Case Study 04 // VMware Learning Platform

From Internal Tool to $1M+ SaaS Product

VMware Learning Platform (VLP) was a powerful internal tool, built over two decades. It had no consistent UX, an old architecture, and nothing that would make a customer want to buy it.

I led the design work that turned it into a commercial SaaS product. Along the way I earned the engineering team's trust, started a design team, and we reached $1M+ in new ARR in the first year after launch.

VMware Learning Platform interface showing cloud-based lab environment and training management — VLP: hands-on cloud labs in the browser, used for everything from sales demos to certification training.

role

Lead Designer → Design Manager

Market & user research, product transformation, team leadership.

2020

team & scale

Cross-Functional SaaS Squad

1 Designer (me) → hired 1 designer, 14 Engineers, 1 PM, 2 Solution Architects.

outcome

$1M+ ARR // 30+ Clients

From internal tool to 30+ Fortune 500 customers and 100K+ lab demos.

In 2020, VMware had an internal lab platform that had worked well for two decades. Engineers built it for engineers, and it handled complex virtual machine setups well.

Leadership saw a market in cloud training and wanted it turned into a SaaS product. The challenge: a strong engineering team that was skeptical of design changes to workflows that already worked, and 20 years of technical debt.

CULTURE

No Trust Yet

As the first designer on the team, I had to show value quickly without slowing engineering down.

PRODUCT

Commercial Pressure

Leadership wanted it modernized fast, to compete with smaller SaaS companies for enterprise training.

Original VLP interface showing inconsistent legacy design patterns — The original platform: powerful, but dense, inconsistent, and intimidating for buyers.

Information architecture and system mapping of legacy modules — Information architecture: sorting out 20 years of nested features.

I talked to three groups of users, and added technical deep dives and a look at competing SaaS products:

ARCHITECTS

Environment Setup

Needed flexible multi-VM templates and fast setup, without the command line.

INSTRUCTORS

Live Classroom Control

Needed to see students' screens live, help them, and track progress.

SALES TEAMS

Easy Demos

Needed one-click customer access in any browser, with no VPN or plugins.

User flow for creating a lab environment — Lab creation flow: every step of setting up a virtual environment.

Market positioning analysis and commercial SaaS opportunities — The market: what enterprise buyers expected from hands-on IT labs.

Customers wanted labs in the browser, without the admin work of traditional VM setups.

Developers and student personas in VLP — 01. Learners — Need instant feedback from the console.

Solution architects persona in VLP — 02. Lab Architects — Power users building complex network setups.

Enterprise sales and field engineers persona in VLP — 03. Sales & SEs — Running live demos in front of customers.

In an engineering-led team, proposing a ground-up redesign is the fastest way to hit a wall. So I didn't. I proposed small, useful design fixes every sprint.

I fixed legibility, alignment, and usability in the features engineers were already building. That showed design could speed them up, not slow them down.

EARNING TECHNICAL TRUST

Small fixes over a big redesign

Engineers came around when they saw that reusable components made front-end work faster, and that good UX meant less QA rework.

Iterative UI improvements and sprint-by-sprint design polish — Sprint fixes: table density, status badges, and toolbars.

Engineering collaboration and design integration milestone — Shared design tokens and a component library, built with the dev leads.

Once the team saw the value, they backed bigger changes.

The turning point came when I was asked to design a new Classroom Experience module from scratch. Instead of treating it as one more feature, I used it to show what a modern SaaS version of VLP could look like.

I mapped the full instructor and student journey, combining live VM status with simple controls for the instructor:

End-to-end user journey of VLP instructors and students — User journey: starting a session, getting students into labs, helping them live, and evaluating after class.

Instructor classroom management interface — Instructor view: every student's VM at a glance, with a way to step in.

Student interactive lab sandbox environment — Student view: lab instructions next to a live console.

The Classroom POC showed that enterprise labs could feel as smooth as a modern web app.

For the commercial market, I designed VLP Lite, a simpler self-service version that customers could get started with quickly, without losing the power underneath.

DISCLOSURE