Engineers working in silos hinder their full potential
Problem Context
In response to the growing demand for streamlined development processes and improved collaboration between developers and various stakeholders, Kimberly-Clark has initiated the DevEx Unified Platform. This platform aims to enhances the developer working experience and accelerates the software development lifecycle.
How do we enhance developer experience in a global enterprise?
Leadership has set an ambitious goal: make developers' work experience better to boost productivity. But here’s the catch—what does ‘better’ actually mean? What problems are we solving? The leadership request is vague, and we need to navigate through that ambiguous statement.
1. Debrief Project Statement
From the project statement crafted by our PM and leadership, we gather key insights about user groups and the features leadership envisions—features they assume will improve our engineering team's daily operations.
2. Research Validation
Building on the identified user groups and planned features, we developed a tailored research framework for each group—focusing on their workflows, challenges, and coping strategies.
3. Product Scoping
With 112 pain points gathered across six personas, we prioritize design features based on their frequency and the breadth of their impact across all user groups.
What do we aim to understand from user interviews?
What does the user’s current workflow look like?
What roadblocks are they facing?
How do they work around those challenges?
Through 4 semi-structured interviews with each user group, we’re not just identifying individual pain points but treating them as an IT ecosystem and uncovering overlapping and interconnected issues to dig into the root causes behind these challenges.
What dev teams are not experiencing well currently?
Developers
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Insufficient clarity from business teams on requirements and data needs.
Misalignment leads to delays in later development stages.
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Teams may need to use tools incompatible with their skill sets.
Example: API changes require Java expertise, but only one team member knows Java, causing bottlenecks.
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Global solutions struggle due to region-specific data, affecting UI consistency.
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Missing guidance on functionality purpose, target regions, development details, and user manuals.
Slows down knowledge sharing and onboarding (e.g., VS Code setup takes 2-3 weeks).
Clients struggle to understand and use functionalities without proper manuals.
PM (coming soon)
Solution Architects
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Optimal technical solutions may be compromised due to the absence of SA input early in the process.
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Slow and demanding approval procedures hinder innovation at KC.
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No dedicated space for storing and accessing reusable architecture diagrams.
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Issues arise not from technical blockers but from developers' lack of expertise.
Support teams struggle to fix problems, often leaving SAs to resolve them themselves.
QA (coming soon)
DevSecOps
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Leads to complex, tangled code that is hard to maintain.
Results in higher maintenance costs and lower code quality.
Diverts resources from innovation and slows down overall progress.
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Some requests require infrastructure or platform teams, which DevSecOps cannot resolve alone.
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Developers struggle to determine the right conditions to raise incident requests.
Issues in Dev environments often delay work in QA and production.
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Developers and DevSecOps struggle to track incident statuses, causing delays and misalignment.
Scrum Master (coming soon)
With so many pain points across six different user groups, how do we know where to focus our problem-solving efforts?
1.Mapping pain points based on developers journey
Narrowing the problem-solving scope by focusing on the most critical pain points during the requirement evaluation phase and code development phase.
2. Mapping overlapping user journeys to identify key problem-solving scenarios
Focusing on the execution phase , a highly collaborative stage requiring coordination across multiple user groups. Prioritizing the deployment phase, a critical dependency that determines the success of collaboration efforts.
Adjust the requirement-gathering focus after identifying that shifting priorities and ad hoc projects arise from PMs and Solution Architects struggling with evolving business needs, driven by leadership and structural challenges that lead to undesirable scope expansion.
3.Categorizing pain points from key problem-solving scenarios for design workshops.
Grouping similar pain points help us discover user challenge patterns in execution and deployment stages, including lack of standardization, knowledge sharing, and team dependency issues. These categories, with their subcategories, guide our design solution brainstorming workshop.
With a clearly defined product scope, we launched co-design workshops with key stakeholders to assess solution feasibility from technical and business perspectives.
