Global people and teams management

June 2023 - November 2023

The problem

In lead-up to Ansarada’s 2024 acquisition, I also helped with the carve out business, Drova.

Drova was challenged by it’s suite of legacy and emerging products that each had it’s own system for managing users. This created increasing technical debt and hindered product cross-sell.

To solve this problem, our team and I were tasked to create a unified user management system that could support all three products from one location.

Outcome and impact

Over five months, our team and I designed and released the new user management system for Drova, unifying three separate user systems into one scalable solution.

Key outcomes:

  • Maintained continuity for paying TrilineGRC customers with no disruption.

  • Created the foundation for cross-sell into Drova’s new products: Operational Resilience and Double Materiality Assessment.

  • Reduced future tech debt and supported Drova’s transition out of Ansarada.

My design process

Learning from the best-in-class

Because complex user management is a solved problem from many best-in-class products, I created system models complex products used internally in Ansarada(e.g. Atlassian, BambooHR) to map out the structure of potential user management solutions we could leverage ourselves for Drova.

Alongside this, I reviewed internal training manuals and conducted internal stakeholder interviews to understand the pain points, emotions and frustrations with managing system access across multiple teams.

Proposing my concept design

I combined the insights from my research along with the projects requirements to create multiple concept designs for design review.

Creating multiple solutions was critical because it surfaced two major challenges:

  1. Senior stakeholder’s lacked alignment on project scope and goals.

  2. Our product team lacked clarity on whether to support legacy or emerging products first.

Overcoming technical difficulties

Fundamentally, this project was more a technical challenge rather than a design problem. Combining the user management system of emerging and legacy products is a complex problem that requires give and take.

So that I could design clearly, all the technical constraints and difficulties had to be clear. What I did to achieve this was by leading team and key stakeholder regular design reviews to iron out uncertainties and discuss feasibility.

By maintaining frequent communication and involving key decision-makers in our design process, we gradually defined our team’s priorities and scope.

This enabled us to come to a final design that we could deliver incrementally over multiple releases.

Final design

I designed the People & Teams system in three phased releases, prioritizing TrilineGRC (Legacy) and Operational Resilience (newly released) to support existing customers and cross-sell opportunities.

Our solution enabled both existing and new customers to set up teams and manage users in a single, centralized location by:

  1. Role-Based Access Control: "Role" concept to ensure backward compatibility with legacy products (TrilineGRC) while supporting new products.

  2. Teams vs. Security Groups: Replaced "Security Groups" with "Teams”. This allowed users to belong to multiple teams, instead of being limited to a single security group, simplifying access rights management.

  3. People and Teams Filter: As the Drova product suite targeted SMEs, typically involving 6–15 users on the platform, we implemented a view switcher to help administrators better manage their organisation.