In 2014, Citrix acquired a company called ScaleXtreme. Our Customer Experience (CX) product design team was asked to redesign the product to fit into a new platform that was still being developed. This was accomplished by first building relationships with the engineering and product management teams to inspire confidence that we could manage this challenge. We applied key principles of design thinking to identify our objectives, learn from customers, prototype, validate, apply, and then iterate. We created a journey map and an initial design workflow to share possible use cases with attendees at our annual conference.

We learned from customers that we needed a Minimally Viable Product (MVP), such as a Proof of Concept (PoC) of a full deployment using our product. With users’ feedback on the PoC, we were able to refine the product further. ScaleXtreme is now known as Citrix Lifecycle Management and includes new kinds of product documentation, video, social media and innovative things to generate attention and spark interest among customers.

The prototype was built in about two weeks to create a design and a workflow; based on our understanding of who the customer might be, and how they might want to use this upcoming Citrix Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product.
Engineering created the XenDesktop PoC, which we began testing with users, and found it was a much more productive way to learn about their needs, barriers and expectations. Over time, we improved the PoC to the point where customers with minimal help could deploy successfully and repeatedly.

Citrix Lifecycle Management is now a completely redesigned product, delivered through Citrix Workspace Cloud. We have found a way of taking pre-existing technology and creating an entirely new experience as an integral part of Workspace Cloud, enabling our partners and service providers help us in providing solutions to Citrix customers by closing the time-to-value divide.

As product designers, our task is to find creative solutions to difficult challenges. Succeeding at this requires a combination of innovation, expertise and collaboration. The role requires imagination, but also deep technical understanding, the ability to listen to customers and partners, and also to be persuasive and show conviction. And we have to work with the hand we are dealt, such as new product acquisitions.

This submission demonstrates how we are redefining the way that customer experience at Citrix deals with the acquisition of new products or companies, and converts them into successful, vibrant and integrated products.

At Citrix, we acquire a lot of companies and technologies. Ours is a big ship that changes course quickly, and we want to avoid being like those companies that make acquisitions then don’t do anything meaningful with them. It takes a special blend of hard work, collaboration and a broader vision to see beyond the usual to create something special and unique.

With the transformation of ScaleXtreme into Citrix Lifecycle Management, we feel we are taking the full lifecycle of this product beyond what other design groups might do. We have done this by including new kinds of product documentation, video, social media and innovative things like comic strips to generate attention and spark interest.

Design teams don’t create products; product teams create products, and design teams are part of that process. We have built a healthy and dynamic collaboration between the design teams, product management teams, and engineering teams, and that only comes when there is a shared vision, and a strong sense of trust. We feel that with the methods we use, we are controlling our destiny and those of our products by doing all these things beyond the usual scope of product design – allowing us to deliver spectacular results.