Modernizing Cloud Structure

Context

In early 2019 we started looking into a major user problem AKA Pay for relationship.

Up until 2018 GCP didn’t provide customers w/ billing tools where they could go and understand their spend, hence they proliferated theirs billing accounts in order to do that. unfortunately the user needed to create more Billing accounts. We on the other hand, wish they stayed with one billing account. But we’re fixing it...


Worked together with a user researcher to arrive at a NON EXIST solution that enables users a view of there cloud spend in a glance

Designed, defined and led development of a live reusable tree component.

Persona: Billing Ops

‘We are getting bought and I need to share a part of our Cloud so we could be transparent about our Cloud spend, which Billing Account should I share? How do I share? How much can I share?’

Persona: Dev

‘I need to start a new Project to run a DB test but I’m missing that option in the UI, who do I contact?’

Persona: Solution owner

"I own a business unit in my company which translates to a Folder in GCP. I have no clue which billing accounts are associated with it and to be honest it doesn't matter either, but I can't get a sense how much my team spends every day/week/month, please fix that"

--GCP's customer

From the Vision deck we pitched to our internal teams

Current state

Desired state

The Challenge

  • Empower customers with intuitive and flexible ways to organize, manage, and pay for their cloud spend.

  • This massive project entails 10+ sub projects that are convoluted within each other.

    • Pay for relationship was just one of them.

  • Modernizing Cloud Structure didn't have Eng allocation hence we had to pitch other teams our goals in order to get their buy-in so they could execute our vision and design.

Leadership

  • Single handed the entire design process for two years.

  • Communicated this project to stake holders and other Cloud Billing teams to get their buy-in and received green light to move forward with MVP design.

Impact

  • Three teams including Monetizer, Cost management front end, and the Partner/Reseller teams gave green light and as a result of that implementation started as of Q1 2021 and expected to end Q3 2021.


Areas for improvement

  • It took us quite some time to understand that our biggest barriers are our internal partners who we counted on executing.