in San Diego we introduced the next experience which made using the platform even easier than ever today's guest takes us through some of the Tokyo features and Beyond including a few tips that you may not know about welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins Builders creators developers and of course all the Curious individuals that I say with the utmost love and respect every time we hear this show Welcome to break point the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career and in this episode I've got the pleasure of talking to director of product management and servicenow Amanda Joslin how are you today Amanda I'm great how are you Chuck I'm so happy to be here talking to you and I'm happy that you're happy that I'm happy I don't know where that was going but we're going to keep going with it because that's what we got before we begin I I don't believe you've been on break point before nope this is my first podcast with you okay well then your first assignment is to tell us who you are and what you do and why we should listen great yeah so I'm Amanda Joslin as you said Chuck I'm the director of product management here at servicenow and I'm in our platform business unit really focus focused on our fulfill our experience as well as our Builder experience UI Builder and the like I've been sort of now for three years um I've been in this capacity for most of that time and before that I was at a few other large tech companies here in San Diego I was just going to ask where are you located but you just answered that you're in San Diego Sunny San Diego yes how long have you been there I've been in San Diego since 2006 we moved from Chicago to here so um quite a few years here it was coming home I was born and raised in Southern California went to experience Four Seasons and got tired of the snow and came back seems to be a common theme about getting tired of snow that's why I'm in Phoenix yes and what did you do before you worked at servicenow um I've been ironically a product man manager my entire career except for one year where I sold copiers and software with copiers after that I was a product manager so I've been a product manager my entire career which is pretty rare I've had the great opportunity to be in large Tech some startups all within the tech space though and really a mix of inbound and outbound PM roles so just a really broad product management career you have something in common with Bill McDermott other than working at servicenow I know Bill worked at Xerox and I worked at Canon competitors he sold a lot of copiers yes he did yes very similar start background it's amazing how careers diverge isn't it and and then reconverge could have been the CEO but I'm not I'm the director of product here I I clearly see that I have limitations that will never make me a CEO of anything and I'm just fine with that but we're not here to talk about careers we're here to talk about you when you were little what did you want to be when you grew up um well I am the daughter of an airline pilot my dad retired um from United Airlines he was the senior most pilot in 2014 wow so as a Navy Pilot's daughter uh I could fly before I could drive and I thought I was going to be a pilot I love to travel it's still my passion but I did not enjoy the path to Pilot so here I am as a product manager you still have a pilot's license I don't but my husband does ah so you have the opportunity to fly places without going through TSA and checking your baggage yes once in a while okay that's a luxury I could do with yes and when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing dachshunds little wiener dogs so I'm either busy um out and about with the girls or playing with dogs okay let's get into our main topic then let's start out with an introduction for those that may be new to the platform or may have been not paying attention for the last several releases what is the next experience yeah so as you know we've been on a multi-year journey to re-platform our user experience um we love to modernize our platform but we haven't done it in some time so we are on this journey to re-platform our ux of our platform and part of that is really changing the way of working from for our fulfiller experience so from your core UI or listed forms over to what we call configurable workspaces part of our San Diego release uh was really the bringing together of those new ways of working workspaces with our core UI as a top menu item as well as really giving an uplift to our look and feel of the platform as well so we call all of those features the next experience so Amanda I have to ask what comes after the next experience yeah well we haven't gotten there yet we're so we have and so we are still really focused on making the next experience the the experience for all of our customers and really introducing new ways and new features to make this the platform that everyone loves that sounds like it will cross that bridge when we get to it the answer yeah when we think of it now we also have something called the unified Navigator right that's part of the next experience I I love that part can you describe what that is I know we're not doing any demos or PowerPoints here but uh it's pretty pretty neat feature it is Unified navigation released in San Diego and previously when I talk about the ways of working in workspace agent workspace used to open an entirely new tab and it was pretty hard to find so um part of our San Diego release we released a unified navigation to bring everything under one single tab so you know the only things that will open in a new tab now are our Builder experiences or things that you would expect to not be in that same experience so really brings together all of our platforms into a single browser Tab and I like this I I have to admit I'm one of