BALENA

Jellyfish

I led a team of engineers to deliver a major new feature against the clock for balena’s team communications and knowledge management platform. All the while crafting the UX and designing the UI across the whole product.

Responsibilities
Product Owner and Design Lead

ONE

The Problem

Historically, a business’s knowledge management tool has been a separate product from its communication tool. This creates two siloed pools of information, in one content gets old and outdated, in the other useful details are quickly buried under new messages.

Could tools like Slack and Notion be a single product? This is what Jellyfish set out to achieve.

When I came onboard to lead the team one half of the solution had already been shipped, Jellyfish served as the company’s knowledge base but the team still had to build and launch its communications functionality. 

TWO

The Solution

The Jellyfish chat feed was home to business focus conversations along with more personal ones.

Bringing the two flows of information together to sit alongside each other required careful planning and design. For a fully remote team its communications platform was its life support system, so building a solution that worked effectively was crucial.

Jellyfish had to be a platform for the team to bond, for personal updates and cat videos, not simply project discussions and work chat.

We achieved this balance by creating two ways that conversations could exist - either attached to a knowledge item, such as a product or feature project, or they could be created within the platform’s distinct company sections. Creating a team-OS area provided the perfect space for social updates.

Key Features

Personalised subscription feed

Research showed a wide range of opinions on how much information users wanted to be notified of, 80% of the team saw messaging as a crucial part of their day-to-day work. However, some team members saw messages and their notifications simply as a distraction. Creating a self directed feed of channels empowered users to control the level of communications they received.

Conversations and information side by side

It was essential that information and communications didn’t become siloed from each other, even within the same product. To achieve this we created a user experience where they both existed on the screen harmoniously, further enforced with the UI, where they sat within the same navigation.

FOUR

The Challenges

Designing and leading a complex feature launch has many challenges, from codebase management to scope creep. Add to this a concrete deadline for 100% adoption from the team and success becomes even more critical, to address the challenges I had the following approaches:

  • User centric design - we had direct access to our first wave of users, the one hundred team members that made up balena, so took every opportunity to consult with them.

  • Rigorous testing - throughout the process I was able to directly test designs with the users, from the very earliest wireframes to the final prototypes.

  • High quality team communications - Leading a global team that spanned three continents required careful management, ensuring all members still had high quality face to face contact, regardless of timezone.