DIGITALOCEAN
Paperspace + DigitalOcean Integration
Phase 1
TL;DR
Defining the first steps, as well as the medium and long term plan for how Paperspace and DigitalOcean become aligned.
The Opportunity
In July of 2023, DigitalOcean announced it had acquired Paperspace, an incredibly successful small business making waves in the AI and Machine Learning development space. The research and evaluation DO’s Design Strategist, our research and business partners, and I had conducted had informed the acquisition case and decision, much to my surprise and delight. In Q2 of 2023, while conducting research into the AI/ML space, I had jokingly said to my teammates that we should just acquire Paperspace - they filled all the gaps we needed to fill to be competitive in the space, and would complement our product suite neatly. Little did I know…
In a short span, my team leader brought us into the integration fold, with myself serving as the UX Lead for what would become a broad sweeping integration strategy. The integration strategy was defined by what we dubbed horizons, each which contained specific milestones to guide us forward while still meeting measurable goals.
UX Integration Phase 1
Getting up to speed
The initial user experience integration was less integration and more awareness and visibility. Alongside new peers and partners from Paperspace, I quickly got up to speed on the following:
Paperspace users, their goals, and their needs
cross-over between DO, Paperspace, and our other acquisition partners (Cloudways)
broad understanding and audit of the Paperspace platform, incl. how each product worked
who my new teammates are and their stories
high level audit of what a short term / medium term / long term / longest term IA and UI experience might look like
high level identification of conceptual/implementation conflicts in UX
Defining Phase 0 and 1
Phase 0 included all of the above, plus identifying and working with our Chief Revenue Officer’s team of product and revenue marketing subject matter experts to create pathways between DigitalOcean and Paperspace to provide immediate visibility for potential cross-over conversion.
Marketing content and visual experiences within the DigitalOcean and Paperspace authenticated and onboarding experiences to direct users to complementary products on the other platform with the goal of converting users from one platform to the other
UI designs for banners in DO and PS
Content design in collaboration with marketing content writers
Engineering partnership with Growth engineering team to define requirements
Mostly Miro/LucidSpark and a little bit of Figma
Identified quick wins in UX for “integrations” for existing cross-over customers
Product overlaps (storage, container registry)
Technology synergies (SSO, authorized application permissions, keys and secrets)
Phase 1 included implementing the quick wins identified:
elevating DO’s Spaces product to high prominence within the data/storage story for Gradient products, and designing a cleaner connection journey between DO and Paperspace that also simplified Paperspace’s existing connections experience
consulting on UX improvements for Notebooks
navigation recommendations for adding Paperspace access within DO’s Cloud console
Kicking off the integration process for Paperspace into DO’s billing engine
Outcomes
Marketing moments within DO and Paperspace went live with immediate impact, with the Paperspace banners on Login and on the springboard onboarding page driving 120% of conversions in the first 30 days post-go live. The Paperspace cross-marketing within the DO console experience drove 35% more sign-ups onto Paperspace’s platform.
Onto Horizon 2…
Phase 1 quickly sped into Phase 2, which includes many tasks, some of which included:
Paperspace/DO Billing Integration
With this project, I worked alongside PMs and both DO and PS engineers to update both the PS billing experience, the DO billing experience, and the DO billing backend to support Paperspace’s many thousands of rollover users and teams. This project work included mapping an entirely new strategy to handle Paperspace’s unique-to-do team/account hierarchical structure, managing a complex SSO and onboarding experience, redesigning many parts of the DO billing experience to accommodate per-second billing, and writing end-to-end user-facing comms for the pre-, ongoing-, and post-integration world.
H100s MVP
Paperspace’s first big release post-DO acquisition was to release H100s for public use. This involved redesigning Paperspace’s Machine Create page, embedding the machine request experience into the form, restructuring the entire internal process for machine request handling and approval, designing new management experiences for multi-node networks, and designing a multi-platform (DO and PS) cross-marketing experience to help users find the right machine for their use case.
