MY PRODUCT PHILOSOPHY - The questions I’m constantly asking myself
WHAT I DO - The skills that I bring to teams I work with
Design Research: I lead research teams to build deep empathy with customers through in-context inquiry and observation techniques, followed by building out detailed customer journeys to surface nuanced needs and meet customers where they are at in their livesBuild to Learn: I work with multi-disciplinary teams to introduce a prototyping and making mindset from very early on, to pressure test our concepts and solutions and move towards higher levels of fidelity, with agility. I guide teams by questioning the design decisions, the trade-offs there-in and support them to stay true to customer and business needs.Product Strategy: I facilitate co-creation and conceptualisation worksessions internally with teams and externally with clients and partners to build alignment on strategic direction of the collaboration, surface hopes and fears, prioritise pilots and experiments, track data and outcomes to course correct, as needed.Design Management: I move from design to operations as we start to build confidence in the solution. I work with marketing teams, field teams and senior level decision makers to test the product in real-world conditions and make recommendations for future scaleCommercialisation & Business Development: I’ve worked on with financial sector partners to negotiate contracts and collaborations, to increase revenues and deliver cost efficienciesTeam Leadership: I work with cross functional teams to bring alignment, enable collaboration and ensure success for both the project as well as the individuals on the team
WORK IN ACTION
VENTURE BUILDINGThe problem: Small merchants are fast losing market share to e-commerce marketplaces that deliver instantlyThe opportunity: Future proof kirana stores by bringing them online, in ways that leverage their super powersThe challenge: Designing digital experiences to meet kirana owners where they are at in their digital, textual and numerical literacy levelsThe design process: Over the course of 18 months, I lead a team of designers and developers, in 3 phases to conceptualise and launch the product - from sacrificial concept development, to prototyping, to product design and full stack development with technology teams and finally piloting with operations teamSuccess of the project: The Zyadashop app is live on appstore, and currently has 50k active merchants with a GTV of INR 2Cr, since its official launch in December. The app was also recognised by Google playstore in the rising stars category.
PROTOTYPING FOR SUCCESSThe problem: Farmers are not connected to digital financial services, creating inefficiencies in their paymentsThe opportunity: For a large tech company to strategically capture last mile customers, by leveraging shared infrastructure and for an agri company to improve farmer loyalty through digital experiencesThe challenge: Finding a viable business model that creates equal shared value among the partners, while also being desirable among the farmersThe design process: Over the course 2 months, I guided a team of designers to run a live experiment to onboard farmers as mobile money agents, and become nodes to distribute digital payments to farmers in their community. In a span of 3 weeks we conducted user research, built prototypes via whatapp to onboard farmers and transferred real cash for them to distribute.Success of the project: We onboarded 10 farmer agents in a prototype, followed by scaling to 100 agents and 1000 farmers. We were able to bring down transaction times from 3 months to 4 days and agents outperformed their target GMV by 111%
DRIVING INDUSTRY ACTIONThe problem: With the launch of Account Aggregator, many financial institutions are poised to leverage its value. However, the idea of data ownership and consent is new and relatively unknown to most users and requires intentional design of solution to adhere to the sprint of AAThe opportunity: Build a publicly accessible toolkit for product teams to take inspiration on good user experiences for explicit consentThe challenge: Balancing the fine line between adhering to compliance requirements while still creating a seamless experience that’s exciting for product teams to consider integrating was difficult, most product managers saw too much information/transparency as a drop off moment and chose to abstract away complexityThe design process: Over the course of 6 weeks, we worked closely with the AA ecosystem, to prototype and test the idea of explicit consent with users and have now launched a Figma file with templates and user experiencesLearnings from the project: User stories and user needs are a compelling way to align industry stakeholders and drive common action
OTHER PORTFOLIO HIGHLIGHTS
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