Northstar metric - cost saving
20,000,000 USD
TikTok
Driving efficiency at scale: Enhancing Kubernetes deployment for TikTok developers
TikTok
Role
Lead product designer
Duration
May 2024 - Nov 2024
Team
a product manager, 6 engineers
To deploy TikTok applications like Live Streaming and Video on Demand to edge data centers, teams must reserve resources—such as compute and storage—across multiple Kubernetes clusters in advance. This ensures their applications run smoothly and perform optimally.
When limited resources are shared across teams, inefficiencies arise, leading to significant waste.
User - Hoarding and inequity
Platform - high operational costs to manually intervene
Two-pronged strategy to clearly expose inefficiencies and make it easier for users to promptly adjust their resource reservations.
The daily project report provides a clear summary of resource utilization across all reserved resources. It breaks down usage by Kubernetes clusters, enabling users to identify imbalances and make informed adjustments.
Weekly alert notifications are sent via internal communication channels, guiding users back to the platform to take timely and relevant actions.
To bridge the gap between insight and action, I redesigned the reservation interface to reduce the cognitive load of interpreting complex relationships between clusters and resources—making it easier for users to spot and correct over-reservations with minimal friction.
Both north-star metrics and supporting metrics are tracked and here are the results after three months.
There’s so much more behind this project—deep user research, strategic decisions, roadmap twists, and countless iterations. If you’re curious about the full journey, I’d love to chat and share more!
