When Highspot set out to revamp how licenses are packaged and sold, I worked with a cross-disciplinary team to develop licensing concepts & experiences that met the business's needs while remaining easy for customers to understand and simple to manage at scale. As a result, Highspot is able to generate revenue with new licensing packages while customers manage their domains with clarity and efficiency.
Highspot is a sales enablement platform that helps sales teams perform by guiding, training, coaching, and analyzing their success.
Highspot’s product is sold using licenses with varying feature sets. The legacy licensing portal allowed administrators to view license capacity and usage, as well as manage license assignments to users, all from a single location within the platform.
This design project supported a complete revamp of how we sell and package our licenses. This work had two main business goals:
Replace a simple good-better-best license model with a more flexible selection of feature micro-packages. In a business climate where new customers are difficult to obtain, granular licenses enable Highspot to grow existing contracts by licensing feature packages specific to customers’ individual needs.
Make licensing self-service. This supports an organizational goal of moving services from an unlimited customer support model toward self-service for most customers, reducing customer support costs as the company seeks scale, efficiency, and profitability.
Solution owners are customers who lead Highspot use and adoption within their organizations. They are responsible for administering their Highspot environment so that it effectively and efficiently serves their colleagues.
Our user goals for licensing were to:
This project was driven by specific business requirements from the company's senior leadership. My product team was responsible for experience design and execution.
Licensing is what a customer purchases, what features their users have access to, and what permissions certain types of users have in the platform.
In our legacy system, licenses could be purchased at good-better-best levels, each enabling a greater set of features and permissions. Licenses were applied to groups, which granted permissions to individual users in the group. Groups could be populated with users either manually or automatically using SCIM attributes synchronized from customer data. Admins could understand license usage with both a dashboard and an analytics tool.
My approach was to reduce complexity through simple and consistent mental models, then rally the product crew around a vision. With shared understanding and well defined concepts, a UI could be proposed to help identify remaining issues.
As a high priority project with little lead time, design and development proceeded concurrently. Keeping the team aligned around what we’re doing and why we’re doing it was the top priority.
When we start together, we stay together and move quickly. Rather than exploring the problem independently, I engaged the entire product team right away. We used working sessions with a balanced team of product managers and developers to talk through the logic supporting the business policy. By starting together, I created team alignment and avoided misunderstandings as UI design and code were being concurrently created.
I pushed the team to establish the system's mental models early. Regular check-ins ensured the entire team shared an understanding, including the language we used to describe the concepts.
With abstract mental models and specific business logic defined, I knew that the UI could be defined quickly.
Two primary questions emerged early in the design process:
"How might we add new license features that are necessary for the business while keeping the experience simple enough to effectively manage?"
Despite the perceived certainty of the business requirements, it was important to align the team around design principles and define a successful experience.
The new Highspot Licensing experience adds support for more license types while making it easier to understand and manage usage at scale.
In brief, we added the following features:
Behind a simple UI is a complex set of business policy and legacy decisions. Creating a simple experience was achieved by exposing only the necessary concepts for solution owners to complete their work.
Business leaders introduced a number of changes to how we package and market our offerings. This added considerable complexity, but much of it could be simplified in the license administration tools.
Licenses are applied to groups, then all group members receive a set of features and privileges. What happens when a user is a member of two license granting groups? We decided to use a principle of most privilege so that the most permissive license granted is used. This applies independently to both base and user add-on licenses so that the best of each is always in effect.
In the legacy product, new users were automatically added to an “everyone” group that granted a license. Because of the principle of most privilege, if that group was set to anything other than the lowest purchased license tier, lower licenses could not be applied. The result was that each user requiring a higher tier license had to be manually added to a special licensing group before they could use Highspot. This became a daily chore for our solution owners that consumed much of their time.
Replacing the everyone group is a new concept: default licenses. Default licenses apply a selected license to everyone who is not in a license-granting group. This allows solution owners to set defaults that work for most of their users, requiring no further intervention. For specialized user groups, licenses can be set to either a higher or lower tier.
This is particularly helpful when an organization grants most of its users a mid-tier license, but also has some contractors who need a lower tier license. Instead of making the lower tier license the default and manually reassigning all other users to a higher tier as in the legacy model, this new model sets a default that works for most users and allows for exceptions.
There’s always concern when adding a net-new concept to a system. In this case, creating defaults adds conceptual complexity while reducing operational complexity. Our solution owners are deeply invested in understanding the product and prefer to learn more if it saves them time in the future.
The result is less administrative work for solution owners, often several hours per week. For small & medium business customers with simple licensing requirements, the default is sufficient so that solution owners never need to assign licenses.
User kind is a legacy licensing concept that we continue to support. It was created so customers could add their contractor partners to Highspot without sharing some kinds of sensitive company content. The result is a discounted “partner” license that grants all of the features of an equivalent “employee” license, but limits data access. Partner licenses are an off-list option that is rarely sold, but remains important for several major customer relationships.
My design approach was to expose this complexity only as it applied. For customers without partner accounts, the option could simply be hidden. But for customers using partner licenses, the simplest approach was to use a single selection UI that would apply base licenses and user add-ons simultaneously. All members of a group, regardless of employee or partner status, receive the same base and add-on licenses. If a user is a partner, their privileges are reduced and they consume a less expensive license. The key insight was recognizing that employees and partners didn’t need to have their licenses managed separately, they only needed to have the results of licensing decisions be made visible.
As this project was the first instance of several new product concepts, I worked with our visual design team on presenting these ideas. Together, we created a set of “illicons” (illustration icons) to help distinguish and market our new domain add-on license offerings.
I also created some visual indicators to make license usage data easier to understand at a glance. In most cases, solution owners are only interested in usage counts when they’ve exceeded their allotted licenses. The resulting indicator brings attention only to these areas. The pattern was later adopted as part of highspot’s design system.
In October 2023, the new licensing experience rolled out to Highspot’s customers.