Success Metrics Foundational Dashboard - Sonatype
Sonatype's Lifecycle product had a Success Metrics section, meant to show customers how the security of their code and software was trending. Almost no one used it. As a senior product designer, I led the effort to rebuild it from the ground up into a comprehensive Success Metrics dashboard that customers would actually reach for. The developers built the final design in Looker, embedded in the product through an iframe, a constraint that shaped much of the work.
Company
Sonatype
Date
H2 2024
Role
Senior Product Designer
The Problem
The old Success Metrics section gave users a basic read on how their product usage was going, but the data was blunt: almost no one opened it. Three reasons stood out. It had not been designed by a designer, so it was confusing. No user personas had been considered or interviewed in building it. And the Customer Success team had quietly built their own version, pulling existing APIs into Google Sheets charts, that customers actually preferred.
So the old page was pulled, and the work of building a real, comprehensive dashboard began. One hard constraint framed everything that followed: it would live in Looker, embedded through an iframe, which put real limits on the UI and UX I could deliver.
The Objectives & Key Results
The dashboard needed to:
Serve both DevOps and Security personas, and hold up under real testing.
Replace the stopgap Customer Success had built, for their team and for users.
Use every filtering option available to make the experience as strong as the technical limits allowed.
Significantly raise the Account Adoption Rate, which sat at 2.62%.
The Process
I started by evaluating what existed. A holistic design review of the old page found little worth keeping. Far more useful were several interviews with the Customer Success team, who walked me through the version they had built and why customers gravitated to it.
From there, I built a wireframe, shared it with the Tech Lead, Product Manager, and Customer Success, and refined it against their input. A full-resolution mockup followed, tested iteratively with users. Given how tightly the build was constrained, I leaned hard on what users told me they needed most: filtering, clear chart sections, and the ability to export the raw data, which was the single most universal ask across everyone I interviewed.
The final draft was validated with internal stakeholders, including senior management and the Customer Success team.
The Solution
The finished dashboard brought together line, pie, area, column, and bar charts, BANs, and tabular data, with nine filters and the export capability users had asked for: the data of the page as a whole, and of each individual chart, downloadable to PDF and CSV. It surfaced trends over time, current usage, and detailed deep-dive data in one place. Every part of the Customer Success charting solution made it in, with several charts redesigned outright to follow best practices and better fit the user story.
Accessibility was the hardest fight here, and worth describing honestly. The organization required the dashboard to be built in Looker and embedded via iframe, and Looker is not an accessible tool. So I pushed accessibility as far as the constraints allowed. I set intentional contrast between chart lines and their backgrounds, and designed for colorblindness as best as possible for charts with 3 or more data sets. I added value labels to charts where the format allowed, mirrored the parent data in accessible data tables on the page, let users download any chart's data as a spreadsheet, and used hover states to surface individual data points. None of it made Looker fully accessible, but each choice narrowed the gap the tool left open.
The Results
Account adoption told the clearest story. It rose from 2.62% to 16.78%, more than a sixfold jump in a matter of months. Customer Success added an early signal of their own: they could immediately name 30 customer companies who would switch from their stopgap to the new in-product dashboard.
The impact outlasted the launch. Over the following months, the Enterprise Reporting team's standing in the organization grew, earning a larger share of the product roadmap and deeper leadership involvement. And because Sonatype uses its own products, the dashboard reached the highest level: senior leadership now uses it to show the company's own usage success to the Board of Directors.
