Automated Provisioning
Streamlining the complex and manual workflow of getting customers access to satellite imagery
TIMELINE
12 months
PLATFORM
Web
TYPE
Enterprise
HIGHLIGHTS
Design Strategy, Discovery
Challenge
Provisioning means giving customers access to what they’ve purchased — sounds simple enough right? It turns out this was an especially complex and messy problem due to 1) every product having a different provisioning workflow causing significant cognitive overload 2) provisioning was a grueling manual process done by our internal teams which created human error 3) finally due to it being manual, we didn’t know when we’ve given access to customers creating traceability issues for revenue recognition.
Overall, this was an infrastructure problem that was punted for years until it became so large it caused meaningful risk to our business.
Approach
This project was highly abstract and required an extended discovery effort in identifying internal stakeholders, understanding each product’s technical infrastructure, and modeling a new and scalable system. I spent time working with engineering teams to identify the areas that required human intervention and to orient our infrastructure design to be user minded. To build design requirements, I spent weeks workshopping with my team to iterate on our user stories, which then led to wireframes which then led to designs. Design-led working sessions were a powerful way to collaborate with Planet’s fully distributed, cross-functional teams.
Impact
We launched Automated Provisioning in late 2023 and we’ve migrated 88% of our products to this system which has resulted in a 25% increase in traceability (we finally know when we’ve given customers access!). In addition, we’ve made a meaningful improvement in enabling our support teams to accomplish higher order customer tasks instead of being trapped in tedious manual workflows.
Addressing provisioning pain points enabled us to provide more transparent usage data to customers downstream and allowed us to launch a data marketplace with a standardized set of products.
If you’d like to learn more about this case study, please get in touch!
Discovery — Due to the ambiguous and technical nature of many Planet projects, I intentionally worked at lower fidelities using workflow maps, stakeholder alignment workshops and wireframes to build out design requirements
Automated Provisioning — Enabled our teams to provision contracts in 1 step
Analytics Dashboard — Post provisioning, this redesigned dashboard provided detailed insights on usage and enabled customers to better manage their teams, contracts and data products
Product Catalog — A marketplace to get detailed info on data products, enabled by automating and standardizing provisioning
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