Flagship Case Study

Re-Architecting the Red Hat Product Trial Ecosystem

Transforming a fragmented evaluation experience into a scalable self-service platform supporting enterprise buyers, cloud marketplace users, and technical evaluators across the Red Hat portfolio.

144%

Year-over-Year increase in visits for OpenShift Developer Sandbox

44%

Increase in activations for OpenShift Developer Sandbox

$20.5M

Opportunity value generated by sales-assisted product trials in Q1 FY26

$39.5M

Closed Won Value attributed to product trial activity in Q3 FY25

Project Overview

From scattered trial paths to a connected acquisition platform.

Red Hat Product Trials (RHPT) serves as the primary evaluation and acquisition platform for products including OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ansible, and cloud-native services.

The ecosystem supports multiple acquisition channels including self-service product trials, sales-assisted evaluations, AWS Marketplace deployments, and enterprise subscription evaluations.

As adoption expanded, the platform accumulated significant operational complexity, fragmented activation journeys, and limited visibility into user behavior across systems.

My role was to redesign the end-to-end onboarding, activation, subscription management, and trial lifecycle experience while improving telemetry, reducing friction, and increasing conversion efficiency.

Role & Responsibilities

Strategy, architecture, dashboard design, governance, and cross-functional leadership.

Principal UX Product Designer Product Strategy Experience Architecture Dashboard Design Subscription Management Cross-Functional Leadership Design Systems Governance Marketplace Experience Design Analytics & Optimization

Partners: Product Management, UX Research, Digital Analytics, Design Engineering, Cloud Operations, IT Engineering, and Global Sales Teams.

The Challenge

The product trial ecosystem evolved across numerous disconnected systems and acquisition channels.

This resulted in significant friction for both customers and internal stakeholders.

Customer Challenges

  • Complex onboarding journeys
  • Multiple authentication handoffs
  • Fragmented activation experiences
  • Poor subscription visibility
  • Limited lifecycle management

Business Challenges

  • Disconnected systems
  • Manual sales workflows
  • Limited telemetry
  • Slow publishing processes
  • Fragmented ownership across teams

The most significant issue emerged within AWS Marketplace activation workflows where users successfully authenticated through Red Hat SSO but encountered a hidden permissions barrier requiring elevated AWS IAM administrative privileges.

Customers demonstrated strong intent but failed before completing activation.

Discovery & Systems Mapping

Mapping the complete request-to-activation ecosystem revealed the real work.

The first phase focused on understanding the complete request-to-activation ecosystem.

I mapped workflows spanning:

  • Red Hat Sales Cloud
  • Salesforce
  • Alfresco
  • Zendesk
  • HOCK Application
  • AWS Marketplace
  • Red Hat Trial Services

The resulting architecture exposed multiple manual handoffs, duplicated processes, and disconnected telemetry streams that slowed activation and obscured customer behavior.

Research Evidence

The source research showed where users needed continuity, visibility, and clearer buying paths.

70%

Modal comprehension gap

Participants expected Explore Now content to be currently visible and did not realize the opened modal had more scrollable content.

60%

My Trials home page validation

General responses complimented the My Trials home page, indicating that the layout and architecture were intuitive, usable, and meeting user needs.

2 paths

Purchase preference split

Customers preferred self-service marketplace options for smaller purchases, but enterprise users with larger accounts preferred contacting sales for personalized service.

Critical Insight

The problem was not customer intent. The problem was system design.

Analytics revealed a 1,467% increase in users initiating AWS Marketplace provisioning but failing before subscription completion due to enterprise IAM permission restrictions.

Intent

Customers were not casually browsing. They were starting real provisioning workflows.

The funnel showed strong activation intent before the experience crossed into identity, marketplace, and permission systems.

Complete Red Hat Product Trial ecosystem architecture An architecture diagram showing trial entry channels, Red Hat identity, marketplace provisioning, trial services, My Trials lifecycle management, telemetry, publishing systems, observability, and sales-assisted routing. Entry channels Activation core Lifecycle + operations Trial Center Product intent AWS Marketplace Cloud buyers Sales Trials Enterprise path Red Hat SSO Identity handoff Trial Services Provisioning state IAM Barrier Admin access required My Trials Lifecycle dashboard Active + expired Renewal cues Drupal Publishing @rhpt/elements UI governance Sentry Observability Sales Cloud Qualified handoff 1,467% Failure signal exposed by telemetry
01

Entry channels

Product Trial Center, AWS Marketplace, and sales-assisted requests captured evaluation intent.

