Connected Product Strategy
summary
Procore Technologies • Staff UX Designer • 6 weeks in 2020
For this project, I served as a Staff UX Designer at Procore Technologies, working with a cross-functional team to define the next evolution of our product strategy. Our goal was to create a unified, collaborative platform that meets the evolving needs of our 1.3 million users. My role involved partnering with team members to gather and synthesize input, designing cohesive product visions, and creating detailed user flows. We developed interactive prototypes, which were presented to executive leadership and the board — and tested with users to validate concepts and usability. This project aimed to align our product direction across multiple teams and set the foundation for the next 5-10 years of the product.
Product Strategy
Vision
Internal video I made for the board and other key stakeholders to explain the vision (AI/AE)
The Background
For more than a decade, Procore has been at the forefront of transforming the construction industry. Procore has grown to support and connect approximately 1.3 million users and 15,000 customers and has earned global recognition as the industry’s leading cloud-based construction platform.
But the way people work together has changed. From increased remote work to rapid adoption of real-time collaboration tools like Google Suite, people are working differently. And that means Procore must change, too. Procore must eliminate silos and single-purpose apps. No longer will it be enough to add another field to a form or columns to a table. Instead, Procore needs to create unified experiences that empower people to connect and collaborate every day and on every job site.
The goal of this project was to craft a concept of our multi-year product vision, based on past research, product exploration, and industry trends to guide us in the next evolution of our product. Lastly, start the conversation and alignment toward a shared vision.
Seeing the Signs
Procore’s product was originally created that a single company account was designed to be the source of truth for a construction project. We supported this vision by offering an unlimited user model for customers to invite anyone to access their account to collaborate. Over the years, we now sell to more personas (General Contractors, Owners, Speciality Contractors, etc), continue to add new product SKUs, have launched in new international markets, and support new market segments (such as government/infrastructure work. While this has been great for the business, it also has hindered the product, architecture and design in the following ways:
No single source of truth for a project due to duplication of data across accounts
Collaborating users don’t find enough value in Procore, and in some cases are repelled by it
This inhibits engagement and reduces overall collaboration. For collaborators such as Owners, Specialties, Architects, etc -- Procore is often perceived as “mandated” by the GC, and not inherently valuable for them - in fact it’s seen as making their lives harder.
To get some real empathy — check out this video we made of collaborates using Procore for the first time. Ouch.
Identifying the business opportunity.
As of early 2020, each month over 450,000 non-paying stakeholder (“collaborator”) users are using Procore. Each of these collaborators are invited by an Owner, GC, or SC, to use the Procore platform. At the moment these users have a poor experience on Procore compared to paying customers, observable via the disparity in NPS scores for each group.
NPS January 2021
VS
Additionally, these collaborators tend to be less engaged once on Procore; the average engaged collaborator user contributes only two-thirds the amount of Project Activity as the average engaged paid user, and is much more likely to leave the platform after their first few months.
Improving the experience will not just improve the lives of collaborating users but for our paying customers as well. By offering collaborators more value we not only lay the groundwork for increased sales but also increase the likelihood that our paying customers get value from Procore and choose to remain customers.
Finally, if we do not improve experience we risk creating negative brand equity among some key stakeholders in our market, which may stymie sales motion in the future.
How to “eat an elephant”…divide and conquer.
A small tiger team of Procore’s lead designers, product managers, and engineers got together and rapidly produced concepts for the future of the Procore. This work touched nearly every part of the product. We were all assigned critical roles with the intention of showing how each “piece of the puzzle” fits into the bigger picture. This effort was meant to help the org understand the key dependencies critical to the success of the product strategy.
“My role within this project was to partner with teammates, gather/synthesize each person’s work, and put together the cohesive product vision through design.”
Example of logistic and schedule to complete work in rapid iterations
Creating user flows after user flows…
For every experience, we started with what mattered the most — user flows. We needed to strip the experience down to the core functionality due to the complexity of our application. We would iterate on these flows as a team before ramping up the fidelity of the mocks. There are so many flows that I’ve only attached a couple below.
Putting it all together — 50,000 ft grayscale
After iterating as a team, we put all the pieces together in four interactable prototypes. These screens are designed to be directional instead of prescriptive. They were then shared with the board, leadership, and then the individual teams to start the broader conversation.
Ramped up the fidelity of the designs for the MVP to put in front of users.
After this work was shown to leadership, in tandem with the written strategy, they took action and reformed the P&T organization around this new strategy. Specifically, a FE prototyping team was formed to get these ideas in front of real users. The main objective of the team was to:
1. Test, learn and iterate the ideas
2. Validate concepts and flows for clarity and usability
3. Show progress and instill confidence in our Connected Strategy to the company
4. Pressure test our FE design system to enable a transition in Procore
Once designs were in a good place, we partnered with our PM and engineers to scope out the work. Below is a design/development task board to help us work in parallel as a team — designing and building all at once.
Lastly, we partnered with Procore’s Design System to help standardize and contribute to the next version of components. We were able to build out a working FE extremely fast due to utilizing the existing patterns and powering our backend through an Airtable. Our plan was to decouple the FE and BE — making sure that any endpoints could quickly and easily be plugged into the new experience.
Get to the testing and learnings.
We tested the above prototype with approx. 20 people (both customers & non-customers). Below is a short recap of what these people had to say about the new experience. Link to research plan and testing script.
This project is a multi-year and org-wide effort. This work was meant to help be a directional guide to drive alignment across 30+ teams. This work has influenced each team’s roadmap and architectural changes are beginning.