Product: Ephemeral Environments for Octopus Deploy

Responsibilities: Discovery, UX design, UI design, Usability testing

Overview

Our team is dedicated to enhancing the developer experience for the Octopus product. We recognize that testing is a crucial part of the application development process, and having a reliable, on-demand environment is highly valued. However, engineering teams often struggle to prioritize investment in this area, and existing tools fail to support their complex scenarios. As a result, application teams are forced to rely on costly, static environments that don’t scale efficiently and ultimately hinder productivity.

My Role

Collaborating with the product manager and principal engineer, we use discovery research to identify opportunities. By leveraging design-led methods, we help the product team develop a solution pitch that positions Octopus to confidently invest in this initiative for the roadmap.

Research and Discovery

We began our discovery research by interviewing customers to determine the relevance of this problem within the ecosystem and how they currently navigate it.

The challenges we encountered included understanding each customer's unique workflow, infrastructure setup, and goals; assessing overall market trends and the desirability of potential technical directions; overcoming internal biases about what the solution should look like; and finding the minimal viable approach to validate the product idea and design.

Design and Validation

We began by brainstorming user job stories, selecting and prioritizing them to define the minimum lovable scope. For each job story, we explored ideas and sketched wireflows, which I then refined into prototypes. Throughout the process, we conducted customer research interviews, using prototypes to test our assumptions, validate concepts, and iterate based on feedback.