Uniting the Platform
The Problem
Digimarc spent many years running primarily as a licensing IP company. When I was hired in 2013, the company was just on the cusp of moving to a product driven organization, and over the years of that transition, there were many tough lessons.
One aspect of this is that many of the services offered had a "proof of concept" feel, rather than a polished SaaS platform offering. Design, interface, and user experience were all concepts that were foreign to the organization, which had previously always had engineering, and to an extent legal, in the driver's seat.
Digimarc's ecosystem was a mess of silos. Tons of different web properties with completely unmanaged branding, and even to the point of having their own credentials. This impacted the company's image as a trusted purveyor of enterprise software, and made any hope of cross selling services an uphill proposition.
This manifested as many services acting as islands unto themselves, with no intuitive connection between products and services, neither through design, functionality - even requiring unique login credentials for each service.
The Fix
I worked with our product, engineering, IT, and marketing team to put together a unification project to make doing business with Digimarc a more cohesive experience. It was no easy feat to get these departments to leave the silo mindset and start working together in a single direction. I took a leadership role in facilitating this work with other leaders from each department.
The first step was to get our branding up to date. A defunct agency had done our last refresh, so our marketing department reasserted itself over the company branding. Once we had something to start from, we set up a web portal to sit on top of all of the previously independent services. We called this top level portal My.Digimarc.
With My.Digimarc, we began systematically going through each independent service and rebranding/reskinning, or where necessary, completely rebuilding each of our services. Each site had a global navigation set to the left sidebar so that each site allowed navigation between all of the various product areas.
I lead the charge to help unify our services with a central hub, My.Digimarc that stitched together our product experiences. All of our services began to have a unified look and feel. Each service implemented a consistent global navigation that dynamically populated the services to which that particular user could access, which let users intuitively navigate all the services and support sites.
We replaced the authentication systems as we went, ensuring that a single login was required, rather than letting each service have its own user database. We integrated all of this into salesforce.com, so that anyone within our organization would have access to view our user information, along with visibility into what products and services those users could access.
The Broader Picture
The result was a much more cohesive product experience. One that provided a much more consistent experience across products, and simplified delivery of additional product content such as software downloads, help content, and support. It also provided the scaffolding for new services so that each new project had a template from which to launch, resulting in quicker development with more consistency.
The major takeaway here is that this project, in my opinion, is representative of leadership in maybe its purest form. I wasn't in some executive position with the authority to tell everyone to get on board with this new direction. I had to lead in a way that compelled the organization to follow.