Whiteboards Document Format

Problem

There was no standard data format to expose whiteboard content to other systems. This prevented other teams from building on top of it, which in turn blocked the whiteboards product from rolling out to >500K paid users across 2,800 tenants. There was a lot of uncertainty and risk around defining a new data format from scratch, alongside considerations like versioning, backward-compatibility, validation, etc.

Outcomes

• Designed and led the implementation of ‘Whiteboards Document Format’, a.k.a. ‘WDF’, which unlocked 6+ distinct use cases across different teams and helped them to adopt it for new features via detailed guidelines and instructions.
• Backfilled WDF representation across 4.6 million existing whiteboards, resulting in a 25% latency reduction when fetching WDF compared to on-demand data transformation.
• No regression in functionality despite the risk of integrating with the critical data persistence flow in production.