The situation
Enterprise customers had to provision thousands to millions of devices as they moved through manufacturing, identity creation, certificate injection, factory testing, shipping, deployment and remote activation. Most of those steps happen outside AWS, in factories and in the field, often with limited connectivity. The experience was fragmented and highly technical, and the team had little direct customer research to work from.
Starting a research practice
Before designing anything, I partnered with our VP and General Manager to set up the organization's first comprehensive customer research program. I interviewed and ran workshops with enterprise customers across industries about the devices they made, how they handled identity and certificates, how factory lines provisioned devices, and where onboarding broke down.
The biggest finding was that onboarding didn't begin in the console. It began in the factory.
Mapping the whole lifecycle
A normal software journey map couldn't hold this. I built service blueprints, journey maps and mental models that connected every stage from manufacturing to field activation. Product, Engineering and executives used them as planning tools, and they gave the teams a shared picture of the customer.
Design principles
- Fit into existing factory operations instead of making manufacturers change for AWS
- Hide the complexity of certificates, keys and identities without weakening security
- Make every workflow work for millions of devices
- Connect physical and digital steps into one journey
Outcome
After several rounds of iteration, customer validation and executive review, the new onboarding experience launched at AWS re:Invent 2019. It gave customers a simpler, scalable way to provision devices securely, and it left the org with a research practice, personas and blueprints it hadn't had before.