those people that gets stuck in the ways of the way things used to work I have a tough time going from interface to interface and from experience to experience I was used to the Star menu had my favorites and the little clock had my history it's all still there but it's better it's better people it if you're not using the next experience yet I highly invite you to go to a PDI turn it on and explore you know the first thing you're going to get is wow this looks nice and cleaned up but then when you start using it and you type a filter into the all menu for example it says show me analytics and it shows you all the things you know you'd expect from the Navigator filter to show you words that have analytics or menu options and then you go over to the favorites you could type a different filter you come back to all it's still got analytics in there it remembers the filters you put in they're persistent until of course you clear them out or refresh the screen whatever uh it and making favorites is just way more easier now you just click the star at the top and there's so many more pages you can star it's like this is way easier it is we made a lot of it way easier we also um have a pill now at the top that follows you around wherever you are in the platform making that favorite experience that we know so many people love much easier to do um we also brought workspaces as a top menu item so if you are starting your migration to workspaces we highly encourage you to put the workspaces there but maybe play around with turning off the all menu for those tier one um workers who may we think are fully able to be in the next experience and on the workspace way of working maybe they we you can remove the clutch the crutch for them to go back to the platform wait you can turn off the all menu for some people is that to say that there this is configurable I thought it was like you're either on or you're off in the old UI 16 mode is there there's more to it right yes you decision or um grouping of those menus that you want at the top however in a future release we're also going to give ex give the admins the ability to configure whatever you want in that top menu so um that will be even more configurable than it is today oh I can't wait to see that I I we might have skipped ahead to the uh future release stuff but we'll we'll get back there right we'll give a hint now Amanda what are some of the new hot features of Tokyo we can talk about that because it's out Tokyo is out now GA and yes in Tokyo we really focused on the usability so we have um a lot of features in our UI Builder which make it easier to use including our new um template for the record page so we're really excited about that um there's going to be notes and some guidelines up on our Center of Excellence as well to share that out we also have expanded dark mode across the entire platform that's a great accessibility feature mostly for those of us that maybe are over 40 and our eyes are not used to staring at the screen all day um dark mode really helps with that accessibility feature and of course that Tipping Point of that way of working we want customers to continue to adopt and try out configurable workspaces and now there's a configurable workspace for each of our major licensable products so they're available out out of the box by default so we really encourage you to turn those on and start looking at how you can move your um the fillers over to those very nice I remember seeing dark mode originally for the workspaces in San Diego but the the the the platform UI was still uh you know defaulting to whatever color scheme it had before so now that it's persistent throughout that's that's even more special I know there were some things that were blockers in San Diego have those been addressed in Tokyo they have Tech yes we had some some features that we have not yet re-platform um and some that we were maybe migrating away from so as you know our connect our ability for agents to chat with each other um was called connect and that was deprecated and so as of Tokyo that was no longer available on the platform um but as of Tokyo we introduced the replacement product which is called sidebar and it's our new way for agents to communicate and to collaborate on a single record so that is a blocker that if you were using connect you now have a product you can migrate over to called sidebar and that is available with the next experience we also have um automatic automated test framework or ATF as well as guided tours and ATF still works on the platform you can still run all of your same tests as you do today that all those will still work however the ability to run tests in the next experience that's going to come in a future release as well as guided tours so guided tours will work in a future release on the core UI and then on next experience coming up well I know a lot of people are really looking forward to getting those back guided tours big big help in enablement and organizational change management yes the good news there though experience we threw that gives the um the fulfillers or anyone that really logs in a walk through of the key features of the next experience um and since it's a new navigational Paradigm there's not that much of a learning curve to it you've known that check yourself you've seen it it's fairly easy and straightforward but we do have that walk through right when you turn it on that you can keep persistent and that's kind of your in-product guided tour are there more themes planned are we are we going to get blimey back this is a big question that comes up who knew everyone loved blimey so much we love the enthusiasm around blimey but we are not going to provide any further out of the box themes however in a future release we are going to provide a theme manager which will make it very