Ping Identity

Trusted by more than half of the Fortune 100, Ping Identity’s Vice President of Experience Lindsey Cardwell and former Group Product Manager Joey Spinella share how they leverage the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite to achieve better collaboration, clarity, and alignment across their organization. 

Both Lucidchart and Lucidspark are widely adopted in the company as they have helped to embrace design thinking, leverage the design thinking mindset, encourage people to brainstorm better, and focus on the end-user point of view. Lucidspark is their primary training tool for brainstorming, storyboarding, observation, and design thinking. Lucidchart is where ideas and processes are mapped out further.

“Lucid enhances interactions for synchronous meetings while preserving a record that is easily accessible later on. They [Lucidchart and Lucidspark] are game changers. Being able to collaboratively build a working picture that everyone feels connected to, that you can reference over time, is a 10x value.” —Joey

Collaboration

At Ping Identity, the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite has been integral to moving to a hybrid workforce. When moving to a hybrid setting, organizations can often face certain challenges like lack of alignment, miscommunication, and siloed teams. Ping Identity wanted to make this transition as seamless as possible. Specifically, Lucidspark was brought in to help certain teams with long-term strategic planning, organizing thoughts and ideas, brainstorming, and gathering feedback in a hybrid setting. Because they already used Lucidchart across the organization, adding on the collaborative features of Lucidspark was simple. As teams adopted Lucidspark, it quickly became widely used across the organization as well. This organization-wide shift to remote work required the involvement of all teams to collaborate, communicate, and work together effectively.

Taking a closer look, Lucidspark has helped Lindsey and her hybrid team with initiatives like design thinking, strategic planning, and new product development. Features like Voting, Sort, and Tagging were used to categorize responses to not only get buy-in from her team but also to have everything more digestible and traceable when looking back on a facilitation session.

From there, the team’s ideas and feedback are implemented into Lucidchart where they can plan workflows and map out their designs. From ideation to implementation, Lindsey’s team uses the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite to plan and execute projects faster than multiple applications. Everything in one place is a single source of truth for the past, present, and future. 

Similarly, Joey and his new remote team needed a solution to help build out a workshop for new verticals that were highly technical and involved a lot of moving parts. 

“Once I started using Lucid, I learned that we could be way more effective working remotely. We got way more engagement via Lucidspark vs. meeting in a conference room—much less awkward.”

Increasing team participation and collaboration is something that didn’t seem possible to Joey when moving to a remote setting, but with the intuitive features of Lucidchart and Lucidspark, it proved to be true. The Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite serves as a living blueprint for Ping Identity. Everything is located in one secure space. Their teams no longer have to switch from product to product, piecing together information. Now, everything conveniently lives together as real-time documents and boards.

Clarity

At the top of 2020, Lindsey and her team had been rolling out a design thinking training course that was fully in-person and interactive. As the workforce climate changed, they started looking at tools to help them navigate COVID-19 and how they could still embrace design thinking and innovation. Within the course, the team wanted to teach and encourage collaboration in a virtual setting. They considered other applications however nothing seemed to quite fit what they were looking for. 

That’s when one of their PMs brought up Lucid’s launch of Lucidspark. Being that they were already Lucidchart users, they had first-hand experience with the quick release of new features and functionality and were impressed with Lucid’s responsiveness to feedback. Thus, they decided to give Lucidspark a try.

Below is an image of the design thinking workshop. With lots of participants and ideas, having an intuitive application that kept it all organized was imperative for the workshop’s success. Participants were easily able to jump into Lucidspark and focus on learning design thinking. With Lucidspark, clarity was achievable amidst the complexity of the concept. 

Before adopting the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite, Joey and his team worked in ways that he describes as the “opposite of the Agile Manifesto.” Processes were messy, collaboration was difficult, and miscommunication was frequent. 

Joey was tasked with integrating a new technology that was recently acquired. This introduced a lot of technical complexity for him, UX, and the engineers. Joey describes, “Without Lucid, you have to write pages of specific info/requirements and hit like a sledgehammer to make sure everyone is aligned. I feel like with Lucid, we are able to have one flow to map out processes [trial end-to-end experience].” 

Without this clarity, developers may have started on designs or writing code only to have it scrapped, wasting valuable time.

During the pandemic especially, it was extremely important to map processes and plans in one document, where everyone was on the same page and could add their ideas. Joey explains that this was an inclusive way to turn a concept into a specific plan. Having mock-ups next to logic and data has been super helpful.

Alignment

At the time of a new product launch, Joey was on paternity leave so it was up to his team to progress forward even while he was gone. The flow they built out in Lucidchart helped to drive alignment and efficiency through that process. 

Joey explains, "When releasing a new admin experience, we wanted to make sure we gave users a period of time to opt in or out of the next look and feel. Visualizing this opt-in solution allowed us to get stakeholder alignment and approval for the launch on a very accelerated timeline. The same visualization enabled developers to quickly implement the solution according to requirements and release the new admin experience on our original schedule."

In contrast, Joey’s team’s old ways of working generally involved gathering in a meeting room, placing hundreds of sticky notes on a board, and having an analyst draw insights—a much more tedious and less collaborative process.

Through listening to Ping Identity’s experiences of navigating remote work and new product development, we see how the Lucid Visual Collaboration Suite has radically transformed how teams work across the organization. As they navigated the challenges of going hybrid, they quickly realized that Lucid bridged the gap between seeing and building their future.