We reached the following alignment from the workshop:
Stakeholders raised concerns about evaluating developer skills, citing its sensitivity and execution challenges across organizational levels.
Automated incident tracking and AI troubleshooting show great potential to enhance efficiency but are technically complex, so they are planned for future iterations.
DevSecOps pipeline request tracking streamlines inefficient emails with a transparent, standardized process, offering high value to multiple user groups and being easy to implement.
Stakeholders strongly support knowledge sharing but are unsure about the ideal format. Research shows users avoid lengthy documents, while creating engaging training materials requires resources the company lacks.
However, sharing existing project code components as reference material is a feasible alternative—offering more value than text-heavy documentation, even without detailed instructions.
Design Goals
A DevSecOps pipeline tracking system to streamline automation and collaboration
A centralized components management space to view, share, and access dependency resources to help teams learn and collaborate
With aligned design solutions and a Material Design system, we created high-fidelity prototypes inspired by market trends and collaborated with developers for technical input.
1.Getting inspirations from market trends
The team is currently using Github to manage CI/CD pipeline by looking at what functions they already have help us provide a familiar interface for users and identify opportunities that can be improved.
2. Iterate design through workshop reviews
Collecting user feedback on critical features, refining UX wordings and continue to explore user needs in the co-design workshop using prototypes.
Feature 2: A centralized components management space
Currently dev teams manage documentation across GitHub, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and emails, leading to disorganization and poor knowledge sharing. We researched Compass for inspiration and tailored a solution based on user insights.
Refine interface based on technical requirements and user needs, for example:
The messaging feature is not feasible and redundant to Microsoft Teams, allowing users to focus on managing component dependencies. Instead, component owner names remain clickable for easy access to contact information, fostering collaboration.
Feature 3: Components Catalog
An accessible component catalog helps dev teams learn and collaborate through shared work examples. Bookmarks enable shortcuts and a personalized workspace, but for scalability, displaying unlimited items without a scrolling section is not feasible
Using the same table view to filter bookmarked items
Enhance filtering, improve accessibility, and support flexible user control.
Although developers review the design throughout the process, additional support is needed for seamless implementation.
Design System
Leveraging the Material Design System streamlines design-development collaboration. For designs beyond its capabilities, we create and document delta components in Amplifi templates.
Despite the design system, annotations help clarify details like colors, logo formats, and icon names, enabling developers to quickly locate assets.
Launched Impacts
Amplifi was first launched for North American developers, showing steady traffic growth over the past 90 days. Retention metrics indicate strong engagement, with development teams actively exploring and continuing to use the platform. Out of 717 unique users, 60% returned after one month, 52% after two months, and by the third month, 50% had developed a usage habit.
Like the development lifecycle, design evolves beyond launch. We conduct usability tests to continuously improve it.
Thanks to our initial research connections, we re-engaged interviewed users for usability testing, assessing three key areas:
Product Navigation – Amplifi’s parent-child structure and dependency diagrams allow seamless component switching but may challenge users in retracing their steps.
Ease of Use – Despite leveraging familiar design patterns, we ensure Amplifi remains intuitive, enhancing efficiency without adding a learning burden.
Goal Achievement – Ultimately, we validate whether Amplifi effectively addresses dependency issues and knowledge-sharing challenges identified in our research.
Goal Achievement:
Users find the dependency diagram valuable for viewing related components and owners to address dependency issues. However, they suggested including key stakeholders, as owners alone may not always resolve issues.
As interest in the diagram grew, users requested additional features such as database and vendor program integration, envisioning it as an interactive application architecture diagram—digitally enhancing the solution architect’s existing framework.
Navigation & Ease of Use:
Users value a centralized platform for development information, reducing reliance on SharePoint, emails, and Teams. However, they struggle to return to the first-viewed component, highlighting the need for a robust breadcrumb system.
Additionally, a basic onboarding guide remains valuable for helping users quickly adapt and gain confidence in using the product.
