Saving an at-risk $1.6B contract renewal
My product team at Cisco learned that a department within the U.S. federal government would not renew a $1.6B contract without a key feature that we hadn’t yet designed (the ability to tag network devices). I leapt into action with my product team to quickly design an MVP solution that would ensure the renewal until we had space in the roadmap to implement the full feature.
The context and the problem
Leadership explained that a department of the U.S. federal government would likely not renew a $1.6B contract for network licenses (and potentially not renew 3 other contracts almost as large the following year) if our product (a license management portal) didn’t have a feature that allowed network devices to be tagged. The department ran yearly audits in which they would validate the security of network devices, and in order to meet security and operational efficiency requirements, they now needed to be able to tag devices in our application as validated, not validated, or not yet audited. Previously they had been doing this manually in spreadsheets, which they found to be extremely time-consuming and prone to error.
The decision for the initial $1.6B renewal needed to happen within the next two months, and our dev teams were almost at capacity, meaning that we had to work fast to design a solution and finalize it in order to fit it into a window that our dev team had. We were used to designing on tight timelines, but in this case we’d need to work twice as fast.
Working toward a solution
The design lead and I began meeting with the PM to discuss the PRD she had begun drafting. Initially we thought that we might be able to design a full tagging feature that was already on the roadmap (allowing users to create fully customized tags for devices) that would also work for the customer’s audit purposes.
Once we started drafting some concepts in Miro though, we realized that that feature would be too complex to design and build in the allotted time. So we needed to create an MVP that would give the customer what they needed (the ability to tag devices as validated, not validated, or not yet audited) so they would renew, but wouldn’t yet have the functionality to allow users to create custom tags with any possible label. That said, we wanted to create a strong design that would provide a firm and scalable foundation for when we were able to expand the functionality to custom tagging.
Process and execution
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Results and impact
The design lead and I began meeting with the PM to discuss the PRD she had begun drafting. Initially we thought that we might be able to design a full tagging feature that was already on the roadmap (allowing users to create fully customized tags for devices) that would also work for the customer’s audit purposes.
Once we started drafting some concepts in Miro though, we realized that that feature would be too complex to design and build in the allotted time. So we needed to create an MVP that would give the customer what they needed (the ability to tag devices as validated, not validated, or not yet audited) so they would renew, but wouldn’t yet have the functionality to allow users to create custom tags with any possible label. That said, we wanted to create a strong design that would provide a firm and scalable foundation for when we were able to expand the functionality to custom tagging.
Reflections and lessons learned
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