GoToMeeting “Next Gen”, a rediscovery of how knowledge workers get the job done

Work is increasingly complex; the moving parts involved to get a product or service to market are larger and more intricate than before. The knowledge to make this happen must fluidly move between teams, go beyond the organization and across geographies.

Collaboration today is not the same as it was decades ago, and the approaches of the past will not suffice in the world of the future.

The classic GoToMeeting promoted a static, organizer centric set of principles which needed to be updated to serve the dynamic relationships of today and tomorrow.

It was time to evolve with a new set of principles and regain our leading position in the market with best-in-class user experiences.

The market had changed and a new chapter just began

A new generation of knowledge workers entered the workplace with fresh expectations
Competitors disrupted the status quo, challenging GoToMeeting’s leadership
Despite its reliability, the software needed rebuilding to support future growth and new features.

My role as a
Design Manager

Product and Design Leadership

Define the UX vision and set key objectives for the product I was in charge of
Align the design team with business goals, prioritizing initiatives
Guide and evaluate design work within the broader ecosystem through feedback, 1:1s, critiques, and workshops.

Collaboration and alignment

Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Research to ensure user-centered roadmaps that drive business impact
Enhance communication and build trust in the design process and shared outcomes.

People and operations

Align designers' career goals with business objectives
Provide tactical support through complex design challenges, workshops, and collaboration with Research
Own design operations from end to end, refining processes, tooling, and ensuring design quality.

Designing the right things

This involved understanding our problem space and identifying the issues we aimed to solve, requiring the Research team to conduct multiple parallel mission

Benchmarking our existing product through task-based, in-person evaluations to measure satisfaction, clicks, speed, and success rates. This established a baseline we didn't want to fall below.
Performing a competitive analysis of traditional competitors like Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Adobe, and BlueJeans, as well as emerging challengers like Zoom, to gain fresh insights into their approaches and future directions.
Conducting extensive qualitative research on Generation Z to understand their habits and expectations, revealing for example the importance of video, text messaging, and workgroup dynamics.

Designing things right

The resulting vision (contact me to know more about it) led to the creation of a parallel work track focused on discovery missions, similar to regular ones led by the usual PM, Engineering, and Product Design trio, but entirely driven by design and research to ensure we were designing with high confidence and precision.

Co-designing with our clients was a key highlight early on, along with discovery missions that included user testing, A/B testing, prototyping, and iterative testing