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Vikram Rojo
Hi, I'm Vikram Rojo.
A product designer, writer, archivist and static site builder. I've shaped developer experience at WorkOS and LaunchDarkly that make enterprises productive and happy.
Being a designer in an early stage startup means wearing many hats. I joined WorkOS and LaunchDarkly as their first product design hire and worked as a product generalist. This meant: UI designs, customer development, product briefs, product validation, and marketing. Product teams vary in maturity and challenges but my primary responsibility has been educating and influencing peers in customer centered design and coaching them through the process of discovery, development and release.
Product Releases
WorkOS (2021-2022)
Custom Domains for Google OAuth
A practice common to Developer SaaS is building internal tools for workflows. But as demand increases so too does the urgency of automating those tasks. Custom Domains required close and simultaneous engineering and design prototyping followed by a subsequent round of interaction design to level up the developer experience.
Introducing the Multi-factor Authentication API
Beta releases come with unique challenges, namely shipping something valuable while leaving room for the product to scale. Our team took a different approach to prototyping an API. Rather than build and iterate, we conducted a competitive analysis on similar APIs. Then we defined our Unique Value Proposition (no identity store) and outlined the offering and API in a document which we shared with interested customers. Based on their feedback, we were able to narrow down our release while clarifying our documentation.
Debug SAML Sessions
Logs are a common customer request with SaaS. But understanding limitations of existing systems and the range of possible users takes more effort to uncover. Working alongside a team assembled from engineering and support, I led the discovery and documentation of session errors. This was quickly followed by a UI solution. Rather than begin with UI, focusing on error handling proved to be a sound foundational investment.
Easier onboarding with Setup Links and Support Roles
Gleaned from customer research, I spotted and evangelized the need for simple Setup Links to our Admin Portal. While we typically hope most customers fully integrate with our solutions, there are often exceptions driven by playbooks and organization structures. Prioritizing one-offs doesn’t always fit with a product roadmap but early product validation showed that Setup Links and the related feature of Support Roles, stood to drastically change product usage. The result was almost immediate adoption and updating of customer playbooks.
Dynamic SAML Configuration
Oftentimes projects are added to a roadmap and believed to be small and tightly scoped. Rarely does this mean that the problem and opportunity are equally small. What began as a way to alert users to expiring certificates transformed into a restructure of our certification method that allowed for automatic refreshing and less user error. This opportunity was uncovered by researching various provider standards and evangelizing a new standard.
Improved Demo Credentials for Okta
In the course of early stage startups, prototypes can stall but remain in the application. Our Demo Credentials, a key experience in onboarding, was just such a feature. A simple but single use product and a key differentiator from our competitors, the feature was left to languish. I worked with the frontend team to remove bugs, soften hard edges and update the interactions and instructions.
Miscellaneous UI Additions
Maintaining a B2B SaaS product often involves revisiting or extending the UI. Below is a list of various projects that can be considered table stakes in developer experience. Improving the Organization view, Environment Configuration, Optional Custom Attributes, Improved Directory summary view, Email Notification Preferences, API key management, and Swapping between environments to name a few.
LaunchDarkly (2018-2021)
Smarter Experiments with New Traffic Allocation Rules
Working within the constraints of a complex flag targeting system, I was tasked with crafting experimentation traffic. While the feature was already validated with our customers, the challenge of balancing an intuitive system against API design. This required conducting multiple usability sessions using design prototypes to determine the right way to update a core developer experience.
Flag Archive Workflow
From the problem statement of helping large enterprise customers manage deployment complexity, I led customer conversations and product validation using prototypes.
Feature Flag Filters and Saved Dashboards
As the complexity of feature flags grow, so does the need for maintenance. I led a redesign of our filters and investigated the need to save dashboard states. Combined, the features were designed to work equally well for different archetypes, from individual developers to engineering managers.
Feature Flag Overview and Dashboard Updates
Expanding on customer research from flag archiving, I conducted a usability study on our existing app’s information architecture as it pertained to development environments. The result was a series of improvements that supported visualization of a system’s state, from a significant dashboard overview to rotating an icon 45º to differentiate a flag variation (diamond) from a developer environment (square) and updating flag status icons.
Miscellaneous UI Additions
Being a generalist often involves routine maintenance tasks. Listed are few straightforward design debt projects or technical updates that I tackled. Choose Your Default Feature Flag Variations, Experiments Dashboard, and Sync Amplitude Segments .