easy and simple to create your own themes and if you want it to look like me please do but it'll be very easy for you to be able to create your themes and that will come in a release that's not too far away if you know what I'm I smell danger in that people are going to have like yellow text on a hot pink background it's just gonna burn people's retinas out go for it if that's how you how you that's your corporate brand good luck Amanda it's time for my favorite question for all product managers and you are included in that list of favorite product managers can you give us a hint of what's on the road map yeah absolutely um for your listeners of course we want to tell you everything that's coming up in their future releases but some of it has to still stay a little bit quiet um but we are really focused on UI Builder usability as well as releasing more templates so really being easier to build out your pages and not have to know as much code as you did previously so usability for our Builder experiences and more templates is what you'll be seeing coming up oh good I'm glad you know usability is definitely on the radar UI Builder is a very powerful thing but it's it's still fairly complex it's not meant for the unwashed masses and I haven't found a personal use case to make me want to go in and try it out and and see if I can put a button here in fact my son-in-law just asked me a couple days ago how do you put a refresh button on the related list in UI building like I have no idea I haven't done that yet and and if there's a way we can you know keep making it easier for those no code low code people to create these amazing interfaces amazing experiences then I'm all for it I'm okay avoiding that but if I wanted to jump in right now if I wanted to start learning UI Builder where would I go for enablement information I spelled out at full Center of Excellence out on our community site and so you can go there for all of the information around UI Builder how to get started next experience how to turn it on and also the migration for workspaces from core UI so all of that information is on one Center of Excellence site and I'm sure we'll be able to provide the link with this podcast as well regarding next experience in UI Builder what words of advice do you have for somebody that's new to servicenow new to development possibly even new to just listening to this podcast well we are so excited that you're gonna start building out on servicenow platform that's our first and foremost thank you but also um my advice would be to learn the platform and learn the Builder it's a very robust Builder it can do a lot of things that's where you'll go to configure your experiences for your users add that button that you want to add or remove or change them but it's a new way of developing as well so I encourage you to start with the trainings there's so much enablement out there um Chuck you yourself have had Brad Tilton on a product manager on my team on this exact podcast and he also has done a lot of enablement and labs and we have all of that material up on the center of excellence site so you can take advantage of it we also run a monthly account Academy so anyone new you can come to that Academy it's right the link there is right on our Center of Excellence as well and you can ask any of us or talk with any of us or hear the information that we have for you and also ask any questions there as well so we welcome you and we hope to see you in the academy and I will have a link for the center of excellence in the show notes for this episode if you want to know how to get there just look in the description look in the show notes I'll plaster it all over the place you can't miss it speaking of links can you let the listener know how to get in touch with you oh yes sure thing so I'm on LinkedIn you can go to linkedin.com forward slash Amanda Joslin and I'm there um and that's probably the best easiest way to get a hold of me of course if you ask a question on the community as well I'm there so um I I will be answering as well um and if there's anything that you have additional you can feel free to reach out to me well thank you very much Amanda for joining us and thank you wonderful listener for listening today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them at servicenow.com Community under the events menu that has changed so pay attention servicenow.com Community under the events menu or if you like the old link still works servicenow.com podcast you can subscribe to this one or any of them that are already there on your favorite podcasting directories wherever you find podcasts breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer that'd be me Chuck tomasi videos and captions are produced by Earl Duque and to find out more about the servicenow developer program get yourself a PDI learn more about the next experience you head over to developer.servicenow.com that's where you'll find all that good stuff again thank you so much Amanda for all the hard work from you and your team and for sharing with us today be back or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi so Amanda what kind of cigars do you smoke well only the finest Cuban for me so we'll sound like Professionals in the as much as possible no I gotta remember what I was gonna say this will obviously be edited out there's the dog it's a feature and people love it so you can't take it away what happened I wonder if this might work holy crap it worked it works thank you somebody you can check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them on the community at servicenow.com Community under the oh crap I don't know where it is anymore I don't have to do that anymore this is outstanding that was I was like you didn't need me for that tough crawl tough crowd and that's how we put that together