Navigating Containers
pivotal
Summary
My role
As the Principal Product Designer I led the Balanced Team in planning and executing all user-experience methods and to collaborate with product managers and engineers on strategic and technical explorations
This six-week Discovery and Framing exercise explored how to increase Pivotal’s confidence in their ability to ship containerised software safely.
Team
TL;DR
WHO: The user
Pivotal development teams shipping containers, Compliance teams, and Customers
WHY: The problem*
Development teams want to ship containers efficiently, in a standards-based way. They worry about toil.
Compliance teams want to make it easy for engineers while limiting Pivotal’s liability. They worry about risk.
Customers want to know what’s in the box, where it came from, and that it’s safe and secure. They worry about how containers will change their ecosystem, but trust Pivotal.
HOW: The process
A formal Discovery and Framing process, conducted by a balanced team, that included stakeholder interviews, journey mapping, root cause analysis of pain points, a 3-day solution workshop, and an incremental roadmap to achieve the ideal process.
WHAT: The solution
A centralised build service building containers compiled by buildpacks and an internal registry that has integrated security and OSL scanning.
+
Education about containerisation, the process, and how adoption of the build service solution would make teams’ lives easier.
* Uncovered during the the Discovery phase
The mission
How do we increase Pivotal’s confidence in our ability to ship containerised software safely?
The process
About “Discovery and Framing”
Discovery and Framing is an Agile practice to explore the problem and solution space. In each step there is a generative “go wide” phase and an evaluative “focus” phase.
Typical activities in Discovery
Typical activities in Framing
My colleagues Roxanne Mustafa and Daphne Lin did an excellent overview of the D&F process for a Voices of Product Meetup.
Learn more about how to use the methods of Discovery and Framing at Pivotal / Tanzu Labs
About “Balanced Teams”
Balanced teams include representatives from multiple disciplines, each of whom contributes expertise and perspective that, together, provide a more comprehensive view of a problem or solution. Thy typical balanced team includes
Product Management
Engineering
Design
Learn more about how we used Balanced Teams at Pivotal / Tanzu Labs
“Balanced Team” presentation by Janice Fraser
Artefacts
These artefacts describe the process through each of the phases.
Discovery
Stakeholder map
We identified a wide range of stakeholders across the organisation.
Interviews and initial synthesis
We conducted 20 interviews and used those as the core inputs for our discovery.
Proto-profiles
Who is going to be impacted by our solutions, and what do they care about?
Journey map and flow diagram
We constructed a journey map of the current world that shows how containers currently flow through our system. This flow diagram describes what entities (e.g., source files, containers, packages) different proto-profiles are working with at each phase of the flow.
Container journey and pain points
Using the journey map of the current world, we layered in pain points across the journey (including gaps).
Hopes & Fears
We did an exercise with the Shipping Containers Working Group around their Hopes and Fears for NavCon. We then brainstormed behaviours to maximise that Hopes would happen and mitigate that Fears would.
Causal diagram of pains
Some pains influence other pains.
Relationships between phases
From the causal diagram we can see closely connected pains, including competing tensions. During the workshop we did a solution exercise focusing on optimising each of these relationships.
Urgency vs impact of pain points
As a team, we evaluated the urgency and impact of the summary pain points from the container journey.
Synthesis and insights
Empathy gap
There is an empathy gap between Engineers & OSL/Legal
Education needed
Education and training is a huge gap
Increased toil
Containers increase toil on everyone
Unsophisticated customers
Customers aren’t as sophisticated yet… but they have a point of view
Philosophical tensions
We uncovered some philosophical tensions.
Security
We heard some pain points re. vulnerability scanning.
Solutions workshop
Journey brainstorm
Considering the pain points and phase relationships, we brainstormed solutions across all 6 phases of the journey.
Solution set
Looking across phases, we identified a set of solutions from our big brainstorm. We then dot-voted on them.
Dependency diagram
We drew a diagram that shows the sequencing of efforts required to implement some of our solution ideas.
Impact vs technical complexity
Using a time horizon of 6-9 months for impact, we placed solutions in a way that represented our best guess at their relative impact vs implementation complexity.
Post-workshop analyses
Solutions vs pain points
We mapped each of the solutions generated in the workshop against the pain points they are likely to address. We used this analysis to identify gaps and better understand the potential impact of each solution.
Solution sequence diagram
We organised solutions generated at the workshop into independent tracks of work with solutions sequenced within each track, then used it to inform experiments.
Ideal journey
As part of ideating on the solution that became “Guardrails,” we eventstormed an ideal journey.
Incremental solution path
We broke down the “Guardrails” solution into chunks of functionality that could be implemented incrementally towards a product vision.
Outcomes
Solution
Conceptual roadmap
🤕 Band-aid: Education and documentation, including best practices around composing and packaging containers.
🛹 Skateboard: a pilot internal registry that enables reuse of container images.
🚲 Bicycle: a registry and a re-usable set of tasks that standardise building containers.
🏍️ Motorbike: internal buildservice using the registry so that we are efficiently building consistent images.
🚗 Midsize sedan: a registry that facilitates streamlined OSL and Security scanning while building secure, compliant container images.
Provisional user journey
A provisional journey for the medium-term solution
Tracks of work
Three interdependent tracks of work that provide value independently of the others and can be worked on in parallel: