
Work Experience
- As a founding designer (8th employee), I was responsible for defining and leading the product and design strategy for Yesler. Collaborated closely with founders and delivered the same.
- Led and delivered designs for various products (and features) including:
Handshake - A messaging platform for Lumber buyers, sellers, brokers,
Storefront - Seller profile with ability to manage their Lumber inventory,
Groundwork & Intel - Analytics platform showcasing intel on purchase history, metrics around cost & time savings) and more. - Conceived and proposed Storefront - a product line that helped increase adoption (5x) and generated new revenue streams.
- Champion for both internal and external users and influenced culture and core values for the organization in liaison with executives.
- Performed Heuristic evaluation for existing websites - Financial Protection Forum & Global Risk Financing (GRiF) projects
- Conceptualized and provided design recommendations for key applications - Disaster Risk Financing & Insurance Program (DRFIP)
- As an Early member of the design team, owned the hiring (campus and lateral) process viz., funnel building, candidate experience & employee onboarding. Grew the team from 1 to 10 people in span of 8 months and mentored them along the way.
- Led and delivered UX redesign of flagship products; conceptualized customer experience for newer products with focus on improving Tracking visibility & Operational metrics across Warehouses / Distribution centers. Increased downloads (by 3x) and DAU (by 2.5x) significantly after the launch of redesign. Improved UX CSAT score from 3.1 to 3.9.
- Delivered FourKites Design System v1.0 and v2.0 to ensure consistent user experience across our product suite.
- Created a culture of customer obsession by strong participation in User Conferences, Customer Advisory Board (CAB) sessions, Customer calls, On-site field visits.
- In the spirit of championing a more open & transparent organisation culture, created Demo Day - a forum for teams to share their work and learnings. This helped create visibility across teams and cross-pollinate learnings.
- Championed user experience of 22 applications across Web, Desktop, Mobile, Hololens and Tango platform for various products including - Connect, Storefront, ATLAS, eCognition, Facility Management.
- Worked closely with Head of Design to deliver Design Strategy document and direction for design team.
- Created & participated in internal forums to ensure customer stories are surfaced and represented adequately.
- Mentored a 5 member team to help identify their career goals and procured training budget to aid their professional growth.
- Collaborated with internal developers to build designs for Data pipeline platform, Self-serve API portal, OSS platform, Chrome plugins, slackbots to increase overall productivity, reduce engineering cost and facilitate developer operations at scale
- Ideated and built creatives for onboarding and product demo videos for a set of internal facing (engineering) tools. Reduced engineering time spent on "how-to queries" by 50%.
- Helped with design collaterals for company-wide initiatives and events - like, marketing, hiring & brand building.
- Managed and led a variety of user experience design projects for the Innovation team at Standard Bank - ATM redesign, financial planner tool and communication design for key messaging to bank's customers
- Understanding users’ ecosystems through data gathering techniques — observation, stakeholder interviews, focus group discussions & contextual inquiry, persona stories and detailed mood boards.
- Devised in-lab and remote based UX Validation and Usability Tests.
- Conducted performance and persuasion based UX reviews.
- Worked for a myriad of clients to enhance their products' User Experience and helped in optimising specific client metrics like operational cost, conversion, reduced effort, etc.
- Delivered pre-sales engagement collaterals and worked on POCs to win customers
- Won 2.2M worth of customer deals.
Volunteering
- One of the early and active members of the Trust founded by my grandfather Thirupoonthuruthy Late Sri V Venkatesan.
- The organization aims to create visibility for the compositions of Saint Sri Narayana Tirtha (an Indian Composer).
- Led initiatives such as "Tarangam Music School" for underprivileged kids, "Tarangam Annual Music Competitions" to ensure talents learn compositions of Narayana Tirtha at a younger age.
- During pandemic (Jun 2020), I led "TarangamSeries", an initiative where prominent young artistes representing South Indian Classical Music performed one rare composition of Saint Sri Narayana Tirtha per episode. The series documented over 50 Tarangams - this helped leverage the power of digital mediums to connect with musicians, rasikas, organisers to create a better reach for the composer and his beautiful compositions.
Working with CARESpaces (Indian performing arts safe-space) to provide support to peers by dedicating time, providing resources and actionable solutions towards addressing sexual and identity-oriented misconduct.
Between Dec 2019 and Feb 2021, mentored and coached 70+ individuals on all things related to design - higher education, hiring, product consulting, salary negotiations especially for women designers, design-engineering collaboration, UX writing.
Education
Active Member of: Student Academic Forum, Student Book Bank, SIMChords (Music Club), SIMCognition (Knowledge portal), SIMConnect (Online Branding and Marketing Cell), SIMClairvoyance (Guest Lecture Series), SIMCinema (Film Club), SIMCapture (Photography Club)
Active member: Abhilasha, Jhankar, Montage Club, Quiz club, Literary Club, Music Club
Certifications
Credential ID 2013-283