A short list of DigitalOcean projects I’m proud of but not really worthy of a whole case study
We all have these projects. They’re great. I’m glad they happened. But do you want to read a whole case study about them? Probably not. But they’re proof that my work has, in fact, made a difference.
Paperspace H100s
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.
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.
A bunch of billing stuff
The billing team at DO is the glue that holds much of the product experience together. Teams check their usage every day, and diligently pay (or don’t pay) their amount owed every month. Teams using DO to host their infrastructure may have any plethora of commitment deals, discounts, special contracts, or net-payment options that our support staff, AEs, and many more have to manage. As DO continues to attract larger SMBs and enterprise companies, we needed to offer a more robust billing experience - both to users, and to our internal staff managing this experience.
I worked on several critical billing projects, both for internal users and customers, including making commitment deals manageable in the console, enhancing discount displays and management, designing a way in the backend for DO staff to look up prices by product or SKU, updating our dunning flows and communication methods to better serve our users, and adding more content to our invoices and CSVs for power users.
An IPv6 Deep Dive
The R&D team, “Design-Led Engineering”, was tasked with identifying opportunities, roadblocks, and expectations around transitioning our users to IPv6. This effort involved deep research, interviews, a survey, analysis and synthesis of user research results, internal platform auditing of gaps and opportunities in our offerings, and finally writing a case study for our executive team and board on recommended next steps for the inevitable IPv6 transition. I was the primary writer and editor of the document.