PP&A designed the study around in-depth interviews with eight experienced users of the platform, drawn from organizations that relied on serverless functions for data transformation, peak-load management, intermittent workloads and Internet of Things pipelines. PP&A developed the interview guide with the client's product managers after a scoping call that set the study's objectives: the getting-started journey, template completeness, the novice-versus-expert distinction, comparison with competing offerings, and adoption barriers.

Each interview combined open discussion of how the developer worked today with a structured walk-through of the proposed template gallery and creation flow. Participants reacted slide by slide to the mock-ups, from browsing and searching templates to configuring memory, permissions, authentication and environment variables, previewing builds and saving their own templates. The team recorded reactions to individual design elements, including badges that indicated a template's source or provider verification, version history, and the relationship between tutorials and how-to guides.

PP&A consolidated the findings into a top-line summary that paired each element of the design with what developers said, what they expected instead, and where the team should reconsider. Call notes and the scoping notes were delivered alongside it so the product team could trace every recommendation to its source.

The interviews gave the product team a clear picture of how experienced developers actually behave. Cost optimization was the dominant reason for choosing the platform, with performance a secondary driver. Developers typically went straight to the documentation and were skeptical of templates in general. They did not always trust third-party code, found templates rarely repeatable across projects, and expected to add their own logic regardless. Interest was strongest in saving and reusing their own custom templates rather than in a broad public gallery.

The slide-by-slide review produced specific, actionable feedback. Developers wanted code snippets in several languages presented in tabbed blocks, a visible version history for each template, and a project-selection step that the proposed flow was missing. They valued a single place to configure memory, permissions, authentication, secrets and environment variables, and asked for build previews and testing before deployment. Search, tags, source labels and a verified-by-provider badge were welcomed, while one runtime badge and the reference to an original template caused confusion. Several participants also asked for cost forecasts and spending caps at the point of creation.

The product team received a prioritized list of design changes, each traced to developer evidence, and a validated view of which parts of the template gallery experienced users would adopt and which they would bypass. That gave it a firmer basis for its roadmap and for tightening the getting-started journey for newcomers.

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