“When you’re driving innovation, it’s going to make people uncomfortable,” says Carla Guzzetti, “because you’re asking the business to change, and you’re asking people to change how they’re operating.”
How do you deal with that discomfort on your way to delivering results? In this interview, we talk with Guzzetti, the SVP Product Experience and Innovation at Extreme Networks, the $1.3 billion networking infrastructure company. An expert in customer experience and product innovation, Guzzetti previously spent over a decade in the media and publishing industry, with stints at the Village Voice and Lonely Planet, among other firms.
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Overview
Extreme Networks provides AI-driven cloud networking solutions. Our mission is to help our customers find new ways of leveraging their networks to achieve better outcomes for their businesses or organizations.
Future of Work
One of the main outcomes that we identified pre-pandemic, and that the pandemic really exaggerated, is the idea of organizations transforming into the “Infinite Enterprise,” where they can deliver consumer-centric experiences at scale and ensure those experiences are seamless and secure no matter where the consumer is located. Because our traditional tethers to the office and home no longer exist as they once did, businesses need a flexible, secure way to scale operations.
Innovation + Product Experience
Greater workplace flexibility, IT staffing shortages, and the widespread adoption of AI — combined with the fact that younger generations are becoming the network admins of the future – mean we need to exceed expectations and deliver a unified experience for our users. For Extreme, innovation is linked to product experience because we need to think about what the user experience will be like from day one.
What is Product Experience?
Product experience is really about the holistic feeling a customer gets when interacting with our product. It’s more than just the user interface or the user experience, although those are vital components. We think about it as a synergy of UI, UX, the content we provide, and the data that drives personalization.
What we’re doing with AI is really exciting because it allows us to weave these elements together in a way that creates entirely new experiences. We’re implementing AI horizontally across our products to anticipate customer needs, provide proactive support, and ultimately, deliver a more seamless and intuitive experience. It’s about building a product that not only meets customer expectations but truly delights them.
Product experience is really about the holistic feeling a customer gets when interacting with our product. It’s more than just the user interface or the user experience…
How AI Can Accelerate Existing Workflows
Product experience is intrinsically linked to innovation because it forces us to constantly reimagine how users interact with our product and what they’re using it to accomplish. We see AI as a key enabler of this innovation. It’s not just about adding new features, but about fundamentally changing how we design and deliver value.
We’re pushing beyond the typical chatbot interactions and exploring how AI can accelerate existing workflows, making them faster and more efficient. For example, if customers need to extend subscription privileges, AI can pre-fill forms with user data, saving them time and effort.
Imagine an AI-powered design tool that allows users to design a complex network simply by describing what they want…
We’re also looking at how AI can replace cumbersome tasks entirely, freeing users to focus on more strategic work. For example, AI can proactively generate reporting and dashboards from complex datasets, eliminating the need for manual analysis and providing the user a clear action. And perhaps most excitingly, we’re using AI to create entirely new experiences that were previously impossible. Imagine an AI-powered design tool that allows users to design a complex network simply by describing what they want, and leveraging the existing data AI has access to.
This is where the connection between product experience and design becomes so critical. We need to think creatively about how to integrate these AI capabilities into the user interface in a way that feels natural and intuitive. It’s about designing for the future, where AI is seamlessly woven into the fabric of our products.
Organization
I report to Nabil Bukhari, Extreme’s Chief Technology and Product Officer and GM of our subscription business, alongside leaders in our product management, engineering, and Office of the CTO organizations.
Innovation Team
I manage a team of about 220 people. I oversee all of our front-end and experience teams, and since we’ve unified our front end that means I have our UI development team and our UX design team, in addition to our generative content teams, people working on AI innovation.
Goal Setting
We need to be able to shift based on market demands. First, we determine what broader outcome we’re trying to achieve for the year, then we think about strategy and start to plan resources and create a tactical game plan. We drive quarterly objectives based on that, and we align with what the greater product organization is doing based on where our leaders are focused. It’s a lot of collaboration with leadership and then breaking things down into what we can achieve with individual teams.
…Once we develop a tactical plan, we use a platform called Betterworks to track our progress on objectives and key results to make sure we’re staying on track.
Metrics
For strategy and operations, we follow a framework that our CTO/CPO has implemented where we think about the outcome we want to deliver, the strategy required, and then the resources. Then, once we develop a tactical plan, we use a platform called Betterworks to track our progress on objectives and key results to make sure we’re staying on track.
Our experience with Betterworks has been really insightful. It’s highlighted a couple of crucial areas in performance management: Mainly, we’ve learned that continuous feedback is essential. The platform has helped us shift away from traditional annual reviews and foster a culture of continuous feedback. This means more timely and relevant feedback, leading to faster development and improved performance, as well as stronger relationships and open communication between managers and employees.
Finding More Use Cases for AI
We’re looking at how to leverage AI to create all of our technical documentation moving forward, creating a template for it that makes it easier for humans to double-check and edit, and feed that information into a content lake that another AI tool uses to break down content for human users. So it’s both AI creating content and AI consuming that content. More broadly, I’m also looking at use cases for AI in graphic design, checking for inconsistencies in our UI, and bringing more AI into the product experience to save our customers time and build improved workflows. A lot of my days revolve around finding AI use cases, then working with teams to bring them into our products so they improve the overall customer experience.
Impact of AI
AI is going to create new business opportunities and streams of revenue. For example, it will help address IT staffing shortages; there’s a lot of opportunity here. AI is also going to impact how simple we can make the experience for network administrators, and eventually, the role of the network admin will change completely from how it looks today. There will always be a human element, but that will change over time as it always has, making us faster and making processes more efficient so humans have more time to do what we do best – be creative and innovate.
Customer Feedback
We look at customer feedback from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Quantitatively, we have aggregate user behavioral data that tells us what people are doing and what overall trends we can identify. Qualitatively, we frequently host customer advisory groups and beta tests, as well as ethnographic studies where we can see how people are really using the product and visually understand what their daily routine looks like. And then we take that data to our product team and use it to help prioritize feature sets and improvements that most benefit our customers.
Startups
I’m always paying attention to the market, and watching the rise and fall of startups is a great way to do that in the technology industry. It helps me keep an eye on what’s coming and get in front of potential problems or trends. I like to be aware of what’s out there and what could potentially impact our space, as well as what partners we might want to align with in the future.
Example
We’re really impressed with what we’re seeing from Writer so far. One of our biggest challenges is creating and maintaining high-quality technical documentation that keeps pace with our product development and partner/ customer feedback. It’s a constant effort to ensure accuracy, clarity, and consistency across a vast amount of content.
Right now, we’re testing Writer to see how it can help us scale our documentation efforts and respond to content gaps more quickly. We’re particularly interested in its ability to help us accelerate content creation when drafting technical content, maintain consistency in style across different writers, and help us ensure accuracy. It’s still early days, but we’re optimistic that Writer can be a valuable tool and help us in our efforts to provide world-class technical documentation to our users.
Getting Bloody
Paraphrasing a quote from the movie Moneyball, “The first guy through the wall always gets bloody.” When you’re driving innovation, it’s going to make people uncomfortable because you’re asking the business to change, and you’re asking people to change how they’re operating. So, with innovation comes a tremendous amount of change management because technology can change all the time, but it’s how people change that really drives innovation. And I think that that is commonly overlooked.
