Platform.next
Reimagining IBM Cloud, brought into line with IBM’s focus on regulated enterprise customers — particularly those who need to automate continuous compliance for regulated workloads within industries like financial services.
Problem
IBM Cloud was optimized for an audience and operating model it had outgrown: individual developers buying piece-part services, manual workflows held together by spreadsheets, sticky tack, paperclips, sheer willpower, institutional knowledge, and a house of cards. Meanwhile IBM’s actual market — regulated enterprise teams — needed something fundamentally different.
Insight
The gap could be named in three shifts: individuals → regulated enterprise teams; individual services → opinionated, customizable solutions; cloud-as-spreadsheets → cloud-as-code. Once those three lines were on a slide, every team’s roadmap had a place to stand and the strategy stopped being abstract.
Solution
The strategy moved from a designer-led side project (Penumbra) to an ad-hoc cross-functional working group meeting twice a week (Project T) to a fully-staffed initiative (Voltron) to the operational model for IBM Cloud (Platform.next). MVP has shipped. Post-launch enhancements are ongoing. Business and experience metrics are moving in the right direction.
Three shifts
The simplest articulation of what Platform.next is changing.
The road there
Penumbra. Named to reflect an affinity with the Eclipse IDE. An exploratory prototype depicting a significantly changed IBM Cloud console: a single place that could accommodate everything IBM offers the market, reprioritized around the needs of regulated enterprise customers. I shared it everywhere I could, changed it every day, and that iteration got me involved with Project T.
Project T. A group of individuals and teams from across IBM Cloud meeting on my ad hoc WebEx call twice a week — starting November 2021 and not stopping — to discuss what we could build if we unified a few things we have already built or are actively building, separately. Everything Project T determined to be important together, and aligned on with collaborators as they joined, is prioritized and staffed to ship.
Voltron. The team that took on the Project T flow for 2021. Manager Jp Pollard’s move allowed design teams to wrap their heads around the subject matter while being informed by — and informing — the business and technical conversation. Beautiful design work, innovative GUI animation, and a lot of increased attention.
Platform.next. Significant effort from many IBMers across each function led to Project T and Voltron being embodied in Platform.next — now the operational model for IBM Cloud platform. Rather than silos, we work across functions to deliver holistic user journeys. Rather than reporting status in our typical squads, we map work to the user journeys themselves.
It still blows my mind that the remarkably impactful Platform.next originated from a designer-led side project. This is incredibly rare, and wouldn’t have happened without Brendan’s strategic thinking, leadership, and zeal. User Researcher, IBM Cloud platform
His most recent effort is Platform Next, an initiative to deliver fully compliant solutions as code. I have worked at IBM Cloud for five years and have never seen an initiative attract such platform-wide, cross-functional support. Brendan planted the seeds for this effort, expanding it beyond technical workgroups to Voltron — a design-led vision concept that captured hearts and minds across the platform. Senior Designer, IBM Cloud platform
He’s been critical to three or four major executive pitches with design prototypes and decks to help communicate a vision — and that’s only in the last year. They’ve all been received with resounding support because of the quality he brings in communicating problems, solutions, opportunities, and a vision for the future. Principal Product Manager, IBM Cloud
Brendan has been the “go-to” leader for design in the Platform.Next project — highly involved in many aspects of this large effort which spans every development team in IBM Cloud platform, and leading many of the design conversations around its user experience. STSM, Common Cloud Services
Status
MVP has shipped. Post-launch enhancements are ongoing. Too early to call it, but the business and experience metrics are moving in the right direction.