Activation Flow Prototype
A prototype that made the case for a unified CockroachDB console across Cloud and self-hosted, and reshaped the team's roadmap.
We were already bringing self-hosted customers into the Cloud console for license management, but still treating Cloud and self-hosted as separate products. I saw a bigger opportunity: stop thinking in terms of deployment models and start thinking about the humans on the other end. Self-hosted represented the majority of CockroachDB's revenue, yet those customers had no guided onboarding, no activation signals, and no way for us to help them succeed beyond hoping they found the right docs page. The console could be more than a place to manage cloud clusters: it could be a unified surface for helping every customer get value from the product.
I'd been making the case for this across the org for weeks. People agreed in principle, but the conversations stayed abstract. Heads would nod in the room, and nothing would change after. The problem wasn't alignment; it was conviction. People couldn't act on something they couldn't see. So I shifted tactics: instead of explaining the vision, I built it.
Using Figma Make, I created a clickable prototype in hours, complete with specific feature concepts, the rationale behind each, and the outcomes they'd drive. I paired it with a companion document and a five-minute video walkthrough. It accomplished what weeks of conversations couldn't: the CTO, SVP of Engineering, and VP of Product didn't just understand the vision, they prioritized it.
The console team's roadmap shifted immediately. Despite this being outside my product area, the owners saw the value and bought in. We'd been building an onboarding flow for Cloud customers, and now prioritized extending it into the license generation workflow for self-hosted users. The concept was straightforward: when a customer generated a license, they'd be told it was on its way via email and immediately dropped into a guided activation flow. Rather than overhauling the console all at once, we identified narrowly scoped projects like this to iterate toward the longer-term vision.
The console would no longer be just a management interface for cloud infrastructure. It would become the place where every CockroachDB customer, regardless of how they deployed, could understand the value they were getting and discover how to multiply it. That reframe would give the console team a way to magnify the reach of everything they built, and give leadership a clear path to accelerating growth across their largest revenue segment.
