magnitude. During that process of growing the team, I spent probably half my time coming up with products, the other half the time was hiring. That core engineering team of eight folks was very serious about bringing good people in, and that's just the way it goes: when you have a core team of highly talented people they tend to attract more highly talented people, and it's a virtuous circle.

[00:10:28] So now we have a team of about 80 people by the end of this three year period, and one of those individuals we hired, his name is Aaron, who's a close friend of mine. He was exceptionally talented in the area of concept design, and Fred noticed this very quickly. One day he approached Aaron and said, Aaron, what would it be like if the interface to our platform was so simple that anybody could use it to get their work done? Anybody, with no training.

[00:11:10] And one of the things that's so hard to do in design and product design is making something so simple. So Aaron said, well, I'm going to probably need at least three months to figure that out, and we said okay, that's fine, take all the time you need and come back to us when it's done.

[00:11:28] About three months later he comes back with a functional prototype which is a total reimagining, if you will, of the platform experience for ServiceNow. This is in early-mid 2016. It's a total departure. A lot of the UI is missing, it's not worrying about technological constraints as we've implemented them, debt around the design of the current platform, existing customer needs. It's really purely focused on the simplest, most intuitive way to work with workflows that a regular person with little or no training could experience to get their job done.

A vision of the future from a surf trip

[00:12:13] It's in the context of this provocation, this catalyst, and the string of successful products for the past three years, that I start to think about the big picture. Seeing this, and building those products and having those experiences with customers and understanding our architecture and our technology stack, I decided I need to take a step back and really think about everything holistically, to decompartmentalize the knowledge I had gained and the experiences of working with all these highly talented people.

[00:12:51] I went on vacation, I took a break, I went out into a very remote area in Baja California on a surf trip, and I spent my days surfing. There's no electricity or water or internet or any of those things out here, and in the evening I would just simply stare up into the sky and think about how everything is disconnected yet connected, and what would that mean for the future of our platform, and how do we bring all these disparate possibilities together?

[00:13:27] I came back from the vacation and I presented to folks at the ServiceNow product organization a vision of the future, and outlined three basic visions of the future where we would go. One would be, in 10 years we would have hundreds of products. Today we might have a few dozen, but we'd have hundreds. Another was that everything in the world would become connected, everything from your doorknob to your oven to your car, your phones of course, every single thing would be connected, like all those stars in the sky. Lastly, with everything becoming connected there'd be much more data, there'd be an exponential increase in data that we'd be creating, more data coming to us, and it would all relate together to create even more complexity than we ever experienced before, as a result of all these dependencies and data being generated.

[00:14:27] That meant that ServiceNow was going to need a scalable platform experience to handle the multitude of products that have not yet been invented that would be inside this platform. It meant we would need a platform-first approach to the way we design products so we could scale properly. And lastly it meant we really needed to rethink the way information was interacted with. The past was about going out and finding information, but now we had the burden of choice nearly upon us. Information that you cared about needed to come to you.

[00:15:02] By the end of this presentation we were so excited about these thoughts, we were ready to do this, we were ready to reimagine the platform experience under these conditions. We started the project off. We took some of our development engineers, our designers, as a cross-functional team, product people, and we started building out hypotheses, testing what we thought would be the future of the experience based off everything we learned and everything that we'd sort of dreamt about.

Three disruptions

[00:15:40] It wasn't to be, because just a few months later Fred Luddy, the chief product officer and founder of ServiceNow, my mentor, would retire. As a result the team would end up being reassigned to focus on more incremental improvements to the platform, defect fixing and the like, and we couldn't get the resourcing we needed to really hit that flash point to push this forward. So it was not going to get the investment that we would really hope for.

[00:16:22] And to make matters even more difficult, by the end of 2017 Frank Slootman, the CEO of ServiceNow, another person I greatly respected who'd been very supportive of our efforts, also decided it was time to retire. New leadership came to ServiceNow and the decision was made that the accelerator team that Fred and I had built over the past almost four years or so was to be disbanded. I lost my team, and that was tough.

