SAP Analytics Cloud
| Digital product launch leadership
It was in the final months leading up to the official public launch of the massive project code-named “Orca” that SAP approached my team at Domain7 with this question "Will you help us launch Analytics Cloud?"
We learned that Analytics Cloud was slated to be unveiled at an internal SAP conference called TechEd Barcelona. Here, as a global audience of SAP insiders gathered to learn alongside each other, the HANA-based analytics platform known as Project Orca would be breaching the waters. As their own internal design and development resources were fully committed to the product itself, SAP needed a nimble collaborator to create and launch the public face of Analytics Cloud for the conference deadline, ready to dig deep for further iteration after launch.
For the product launch for SAP Analytics Cloud, I conducted the initial research and discovery, ran the collaborative UX and product design sessions, and set the overall strategy for our designers and developers to get the experience launch-ready.
The job to be done: gateway to the product
Think of the homepage of your favourite digital product: web-based tools like Mailchimp, or Trello, or even Google Drive. Before you are a user of the product, what are you? You’re a researcher. You’re hunting down options, you’re comparing, you’re looking for free trials. You’ve maybe got a few different tools on the go, you’re consulting online reviews, you’re looking to solve a specific problem and you’re hoping this is the one. At some point, you come across the product’s homepage, which is your launchpad for exploration.
That “entryway to a product” is what our team needed to help plan, design and build.
Job one was getting up to speed on what they knew about their audiences. SAP had commissioned two different firms to dig into audience research (two west coast firms with radically different methods: the Ipsos-challenger InsightsWest, and the story-focused The Sound Research). We paired their findings with some competitive analysis, looking to understand what else is on the market. But as SAP project sponsor and former Hootsuite marketing lead Peter would tell us, “Don’t look to the market to find the bar. Let’s set the bar instead.”
Our end goal was ensuring the "sign up for a trial" process was seamless — at the moment of the project starting, this was not the case.
In the traditional model, SAP’s enterprise mode of working is accustomed to providing hands-on support for nearly every stage of the buying cycle, from software installation, to providing user licenses. The model of flipping the old-school enterprise approach to cloud-based, self-serve software ran counter to their entire culture and process.
“We can get licenses generated until 12 days after a user request,” came the answer from the SAP technical team. “12 days?” was the counter from the SAP Orca marketing lead. “I need 12 seconds.”
And so they got the work: to make a seamless-as-possible user experience, and actually meet expectations for the real-time web, the two diverging cultures within SAP had to find common ground.
Meanwhile, the front-end dev team was able to get the site up and running for the conference launch. And true to their promise, SAP’s technical team managed to get trial licenses generating in near-real-time. SAP’s UX team for Orca need to partner with the SAP technical team to make this come together in a crunch: and they did.
Results
Within a month, more than a million dollars in deals had come in. By the end of the fourth quarter, that number was more than thirteen million, with deals closed through HP, Samsung, Volvo and others.
This groundbreaking group within SAP caught the attention of other business units stunned by how this nimble, people-centric collaboration has yielded such tremendous success. The product team is in-demand all over again, as usage levels mean users are ready for the product’s next evolution.
“SAP’s breakthrough success with launching Analytics Cloud was possible because they chose true partnership. And to pursue this, SAP brought the time, space and humility to collaborate openly and curiously.” - Charlotte Taverner-Whelpton, Domain7 Engagement Strategist
SAP’s Analytics Cloud moved over to be support The Loop — Domain7’s special program for measurement-based UX iterations. As part of The Loop, they can use data from the live product to conduct new experiments and optimizations in a live partnership with Domain7.
(Soon after launch, they created a whole new design and flexibility for their Resources section, and are working on plan for Analytics Cloud University, an online learning platform for users as they keep learning and iterating.)