Improve experience for PagerDuty Webhook Migration in ServiceNow

Migrating mission-critical integrations is never just a technical challenge, it’s a cumbersobe task for a human. As the Lead Product Designer for PagerDuty’s Integrations, I had the privilege of guiding a process that blended UX, stakeholder collaboration, and continuous discovery, aiming to transform a high-risk migration into a confidence-building experience.

Project Overview

PagerDuty’s ServiceNow integration is crucial for enterprise-scale incident management. The transition from v2 to v3 webhooks was designed to deliver significant enhancements, yet it also introduced fresh challenges and uncertainties for users. Recognizing that many might postpone migration due to perceived risks, our cross-functional team of UX, Product, and Engineering leads prioritized a migration journey that goes beyond technical enablement, delivering resources, guidance, and proactive support to ensure users feel confident and prepared every step of the way.

Discovery & Research

We started with a thorough discovery phase, collaborating closely with Tier 2 Support and Professional Services teams, particularly those who had managed previous migration efforts. Their experiences surfaced critical pain points, such as:

Lack of logging in v3 (customers rely on logs for success verification)

Unclear outcomes from migration actions (users unsure what “MIGRATE” actually does)

Hard-to-parse outputs that felt like a raw CLI interface

No instructions or obvious expected results

Hidden migration modules and confusing UI updates

We also used their help to identify the personas that are most likely to do a migration process.

Enterprise Tool Owners: Accountable for migration and system workflows

Sr. Engineering Managers: Oversee success, even if not hands-on

ServiceNow Admins: Responsible for execution, needing clear admin controls

We poured over past support tickets and customer migration transcripts to triangulate recurring issues and anxieties.

Designing the Migration Flow

We defined the project requirements by first analyzing feedback and pain points gathered during our discovery phase, particularly from those who had managed similar migrations in the past. Next, we facilitated collaborative workshops with Engineering and Professional Services to clarify customer needs and technical constraints. By aligning insights from both user experiences and internal stakeholder input, we established clear objectives for the migration journey: prioritizing functional improvements, customer enablement, and risk mitigation at every stage.

Before moving into the design phase, we facilitated team brainstorming sessions to explore possible solutions. These collaborative discussions brought together diverse perspectives from Engineering, UX, and Professional Services. We reviewed pain points and requirements identified earlier, mapped out key challenges, and encouraged open idea-sharing. By focusing on customer experiences and technical feasibility, we generated and refined solution concepts—ensuring everyone was aligned on priorities before starting design work.

With a clear understanding of user needs, our design goals focused on:

Communicating Benefits upfront: to motivate early and proactive migration.

Building Awareness: ensuring users knew when migration options were available.

Supporting Preparation: guiding users through readiness checks before migrating.

Empowering Manual Control: allowing partial migration, staged testing, and rollback for peace of mind.

Self-Serve Troubleshooting:so users could fix issues independently, reducing support friction.

Exportable Logs: giving users evidence and data to share if they needed help.

We mapped high-level user journeys, ran benchmarking on migration flows, and broke down user stories to craft multiple design options. Low-fidelity wireframes enabled rapid feedback, followed by detailed prototypes ready for usability testing.

Testing & Validation

I validated our assumptions directly with end users. We consistently iterated based on findings, making sure each step, from discovery to final mockups, was rooted in real-world scenarios and user language.

Key Challenges & Lessons

• Transparency matters: Users need clear feedback about what’s happening during, and after, migration.

• Trust is built through control and data: Letting users see logs, manually test, and rollback changes gives them confidence.

• Design for edge cases: Automatically hiding modules or failing to communicate steps can create new obstacles. Documenting every step (in Confluence and Slide Decks) helps maintain organizational memory.

  
  

  

  
  

Prepare the migration flow to:

Communicate the benefits of migration so they can do it as soon as possible

Create awareness the migration is available to be done.

Allow customers to prepare for the migration

Manual control while doing the migration, partially migrating, and testing services in order to increase their confidence to run the full migration.

Allow users to self-serve on fixing any issues identified from the migration experience.

We want users to have exportable logs in hand in case they reach out to our support team for help.

Outcomes

The ServiceNow Migration module stands as a testament to the power of research-driven, cross-functional UX design. The learnings from previous migrations, combined with direct user insights, enabled us to create an experience that put control and clarity in the hands of enterprise users, making a complex task look simple and effortless.​

ServiceNow V8 by PagerDuty launched in January 2024, introducing the webhook migration module and health check feature. By January 31st, 2024, 31 out of 649 ServiceNow app customers (4.1% of our total base of 656) had migrated to V8, with 40.7% of those being Enterprise customers.

Over the course of the year, the webhook health check module was utilized across 706 active accounts. As a result, 197 accounts successfully migrated to the latest PagerDuty ServiceNow 8.0 app version.