LogMeIn / Jive Communications · Jan 2014 – Aug 2021
Bringing a Twice-Reset Product to Production
After two earlier attempts to build JiveWeb had failed, I was given design leadership for the product. I worked with product and engineering to bring it to production and get it into customers’ hands.
Research, shared exploration, and closer collaboration helped us make progress. The product reached production, and after LogMeIn acquired Jive I helped bring GoToConnect and GoToMeeting into a shared product experience.
30-second read
What matters in this case
- The challenge
- Two earlier attempts to build the communications product had failed before I was asked to lead its design, while competitors continued to move ahead.
- My contribution
- After I was given design leadership, I built research capacity and brought product and engineering into design decisions. I later helped unify GoToConnect with GoToMeeting.
- The result
- The team brought the product to production with me leading design. My later remit covered GoToConnect, GoToCallCenter, GoToAdmin, and GoToRoom.
- Pivotal decision
- We used deliberately low-fidelity prototypes to align on workflows before investing in another expensive implementation direction.
- Production
- Reached release after I took over design leadership
- 4 products
- Created or substantially improved under design leadership
“Too hard to do business with”
Partners churning, blaming the software
“Channel Partners love selling us”
The exact phrase partners started using
Related work at Jive: this diagram summarizes the partner-service changes developed alongside the product work. Read the service design case study.
The Situation When I Was Asked to Lead Design
By the time I was asked to lead design, two earlier attempts to build JiveWeb — the product that would eventually become GoToConnect — had failed. Those attempts involved different codebases and teams; neither reached release.
Competitors like RingCentral had years of head start. The team had lived through two failed attempts and carried the weight of that history. Trust in the product — and in design — had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Reset twice
Two earlier attempts had failed before I was given design leadership — new codebases, teams, and approaches. The product had not reached release, and morale reflected it.
Competitors years ahead
Unified communications was a crowded space. RingCentral and others had shipped, iterated, and refined. We were catching up from behind.
Two product lines
GoToConnect and GoToMeetings operated separately — different teams, different patterns, different design languages. The market expected one experience.
The inventory
What two resets actually leave behind
Every number below was true the week I took over. Select a tile to see what I changed.
Building the Research Infrastructure
Before I could design the right thing, I needed to understand the problem — and give the whole team the means to keep learning. I built the research infrastructure from scratch.
Understanding the competitive landscape
- Attended competitor conferences Went where the products were sold — handled the tools, talked to users, asked about roadmaps
- Catalogued competitor products Support sites, feature requests, user reviews — systematic capture of what competitors were doing right
- Tracked real user conversations Twitter, Reddit, forums — reading what people actually said when they weren't being interviewed
Building a learning system
- Implemented session recording (GetJaco) Watched real user sessions — searched events, built funnels, observed behavior without bias
- Stood up analytics and feedback tools Google Analytics for behavior data; UserVoice for feature requests and bug reports — closed the loop from user to roadmap
- Built a customer panel Started a shared doc with users willing to have ongoing relationships — the product org adopted it and it changed how they thought about customers
- Ran continuous usability testing (Validately) Moderated and unmoderated tests — rapidly improving flows and catching issues before they shipped
- Get out of the Building Thursdays A standing weekly commitment to talk with real customers — sometimes at their workplaces, often by cold-calling them. The cold calls worked better than you'd think.
What I found
Some sessions I watched with specific questions in mind; others just to see what I'd notice. Both kept turning up insights that went straight into the design.
How I Approached the Work
Design wasn't separate from engineering — it was the organizing force that kept everyone moving in the same direction.
Collaborative ideation
Brought engineers and the PM into the design process before a single wireframe was drawn. Discussed technical constraints, scope, and research together. Better ideas — and shared ownership of the outcome.
Low-fidelity first
Sketching and rough wireframes before any pixel was polished. Rapid exploration of many directions — the fastest way to stress-test an idea is to draw it badly and see if it holds up.
Purposeful prototyping
Every prototype had a specific learning goal. Sometimes formal usability tests — other times just getting a sense for how a microinteraction felt. Used whatever tool fit the question: InVision, Atomic, Principle, Framer.
Continuous testing
Tested contact actions, call merge flows, multitasking scenarios, and join-conference experiences. Nomenclature, discoverability, feature presentation — each round of testing surfaced a more intuitive product.
Bringing the Experiences Together
In January 2019, I was asked to lead designers from both the GoToMeetings team and the GoToConnect team to unify their experiences — looks, interaction patterns, and functions.
