Turn an under-used product into a mission critical enterprise platform

Dell is one of the largest enterprise computer & infrastructure manufacturers in the world. Their hardware can be found in pretty much every office building around the world. As the #3 PC vendor in the world, custom software is needed to help their clients manage and monitor their fleet of computers and infrastructure.

Data was showing that the managing & monitoring software was not being used the way it was intended to. Customers weren’t getting the value and support they should have been gaining from the software. This harmed revenue by leading customers to seek out alternative solutions, potentially leading to losing clients.

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We found that target customers didn’t know what the product was capable of

Dell’s goals:

Find out why the software wasn’t being used as intended
Determine and prioritize a roadmap to regain their competitive advantage

This type of challenge required getting a first-hand understanding of how effective Dell’s software was from the perspective of IT professionals. We needed to understand what best-in-class meant to target customers and prioritize improvements. We also needed to size Dell’s market size versus their competitors by workflow. A survey to North American IT professionals who use a range of products would answer all of the above, plus determine which opportunities needed to be explored more.

Given the broad range of use cases that this software supported IT professionals, we needed to use two methods to go deep into their workflows:

Ethnographic research: Walking through a day in the life of the wide range of customers and their use cases
Co-creation: Using virtual whiteboarding tools to build idea dashboards alongside customers

Over the course of this six month project we found out why people weren’t using the software as intended by:

Collecting evidence from internal stakeholders about possible gaps and areas for exploration
Surveying 2,000 IT professional across North America to understand which tools they were using
Analyzing data to determine the gaps and opportunities of leading products in the category
Interviewing 16 in-depth discoveries with target customers to understand usage and determine ideal solutions

We found that target customers didn’t know what the product was capable of.

To determine and prioritize a roadmap to regain their competitive advantage we:

Identified Dell’s competitive advantages & how to win
Led workshops to align stakeholders around what the biggest challenges and opportunities actually were
Led co-creation sessions with customers to find out what the product needed to be to become invaluable
Delivered a prioritized product roadmap for how to turn an under-used product into a mission critical enterprise platform

Redefined what Dell knew about how IT professionals use management & monitoring software
Delivered quantitative and qualitative evidence about the performance of the software relative to competitors
Identified underserved use case and audiences who were opportunities for growth
Aligned the team and product roadmap around short-term and long-term success