[00:17:00] But the good news was that the new executive leadership team saw a lot of value in the way we approached creating products and working on the platform, and I was asked to build a new team, which was ServiceNow's design team. That was an awesome opportunity, from the ground up, taking just a handful of designers and building it out, did an acquisition. Awesome, fun, challenging, exciting, building a culture together with all these folks. The acquisition was super successful, about 90 percent of those folks are still with us to this day, and I learned a ton about creating this organization and creating a culture together. Great times.

[00:17:43] On top of it, there was still that opportunity with this new team we were building out. As it got bigger, got up to about 70 people or so, to start investing in that platform idea again, because I still thought about how important it was going to be for us to think about the future, future-proof the platform experience. In the acquisition I got a few JavaScript developers, front-end developers. I tasked them with coming up with a few prototypes. We had UX architects start whiteboarding with them. The visual design team, I told them we really want to push the envelope, sent them out on trips to go get inspired, do some wild color explorations, create something they would want to use every day. And we kept the dream alive, we started getting momentum.

[00:18:23] But a few months after kicking this project off again with the design organization, I encountered more disruption. The decision was made to bring in a global head of design that had far more experience than myself in this role, to lead the team. As a result the work that I'd commissioned was put on hold, people were reassigned to other projects, and those were hard times.

[00:18:53] I don't think you could fault me for wondering what I was going to do next at this point, because that is a tough call to swallow. Now three times: first with Fred leaving, second with Frank leaving and the team being disbanded, and third with the new team that I built now being given to someone else to lead. So there was some soul searching there.

[00:19:19] But the good news was, it was an opportunity for me to grow as a leader, because I still had a lot to learn. This was a time of self-reflection and developing self-awareness, and ultimately that experience was very valuable to me, to make me a more complete person and a better leader, so I'm happy for it. A lot to learn, but it was tough, it wasn't an easy experience to go through.

Rescuing the design system

[00:19:49] So with the emphasis now being focused on products versus the platform experience for the design group, and my attempts to make a priority out of the platform redesign, number one, but basically getting pushback from the new leader coming in, we were now going to focus on the design system. Which was great news actually, because we knew we needed a new design system with this new platform experience, so I was very excited by that.

[00:20:18] It was a very challenging problem to solve, because the design system needed to support the creation of many products on a platform, but it also needed to support tens of thousands of products that hadn't even been created or thought of yet. So we had this moving target that didn't even yet exist in most cases. Furthermore, an infinite number of use cases: any business could digitize their business and put it in our platform, for any type of user, any type of use case, infinite uses. Building a design system that can actually help you build products quickly is a very tough problem to solve. The conventional approaches around being product focused and Jobs to be Done frameworks simply would not scale to solve this problem.

[00:21:07] I'd spent some time thinking about this and had figured out a solution, but initially the decision was made to take a more conventional, less risky approach. But of course the less risky approach wouldn't scale, so in my mind it was going to be the most risky approach for us to take at all.

[00:21:28] Eventually things came to a head where the project was behind schedule, and I was tapped to come in with a team of folks and lead that team to come up with a new way forward, to design the scalable, platform-wide design system that could create products quickly. And like the cavalry coming over the hill, we got there just in the nick of time and turned the design system project around. We ended up solving for design system outcomes with 400 percent increased efficiency, meaning one engineer can now do the work of four, one designer the work of four. It used a modern UI tech stack.

[00:22:09] It really helped my team's reputational credibility as well as my own, and that was going to be very important, because with the new leadership team I was relatively unknown to them, and pulling off something like this at the 11th hour with a low probability of success, and ending up very successful with it, gave me the capital that I was going to need to pursue bigger dreams, bigger accomplishments and outcomes at ServiceNow in the future. Because with this design system we could do more than build products. We could do things like build a new platform experience.

Fusion: the project finally gets its sponsor

[00:22:50] Because through all this time — I think now we're at about four, five years into ServiceNow's journey with myself, at least — I hadn't given up the dream. I was still dreaming about redesigning the platform UI ever since that time out in the desert and coming back and saying, this is what the future is like, we need to prepare for the future. I was putting together manifestos, sitting with UX architects in the time permitted to do so. There were still people working on prototypes on off hours. This thing had to happen, we knew it had to happen, and getting the design system done, and doing it in a way where the work was really recognized and appreciated, was critical to the future success. The design system outcome, it was promoted and it was very helpful with my reputation and being able to drive us towards this outcome.