Two products. Two teams. Two design languages. LogMeIn wanted them to feel like one platform — and they wanted it to feel like GoToConnect. I took on the project management and the design work simultaneously.
We started with an audit — a decision board mapping the differences between the two products, prioritizing what to harmonize first. Then we built toward a shared design system, one that would eventually extend to GoToWebinar and LastPass as well.
Five teams, five systems. No shared customer view—and little understanding of one another’s work.
- Sales
- expectations
- Support
- pain points
- Engineering
- constraints
- Billing
- obligations
- Product
- decisions
- More empathy
- Cleaner handoffs
- One experience
One cross-functional team, sharing context around the same customer journey.
The shared customer view shown here comes from my related Jive service design work across sales, support, and billing. The GoToConnect harmonization focused on communications interfaces and shared interaction patterns. Explore the service work.
Unified meeting experience
GoToConnect and GoToMeetings' in-meeting and pre-join screens harmonized to shared patterns — the same look, the same interactions, the same expectations.
Shaped next-gen GoToMeeting
The harmonization work gave me a non-trivial role in the direction of the next generation of GoToMeeting — a product used by millions.
Portfolio-wide design system
Part of a small group shaping the company's design system — work that trickled down to GoToMeetings, GoToWebinar, and LastPass.
The mandate grew from getting JiveWeb to production to helping GoToConnect and GoToMeeting work as one platform.
What Shipped
The product that came out the other side — one design language across browser, macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.
The same call, the same patterns, on whichever screen the customer picked up first.
Calls, channels, and history in one place — the harmonized language in production.
The Outcome
A product in customers’ hands, and a shared foundation for the next stage
The first three years cost two engineering teams and two design leaders. Recreated from my 2021 portfolio presentation. These historical product figures reflect the work of the broader team; they do not isolate the impact of design.
Product adoption as presented in my 2021 portfolio, recreated from the original presentation. These figures describe the product’s trajectory across the work of design, product, engineering, sales, and the wider company; they do not isolate the effect of design.
Company milestone
LogMeIn completed its acquisition of Jive on April 3, 2018 for approximately $342 million. I contributed product design and integration concepts within that broader company effort. Transaction details.
Broader design responsibility
My scope grew to include GoToConnect and its harmonization with GoToMeeting, working with designers, product leads, and engineers across the combined organization.
Product that shipped
After I was given design leadership, the team brought the product to release and went on to deliver browser, macOS, and Windows experiences for phone, video, and messaging.
Platform harmonized
Two separate product lines — GoToConnect and GoToMeetings — brought to a unified design system and shared experience.
Design culture built
Research practices, collaborative ideation, user panels — a customer-centered design culture that didn't exist when I arrived.
Team grown and led
Built and led an international team of product designers — mentored people who went on to lead design at other companies.
Beyond the Flagship
JiveWeb was the center of gravity — not the whole job. As Director of UX, I oversaw design across four GoTo products spanning web, mobile, admin, call-center, and conference-room experiences. Each was created or substantially improved under my leadership.
- GoToConnect — web, iOS & Android
- GoToCallCenter
- GoToRoom
- GoToAdmin
GoToRoom
Ten-foot UI: the portfolio, on the conference-room wall
A uniquely challenging surface: one design language driven across TVs, Dolby Voice hardware, signage tablets, and Crestron controllers — screens you operate from across the room.
Accessibility Champions
Together with Meg and Wendy, I helped kick off LogMeIn's Accessibility Champions program — a cross-team network that made accessibility a shared, ongoing practice instead of one team's job.
One design system, portfolio-wide
Part of the small group shaping the company-wide design system — work that reached GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, and LastPass.
Hiring & promotion councils
Sat on the leadership hiring council interviewing designers org-wide, and the promotion evaluation committee for the broader design organization.
What I Learned
Rebuilding trust is slower than building something new — and more important. A product reset twice leaves nothing technical behind — the codebases were thrown away. What it leaves is a team that's learned not to believe in what they're building.
The research infrastructure mattered as much as the designs. When you set up analytics, session recording, and user panels, you give the whole organization permission to learn — not just the design team. The PM started interviewing. The engineers started asking why. The product got better faster because more people were paying attention to users.
And the harmonization taught me something about leverage: if you build the right design system, one decision propagates across a whole portfolio of products. The work you do in one place ripples outward in ways you can't always see.