Meet UX Designer Steven Kraplin

GingerAnderson

Meet Steven Kraplin­—UX Designer, Associate Financial Analyst at The MathWorks, and Master Anaplanner. Steven spends his days working to maintain internal systems, which include Oracle, Vertex, Anaplan, and others. He also works on product development, including new projects within those tools, as well as helping users address any existing issues, bugs, questions, and tasks.

We asked Steven to share his thoughts on the Anaplan Community, including how he uses the Community, what value he finds there, and what he has learned.

I primarily work in development and support, and so whenever I need to support an end user, one of my first visits is always the Community to see if somebody else has experienced the same issue or has done a similar enhancement to one of their models.

- Steven Kraplin

Tune in to see how this UX Designer brings value to his role and personal growth by being active in the Community, or check out the transcript below. Have you checked out the UX Designer persona hub? Subscribe for automatic updates and join the conversation in the dedicated Group forum.

If you have a story to share about your Anaplan journey, we would love to connect. Share in the comments below or contact us at [email protected].

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Transcript:

Interviewer: What are some of the ways that you use the Anaplan Community?

Steven Kraplin: My coworkers and I often review some of the ideas that are posted within Anaplan, make comments. Add our feedback like them to see if they can get pushed forward. We share ideas among ourselves from the Anaplan community. We discuss those and then any time there's new training or new posting about Anaplan, I'm always trying to open those up and see if it's something that I can benefit from.

Interviewer: What is the value of the Anaplan Community to you?
Steven: I primarily work in development and support, and so whenever I need to support an end user, one of my first visits is always the community to see if somebody else has experienced the same issue or has done a similar enhancement to one of their models.

Often ask questions related to some of our models if we experience any issues. And I think any posts can be valuable. Users that tend to read those posts will also post with a potentially a similar structure, which can lead to faster development of ideas, especially once you get the idea across to many different users, and that can get grabbed by internal development.

Interviewer: What are some of your thoughts on Persona Hubs?
Steven: I primarily worked in incentive comp management and sales, booking planning before, and so hubs that are specific, those types of users and something like the planning process or the compensation process could be very helpful in facilitating and speeding up model and UX design because you're not, you have a reference point to start with. Not just a spreadsheet that you may have worked off of internally five years ago.

Interviewer: Can you share with us some of the ways or things you have learned from the Anaplan Community
Steven: I definitely benefited from trainings from levels one through three, obviously, and I've actually gone back and redone those trainings before, I primarily benefit from being able to learn from the community as well as doing my own research specific to our models. A lot of that has to do with going up to Google and finding the finding of somebody else has done something before it because I firmly believe that very little is truly new. And your experiences, you're able to build on others experiences for development. And then the additional training Anaplan has offered recently related to the new UX, the reporting tool. Leveraging APIs, all of those can help grow your experience.

 

Interviewer: Please share with us some of your strongest accomplishments as an Anaplanner.

Steven: So, something else that I was tasked with was researching whether Anaplan was a good fit for our expense plan. We took a sample of one of our models and then just created a couple of modules that were able to just pull in some of the data. And then using that, we pulled down that data into each of those tools and attempted to essentially replicate what the upper management is used to seeing.

 

Interviewer: Who are you and what are some of your primary responsibilities in your role?
Steven: The primary type of work that I do within my organization is maintaining internal systems, which include Oracle, Vertex, Anaplan and others. I work on product development, including new projects within those tools, as well as helping users address any existing issues, bugs, questions, tasks, etc.