[00:23:45] Finally, after all this work in the design system was done, some of the things that I predicted would happen in the future started to happen. The future was manifesting itself over time, as it does. We were building lots and lots of products with the new design system, but at the same time customers were starting to get frustrated with the products and the product design. So I was going out to see customers, talking with customers, and it was finding more often than not it wasn't products per se that were frustrating them, but the platform experience of getting to the products, finding the products, working with the experience of these brand new products in the context of an old platform UI. It was just driving people nuts. I started documenting all this, working with research folks on the team, making sure we kept a long list of grievances people are frustrated with, the issues, so we could use those later to support our assertion that we needed to improve the platform experience.

[00:24:39] At the same time I'd been working closely with the largest division of ServiceNow, the technology workflows division, and they wanted a unified experience for their multitude of products. They had a great deal of products in their portfolio, and the general manager came to me one day and said, do you have any ideas on how we could just bring all this stuff together? I basically said, it's funny you should ask that, we've been thinking about this for some time and we do have some ideas. If you could support us spinning up a team to solve your problem, your product unification problem, I think we can come to a solution that your customers will appreciate. So he said, that sounds great, just tell me what you need.

[00:25:27] So then I went back to the team and I said, guess what everybody, we've got a new project that I want to call Fusion. It's about future-proofing the platform, improving our visual design and bringing all the experiences together, old and new, all customers. And so we call this Fusion. It's going to solve the problem that this technology workflows division needs for the products, but it's also going to solve all the problems across the platform. The GM said, yeah, that sounds good, as long as it solves our problem. If we can solve more people's problems, that's even better, so let's do that.

[00:26:07] So I call up Aaron, the guy that had worked on the initial provocation, and I said, hey, I'd really love for you to get involved in this with us, because we're going to push the envelope but we've got to bring it all together, love your point of view. And I talked to all the leaders of the teams and said, this is our moment, this is our time, we're doing this, this time is the time.

[00:26:27] So we all started working together. The visual designers started working on new visual design ideas, influences from film noir, lots of cool video games that people have been playing. There's an awesome movie, it's a masterclass in jewel tones, In the Mood for Love, I want you to check that out. UX architects, a lot of whiteboarding, burning through magic markers, just humming and hawing and prodding at everything. Researchers doing sentiment analysis, qual, quant. Everybody's working in parallel, knowing that hey, this is a huge possibility here to pull this off. We put a lot of time into thinking this over the years, let's make it happen. So, very highly motivated, excited team, been dreaming about the opportunity to do this, it's a rare treat. So we have all those streams going in real time.

The navigation problem

[00:27:17] But there was one problem as we made progress, and this problem took us a while to figure out. It was the navigation system, because our navigation system was this left-hand navigation which you saw at the beginning of the presentation, and it was pretty clunky, but existing customers love this thing. We call it the left nav filter list UI. I think as a general rule, any navigation construct that you need to use five words to describe is probably pretty hard to use. But it was very powerful, and as people got used to it sometimes they tended to like it, and our existing customers had gotten used to it, they built experiences on top of it and so forth.

[00:27:57] Meanwhile, you can see where this is going to go. New customers, they didn't like it. It was ugly, it was hard to use, it was one of the things they were constantly complaining about. But with the new platform experience that we were imagining, we wanted to redesign, we needed one solution to both problems. I'd seen a lot of other companies create a classic view and a modern view, and I viewed that as a failure on our part. It wasn't acceptable to me to go down that road, I found it to be a lazy solution, and it was going to cost us as well as our customers a lot of money to manage the change management for that over time.

[00:28:33] Aaron and I in particular had a lot of discussions about this. He was of the opinion that we should just make a clean break with the past, do a top menu navigation system. I was much more concerned about the existing customers, having launched several products in the past. ServiceNow made a few changes without asking customers, I'd been locked in conference rooms with angry CIOs having to explain myself, and I didn't want to relive that, I didn't want customers to relive that.