02

Activation core

Red Hat SSO and Trial Services carried users into provisioning, where hidden IAM permissions blocked completion.

03

Lifecycle visibility

My Trials, observability, shared components, and Sales Cloud routing made trial state and follow-up visible.

1,467%

Failure signal

Telemetry exposed marketplace provisioning starts that failed before subscription completion.

Reimagining the Trial Experience

A redesigned experience model brought onboarding, routing, lifecycle management, and state clarity into one coherent system.

Simplified Activation

Embedded registration directly into trial entry experiences, collapsing authentication and activation into a streamlined onboarding flow.

Intelligent Routing

Redesigned TryIt SPA routing logic using application state flags to bypass unnecessary screens and route authenticated users directly into activation workflows.

Subscription Lifecycle Management

Designed and launched the My Trials dashboard.

The dashboard became the centralized command center for:

  • Active trials
  • Expired trials
  • Subscription status
  • Remaining evaluation time
  • Renewal eligibility
  • Purchase readiness

Visual State Management

Introduced highly visible lifecycle indicators including:

  • Days Remaining progress indicators
  • Expiration states
  • Activation eligibility messaging
  • Subscription health indicators

Dashboard System

My Trials became the centralized command center.

Source research positioned My Trials as the authenticated experience for active or expired trial subscriptions, post-activation redirects, Product Trial Center CTAs, and the My Red Hat authenticated drawer.

OpenShift

18 days remaining

RHEL

Ready to activateEligible

Ansible

Expired trialRenewal path

Marketplace

Provisioning reviewAWS IAM required

Explore Now

Content visibleTooltip clarity

Recommendations

Personalized next stepRequested enhancement

Enterprise Purchasing Paths

Research revealed meaningful differences between SMB and enterprise procurement behavior.

A single conversion path could not effectively support both audiences.

To address this, I redesigned the purchase experience around two distinct pathways:

  • Purchase Online — Marketplace-driven self-service transactions
  • Contact Sales — Enterprise procurement and licensing engagement

This reduced ambiguity while improving lead qualification and conversion efficiency.

Technical Collaboration

Modernizing the system required design, engineering, analytics, and publishing changes moving together.

Publishing Modernization

Partnered with engineering teams to transition from hardcoded HTML trial center experiences to Drupal 10 Layout Builder architecture.

This reduced publishing dependencies and significantly improved release velocity.

Shared Component Library

Collaborated with Design Engineering on implementation of the federated @rhpt/elements component library.

This established a consistent UI foundation across the trial ecosystem and improved governance at scale.

Observability Improvements

Integrated Sentry monitoring to capture:

  • Application failures
  • API timeout events
  • Browser-specific issues
  • Activation edge cases

Outcomes

Business impact landed across developer adoption, marketplace completion, sales-assisted demand, and revenue.

OpenShift Developer Sandbox

  • 144% Year-over-Year increase in visits
  • 44% increase in activations

AWS Marketplace

  • 1,081 Start Trial conversions
  • 51% successful completion of SSO return and provisioning workflow

Sales-Assisted Product Trials

  • 505 submitted requests
  • 400 approved requests
  • 188 unique opportunities
  • $20.5M opportunity value generated in Q1 FY26

Revenue Impact

  • 51 closed-won opportunities in Q1 FY26
  • $7.3M closed-won value in Q1 FY26
  • $39.5M Closed Won Value attributed to product trial activity in Q3 FY25

Organizational Impact

The redesigned ecosystem delivered more than improved user experiences.

Integrated dashboards equipped product, sales, and leadership teams with actionable visibility into customer behavior and activation performance.

The initiative improved lead routing efficiency, increased operational visibility, and helped establish a unified enterprise design standard through shared components and governance.

Reflection

Customer acquisition challenges rarely exist within a single interface.

This project reinforced that customer acquisition challenges rarely exist within a single interface.

The largest opportunities often emerge at the intersection of products, systems, teams, and business processes.

Success required balancing customer experience, marketplace integrations, enterprise procurement models, technical constraints, and organizational alignment.

The resulting platform created a scalable foundation for future growth while helping shift the organization toward frictionless cloud-native acquisition experiences.