VMware Cloud services user persons

Year: 2016

VMware conducted a study to understand the ecosystem of the Cloud organizations as they built the Cloud Management Platform solution.

Opportunities  

VMware stakeholder interviews framed the initial opportunity areas.

  • How can a cloud platform empower IT to provide services developers prefer?

  • What are the IT Cloud Team roles and use cases for the cloud?

  • How are the role of dev blurring to take on traditional tasks of IT?

  • What are the end-to-end needs of the future developer w/ the cloud?

  • How can cloud resolve the needs for autonomy and authority?

Key Findings

4 Personas discovered and defined

  • Jason: The Cloud Admin

  • Anita: The VI Admin

  • Shauna: The Devops Admin

  • Scott: The developer

There are essential needs shared across  3 personas.

  • Self Service: Self-service tools to help reduce manual steps and speed up time to implementation.

  • Monitoring: All levels of monitoring are required for the personas from kernel level up to overall app performance.

  • Governance: Configuration and automation of governance from admin to developer environment to app in order to reduce slow, manual processes.

  • Planning: Capacity, usage, and budget awareness need to support future business needs and enable the feel of ‘limitless’ cloud capacity.

  • Tool Integration: Reduce the overhead of context switching with easy integration into the full array of tools used by each persona.

My Role

  • I worked closely with the external agency define the timelines, milestones, and deliverables for the project. During the research phase I partnered with them to define the requirements for research candidates and attend all research sessions as well as worked with the agency to distill the findings. 

  • Once the final personas where delivered the decision was to make the personas more general to apply to all of the products in the business unit. At this time I worked with product management to generalize the personas content created by the agency as well as to create additional personas based on past research. I then produced the final designs for the persona posters as well as other collateral for each persona.