[00:29:02] So we were at an impasse and the conversations got heated. This is a pretty good summary, this meme here, of the kind of discussions we had. I'm the individual with the handlebar or horseshoe mustache here. So, a lot of discussion, a lot of energy. We knew how important it was to make this thing look and feel awesome, but we also knew how important it was to not disrupt our legacy customers. Making a change that impacted them could cost them millions of dollars in training and re-architecture of their instances of ServiceNow that they've customized.

[00:29:39] So we spent a solid, I want to say, two months going back and forth on this problem, coming up with a lot of different prototypes, trying to figure out a way to combine this left nav thing with non-left nav where it becomes a little less confusing. A lot of different ideas were thrown around. Here's where we're turning off the top menu system, Aaron's like, I need this in my life, and I'm like, well, we split the left nav, so that's got to stay there. We weren't happy with any of these solutions though, we weren't really making a lot of progress.

Pat Casey, and two people solving it the same way

[00:30:11] So it's at about this time that I decided we need to talk to somebody who's a power user of ServiceNow, that really loves the left navigation system, that has a lot of time invested in it, and get their perspective, figuring that if we can convince them to move away from the navigation system of old, then maybe we can just forget about the left nav and do the top menu system that looks so much more modern and clean.

[00:30:40] So we head over to ServiceNow's main engineering building and we sit down with ServiceNow's CTO, Pat Casey, and we have a few sessions with him around this tiny table, talking about the navigation system, seeing if we can convince him. I figure if I convince Pat Casey to move to this new menu system, we can probably get it by our users and they'll probably be fine with it overall.

[00:31:06] But the talks don't really go in the direction of, okay, yeah, let's go with something new. He brings up a lot of good points, that you can very quickly type commands into this navigator, that if you have thousands of things in the navigation system, which some people do, you can find them much more easily. After a few sessions with him where he's extolling the virtues of the classic left nav list UI filter navigator, Aaron and I are sitting across from one another and I look over at him, and he has a flash of insight, and I have a flash of insight as well, and we're just looking at each other right there. It's happening, there's a spark. We kept pushing on and we figured it out.

[00:31:48] The meeting ends and we thank Pat, because he did a great job of representing our current customers, and we walked back to the design studio. On our way back, that's Friday afternoon, I turn to him and say, Aaron, I know you've got an idea on how to fix this problem. I've got an idea too. But why don't you think about it over the weekend and I'll think about it, and then on Monday come to my office and I'll show you what I've come up with and you show me what you've come up with, and we'll just see what happens. We'll have a synergy and just surprise each other, and maybe we can come up with an even better solution. So he says okay, that sounds good.

[00:32:28] We head home for the weekend and ruminate on it, and then he comes to my office on Monday morning with his laptop, spins it around towards me, and plays me a prototype he'd put together. While I'm watching it I point at my whiteboard without skipping a beat, and he walks over to it and sees the exact same design on my whiteboard. We both solved the problem the same way.

[00:32:46] What it was, was a pinnable navigation system that allowed existing customers and users to keep the UI they'd become accustomed to for as long as they like, while also allowing new users and customers to use a much more modern set of affordances. But the real beauty here was it was dynamic, meaning any user at any time could change the way they're working with the menu system depending on their need or depending on the product they're using. So it was really maximum flexibility with absolutely no usage experience overhead.

Selling it: certainty pays a premium

[00:33:25] So with this solved, we were super confident that we were ready to present our work, not only to the GM of the technology workflows division, who was fully supportive, but also to our chief product officer, CJ Desai, and his staff, saying we have identified the problem and now we've solved it, and it was time to tell the world about it.

[00:33:51] With that we set up the meeting with the chief product officer and staff, and I level set the conversation around the future ServiceNow user. We'll be able to use all these different utilities, all the new experiences, but it'll be a unified experience, and it's going to be better than ever before. You're going to fall in love with how nice this thing looks, and it's going to be more productive and smarter.

[00:34:15] That was a bold proclamation, and we're obviously making big changes overall to the look, feel and the experience. So to help everybody on that journey, to go from thinking of this as high risk to low risk, because the biggest risk of all would be to stay static in a dynamic world, I gave some examples. Apple, Microsoft, two great examples of companies that had evolved their experiences on their platforms over time. We weren't doing anything radical here, we were doing what we needed to do to continue to evolve and innovate to stay relevant.

[00:34:50] At the end of the demo everybody was on board and super excited for this new project. Nothing could stop us now.

