CircleCI Usage Controls

Adding cost management via usage controls

Role

Product Designer

Company

CircleCI

Timeline

Jul – Dec 2021 (v1), Feb – April 2022 (v2)

First, a few highlights

Before diving into this case study, a brief overview of my time at CircleCI:

On the Monetization team, I improved trust in our billing model and increased cost transparency for users. I regularly engaged with the customer success team to understand customer problems, helped create OKR's each quarter, communicated changes to plan pricing and packaging, and collaborated with other teams to design features for them.

I also assisted on design system work like creating the framework for a dark theme, unifying our marketing and product systems, and coordinated an icon refresh.

Project overview

Problem

Customers wanted usage controls to manage cost.

Solution

Controls that allow customers to tweak cost without blocking critical work.

Learnings

Users prefer automatic controls they can monitor since they have limited time.

Context and research

Context

Through our customer success team, we heard that a few of our largest customers wanted usage controls to manage cost. Aside from the phrase itself, we didn't know what they wanted, so I began with exploratory research.

Research goals

Understand how customers think about optimizing usage and spend on tools.
Create a list of Jobs to Be Done and outcomes that customers hope to achieve by managing usage and tool spend.

Findings (Jobs to Be Done)

Enable developers to build and deploy
Reduce excessive waste
Understand in real time where there are bottlenecks
Limit billing surprises
Need: Remain in control

Recommendations

There are conflicting desires of wanting human intervention and having time to intervene. There is an opportunity to implement automatic controls by meeting the needs of:

Not automatically blocking critical work
Informing code/CI owners

Infrastructure maintenance tasks are often backburner items, so helpful controls may still be welcome.

Competitive analysis

Jenkins controls mostly revolve around user access & permissions around read/write
Gitlab is largely focused on branch and project permissions with a few controls around deletion delays, importing/export, SSH keys, and more
In consumer products, Verizon offers content trackers for web & app activity, pause service by user, contact controls, and usage monitoring. iOS screen time has monitoring and limits for apps, contacts, and content

Creating an MVP

After discussing feasibility with the engineering team, my PM and I decided to release a simple first control that aligned with research findings while also allowing cost management.

The result is a control that prevents unregistered users (those who have triggered builds without signing up) from using credits. Importantly, this control does not block the rest of the organization's users from working.

Improving and expanding

After positive reception to our first control, we released a second and iterated on the first a couple months after shipping the initial one.

Our second version focused on storage retention—setting values for how long job-related data is stored—so we could continue to help organizations manage cost without blocking work. I also improved the first control's typography and worked with our writer to more thoroughly describe its function.

Reflection

What I enjoyed most about this project was that I got to take it from vague, exploratory research all the way through to an MVP feature launch and ultimately a polished release. Finding out early on that user preferences didn't align with our initial expectation helped me stay grounded as I continued with the project.

As far as future improvements, this feature is currently something only people in the know would seek out to manipulate cost. The next step I'd take is to help those who don't know about usage controls discover what they are and how they can be used to tweak cost.