Collibra serves complex enterprise customers managing governance, privacy, and trust across massive data ecosystems. The platform spans multiple personas — from data stewards and engineers to compliance leaders and executives — each with distinct mental models and success metrics.
The Problem
UX had grown organically alongside product capabilities, resulting in:
- Inconsistent interaction patterns across modules
- High cognitive load for non-technical users
- Limited shared UX principles across teams
My Role
As VP of Product Design, I led the UX strategy to scale design quality, consistency, and clarity across the platform while enabling teams to move faster.
Approach
- Defined a platform-level UX vision aligned to Collibra's Data Intelligence Cloud strategy
- Established shared UX principles grounded in trust, clarity, and confidence
- Introduced a design operating model that balanced centralized standards with embedded product teams
Impact
- Improved cross-product consistency and learnability
- Faster delivery through shared patterns and design language
- Stronger executive confidence in UX as a strategic lever, not just execution
Overview of Process Rollout
Sample Screens After 2 Years Running Product Design
Use Case Spotlight: Using NPS to Drive the Platform UX Roadmap
Focus: Turning customer sentiment into measurable UX, adoption, and revenue impact
Executive Summary
At Collibra, Net Promoter Score (NPS) became the primary signal for understanding platform UX health — not as a vanity metric, but as a decision-making input that directly shaped the UX roadmap. By combining NPS with journey-level analytics and business KPIs, we identified a critical experience gap between Admins and Consumers and reoriented the UX strategy toward growth, adoption, and expansion.
Key outcome: NPS insights exposed where the platform was protecting ARR — but failing to unlock expansion — and guided a roadmap focused on reducing time-to-value for Consumer journeys.
The Challenge: One Platform, Two Very Different Experiences
NPS analysis revealed a clear divide:
- Admins reported strong satisfaction and advocacy
- Consumers were neutral — neither detractors nor promoters
Despite using the same platform, these personas experienced it very differently. Admins tolerated and even benefited from complexity, while Consumers — who primarily wanted fast, reliable answers — were slowed down by that same complexity.
This surfaced a strategic risk:
- Stable Admin NPS protected renewals
- Flat Consumer NPS quietly limited adoption, engagement, and expansion
Why NPS Was the Right Signal (and Not Enough on Its Own)
We intentionally framed NPS as a directional signal, not a standalone KPI — a starting point for deeper investigation.
Strengths we leaned into:
- Clear trend tracking over time
- Qualitative feedback revealing friction points
- Benchmarking against SaaS and data-platform peers
Limitations we mitigated:
- Paired NPS with journey analytics, activation metrics, and ARR correlations
- Avoided feature-level decisions based on score alone
This approach allowed us to translate sentiment into strategy, not just reporting.
Turning Insight into a UX Strategy
The Core Insight
Today's one-size-fits-all experience protects core ARR — but blocks growth.
NPS segmentation by user type, combined with sentiment analysis, consistently pointed to navigation complexity, search relevance and clarity, and difficulty finding meaningful answers quickly. These were not edge cases — they were systemic UX issues affecting Consumer adoption.
Connecting NPS to Business Outcomes
We linked UX friction directly to time-to-value metrics:
- Time to First Ingestion (Activation) — Faster ingestion strongly correlated with expansion and reduced churn
- Time to Paid User Activation (Adoption) — Customers activating users earlier were significantly less likely to churn
- Time to Consumer Traction (Retention) — Faster Consumer onboarding improved both retention and ARR expansion
- Time to Data Marketplace Usage (Expansion) — Engaged Consumers were materially more likely to expand contracts
These correlations reframed UX work as a growth lever, not just a quality initiative.
How NPS Directly Shaped the UX Roadmap
NPS insights drove three key roadmap decisions:
1. Journey Differentiation Explicitly designed for Admin vs. Consumer needs — reduced cognitive load where speed and clarity mattered most.
2. Time-to-Value as a UX Metric UX initiatives prioritized by their impact on activation and adoption — shifted conversations from "feature delivery" to "value delivery."
3. Platform-Level Improvements Navigation, search, and content clarity treated as growth infrastructure. Small UX improvements aggregated into measurable NPS and adoption gains.
Leadership Alignment & Cultural Impact
This work culminated in executive alignment around a clear mandate:
"We must prioritize fixing existing issues and obscure complexity from customers to deliver a consistently high-quality experience."
NPS became a shared language across Design, Product, and Engineering — a way to balance intuition with evidence, and a tool for aligning teams around customer outcomes, not internal abstractions.
At Collibra, I led the use of NPS as a strategic UX signal to guide platform roadmap decisions. By segmenting NPS by user type and pairing sentiment with journey analytics and time-to-value metrics, we uncovered a critical gap: Admins were satisfied and renewing, while Consumers were neutral, limiting adoption and expansion. These insights reframed UX priorities around differentiating Admin and Consumer experiences, reducing complexity, and accelerating time to value — directly connecting UX improvements to activation, retention, and ARR growth.