[00:35:02] Oh, wait, something could stop us now, because just a month after presenting this demo and getting major buy-in from everybody to make it happen, COVID-19 started up, and that was disruptive to say the least. Furthermore, just two months prior to this, a new CEO of ServiceNow had come in, Bill McDermott had joined ServiceNow, and I also had a new boss myself, we had a new global head of design join the company.

[00:35:34] So it's in all this sort of disruption where one of my most trusted employees approached me one day and said, Troy, do you really think you can pull this off? And my answer was, absolutely. Because in a time of uncertainty, certainty pays a premium, and we were 100 percent certain about what we needed to accomplish with this project and why.

[00:36:09] I laid it out to everybody up and down, left and right of the company: that the new platform experience would create a cohesive, more productive experience for users, it would look great, using the latest technology for our engineering teams, it will be personalizable and contextual, and will work for all customers, old and new. Everybody comes along for the ride. Since we knew exactly what we were focused on doing, and we knew how important it was to our users, there was no question we would make this happen. And of course, after going through so many false starts and holding onto the dream for so long, I was willing to put it all on the line to make it happen.

Polaris, and shipping the Next Experience

[00:36:57] From there we mobilized ServiceNow at scale in a new environment, in a remote world. This project would come to be known eventually internally as Polaris, our north star. It would be the biggest project ever at ServiceNow. It garnered support across the organization: our best program managers, our best engineers, best designers, best people and docs, the very best people were all clamoring to be part of this clear vision of what we're going to set out to do and why it was so important. Even people from that original accelerator team, now five, six years in the past since I last worked with them, were coming out of the woodwork, getting involved and making huge impacts on building this experience into a reality.

[00:37:46] This was going to be a design driven initiative, and I put that in quotes, because when we say it's a design driven initiative, it's not just about the design. I want to share with you really quick this project plan I put together at the end of 2019, which I think really goes to show that it's not all about design here. This was worked on with folks in engineering and folks in product management, and I created this not because I knew it would be the final output, but it established a bridgehead, and talking with people in a way they understand. If you're going to drive, you have to drive in a way that has common currency. So putting this in here, sequencing the work, assigning it to engineering teams at a high level, getting feedback from engineering, getting feedback from program management, product management, as a roadmap establishes a bridgehead for all the different parts of the organization that would be necessary to make the dream a reality.

[00:38:50] By the end of 2021, as we got into 2022, we launched our new platform UI. This marketing video is just kind of mind-blowing to me, because here we are showing off a platform as if it's the coolest thing around, which is awesome to me. In addition to getting the platform redesigned, we also took on work around creating several new applications, over two dozen new product applications that integrate completely with the new platform experience.

[00:39:27] Altogether we released this at the beginning of 2022, and we call it the Next Experience. It's the new platform UI experience from ServiceNow. Customers really love it, we're very impressed by it. Here's some of the things customers have been saying. They're in awe. They think it's a huge improvement. They want to throw money at us because of the platform update — how often does that happen? And this last one's Australian, I'm told it means very good job, keep up the good work.

Takeaways

[00:40:05] So that's the story in a nutshell. As far as takeaways, I think it comes down to just a few salient points, really, at a high level. The first one is, genius, the idea, is just one little piece. 99 percent of this is hard work, the willingness to take your hits, learn along the way, and keep making progress.

[00:40:31] Platform innovation is a marathon. Taking a good product idea and making a great product is very hard to do. To do the same thing with a platform is harder yet.

[00:40:45] Great outcomes are a team sport. You can do good things by yourself, but if you want to achieve great things you've got to work well with other people to deliver. And of course that requires working with shared currencies. You need to build those relationships, see things from different points of view, if you're going to create outsized outcomes.

[00:41:08] And lastly, every failure is a step towards success. When we set out to build this modern metropolis, it wasn't built out of aluminum alloys. We used a special material which we'd found in abundance over the course of this project, and that material was our failures. It was through all those failures, all those learnings, that we were able to take that material and transform it into the success that we've realized with the Next Experience UI.

[00:41:43] So I hope that this talk was useful to you and your efforts, and I wish you well in creating product and platform experiences that your customers love. Thanks for watching.