Blog Post Author:
Angela Scheuvront,
ServiceNow Manager
AIT Worldwide Logistics, Inc.
When I started at AIT Worldwide Logistics as a Platform Owner, my “team” was me and one admin/developer, Erik. He had raised his hand when we were going live on ServiceNow and said, “I want to join this movement.” Erik was my entire bench.
Recently I joined two fellow platform owners, Anton Potter from Kenvue and Jomer Bunque from Slalom, for a Platform Owner Club Academy session hosted with ServiceNow University. The topic was building capability from the ground up. We came from very different starting points, but the same themes kept coming up. Here’s what the three of us learned.
Nobody has all the answers
Platform owners are expected to know everything. In reality, we’re building the team, developing skills, and setting AI guardrails as we go. Anton’s company only recently separated from its parent, so they had to build their expertise from a very limited footprint. Jomer started as a developer, became a process owner, spent time on the partner side, and now runs a platform team. I’ve been working in ServiceNow since about 2018. Three different paths, and none of us would say we have it all figured out.
That’s why my advice for anyone starting out is the same one I gave at the end of the session: you don’t have to be an expert in everything. Almost no one knows the entire platform anymore, especially when your organization runs several products on it. Ask for help.
Growing the team means growing knowledge, not just headcount
You can’t walk into leadership and ask for ten new heads. So I think about growth two ways: more people, and more capability in the people you already have.
For me, the biggest lever is ServiceNow University. I encourage my team to spend about 10% of their time learning, whether that’s courses, community forums, or networking with other customers. SNUGs are a big part of that, and I use them myself.
Anton added something I’ve taken to heart: pair the formal learning with small proofs of concept. His team takes a real problem statement, spins up a developer instance, and tries a new capability to see its strengths and limits. They did this with Zero Copy Connector to pull real-time data from their ERP and HR data hub. It solved the original use case, and it also sparked ideas for problems the business hadn’t thought to raise because no solution seemed possible. Anton’s point was that this builds team skills and also strengthens your relationships with stakeholders.
Hiring: have people show you how they work
When we get to hire, we skip the standard interview questions. We’ve done role-playing activities and had developers spin up a PDI and walk us through how they build. You learn much more watching someone work than listening to them describe it.
Using AI to extend the team
Jomer shared something that stuck with me. His engineering team has connected their ServiceNow instance to Claude and is using it to fill skill gaps. When a stakeholder asked for something in UI Builder and nobody on the team had that experience, they gave Claude context about their environment and asked it to get them part of the way there. It produced a solid skeleton plus resources to learn from. It didn’t fully solve the problem, but it got them 20% or more of the way, and the team filled in the rest.
They’ve also built AI agents to help product managers write stories faster. Anton asked the question many of us are thinking: how does this change the roles on your team over time? Jomer was honest that it’s a little scary. For now, he sees it as an extra developer on the team, and he’s upskilling everyone to be proficient with AI. Humans are still essential for understanding requirements, talking to customers, and checking that the output makes sense.
Your data decides how far AI can go
Here the three of us took different routes. Anton and Jomer went broad. Anton’s team deployed generative capabilities across ITSM, HRSD, CSM, WSD, and S2P, and found the real value comes when skills are chained across the whole ticket lifecycle, which compounds the impact. I went incremental, with Virtual Agent and AI search plus a limited set of starter-package licenses for fulfillers, because our platform isn’t ready from a data perspective. Our knowledge isn’t there, and our ticket hygiene definitely isn’t.
Jomer’s experience confirmed what I was seeing. His team had to run a big campaign to clean up knowledge articles across all of their knowledge bases. Stakeholders saw for themselves that AI answers were only as good as the content behind them. After the cleanup, people started coming to the portal because the answers were actually good. He told leadership it might take a year to see the value, and the work was worth it.
Making hygiene visible
A platform owner in the audience asked how to measure data hygiene. I shared how I pulled our incident data from ServiceNow and used ChatGPT to evaluate tickets against criteria I defined. Our fulfillers love closing tickets with “Done,” “Closed,” or “Resolved,” so I kept the results simple: met expectations or did not meet expectations. I then shared those results with each manager. We’ve also discussed creating an agent that grades ticket hygiene on an A-through-F scale. It feels a little like grade school, but nobody wants a failing grade! Both approaches help make the point clear to leadership: good ticket hygiene is a prerequisite for agentic workflows.
Anton’s team is exploring how to bring a QA and coaching process into ServiceNow, possibly with a skill that checks whether work notes are meaningful and descriptive, not just filled in. Jomer keeps his required fields to about five (short description, CI, category, subcategory) and then requires real resolution notes at close, meaning actual resolution notes, not “talk to the customer.”
Telling the value story
All three of us agreed that measuring value is hard, and that it starts before you build.
- Anton relies on his Impact team to reset the business outcomes and pick the KPIs that matter. His advice is to take a baseline snapshot before you deploy, so you have something to compare against later, and to look at the out-of-the-box AI reports and dashboards already available.
- Jomer time-boxes the story: here’s where we started, here’s what we added, here’s where we are now. His team is going live with HRSD onboarding for the whole organization in December, and he’s already planning how to show the before and after with surveys, feedback, and knowledge article growth.
- My challenge is a bit different. With new leadership at AIT, there’s a fresh perspective on ROI. I can share plenty of metrics, but I also need to understand how they define value and which outcomes matter most to them. ServiceNow is a significant investment, and what each organization gets from it is different. A leadership change is a reminder that the definition of success needs to be revisited, even when the platform and the work are already well established.
Advice for new platform owners
- Build relationships and lean on the business. Technical knowledge won’t earn trust if you don’t understand your users and what matters to the organization.
- Have courage. Challenge requests, and don’t always say yes.
- Use the community. Anton said it best: it’s rare to be the first person to try something, so why reinvent the wheel?
- Balance technical and soft skills. Jomer’s reminder is that you need both, and you should always be willing to learn.
- Ask for help. No one is an expert in everything.
Keep the conversation going
We didn’t get to every question during the webinar, post your questions below!
The next Academy session, on entering/re-entering the workforce and building Platform Ownership, is November 18th. Bring a colleague, whether they’re a product owner, process owner, or admin.
Nobody has all the answers, and that’s exactly why this community matters.
