Within the dynamic landscape of M2P's diverse product portfolio spanning payments, lending, and banking, the company experienced remarkable growth, expanding its workforce from 200 to 1200 within the first year of my tenure. Specifically within the product design team, I played a pivotal role in increasing our team size from 10 to 30 members. However, as our team and responsibilities expanded, it became evident that existing processes for evaluation, task management, and beyond needed a substantial upgrade to accommodate the scale and drive continued success.

Started off with an assessment of existing products, services, and existing design methods to identify the strengths, weaknesses and gaps that need to be addressed.

• How much user research is integrated?
• How consistent is and standardized the design process across teams?
• Are there any design guidelines, personas, and journey maps?
• How effectively the design team collaborates with the rest of the teams for inputs?
• Do they carry out testing and do they receive feedback and iterate?

• How supportive is the leadership, and their opinion about UX in products. . A mature UX setup typically needs to have a leadership that understands and values the importance of UX in achieving business goals.
• Evaluated the organization's overall commitment to user-centered design principles.

• Upon in-depth analysis, several areas requiring improvement became apparent, each presenting unique challenges. These challenges included the need to align teams, enhance operational efficiency, and implement corrective measures.
• The specific pain point of grappling with the management of proof-of-concept (POC) projects.
• The challenge of addressing a knowledge gap concerning others' products.
• Managing the absence of a unified process, resulting in variations and diverse approaches in product handling and requirement gathering, and the imperative need for comprehensive enhancements across all products.

These challenges serve as opportunities for strategic interventions to elevate our product design processes to new heights.

• Along with the partial support of the leadership team, collaborated with products and created a long term strategy for user experience design, aligning it with business objectives and goals.
• Led and managed a team of very proactive, young and enthusiastic UX professionals, of team size 30, implemented the following initiatives in the Product design department

• Design Evaluation Framework
  • Introduced and trained the team to use a structured and systematic approach used to evaluate and assess the user experience of a product, service, or interface. It provides a set of guidelines, criteria, and methods for examining various aspects of the user experience, with the goal of identifying strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement.
• Product Design Methodology (UCD)
  • Introduced and mentored the team to practice 'User-centered design (UCD)' in their designs that prioritizes the needs and preferences of end users throughout the entire design and development process, ensuring products are intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable for their target audience.
• RFP Library
  • This initiative consolidates all product flows into a single file. It streamlines the process of completing new RFPs, making it more efficient and ensuring a consistent flow across the entire design team.
• Persona Library
  • For all the teams to quickly refer to Personas, and also to document the changing behaviors of users in the personas.
• Knowledge Sharing Sessions
  • Knowledge is wealth, and all products of M2P are designed with high level of inter-operability and dependency. Encouraged team members to share their knowledge at regular intervals in the form of 'Knowledge Sharing session'. All the team members, sometimes even the development teams found it useful and the entire team gained a common and shared knowedge of products.-
• Fintech Glossary
  • A friendly financial dictionary for the digital age! It's a handy collection of terms and phrases that explain the exciting world of financial technology (fintech) in simple, easy-to-understand language.
  • All those intimidating terms were broken down into bite-sized explanations that any reader/user can grasp quickly, whether they are a tech-savvy enthusiast or a complete newbie to the fintech scene.
  • This eliminated the confusion / apprehension one encounters, when they newly join the company. Though it was designed for the design team, that was put to use widely by all the teams.
• 360-degree Appraisal
  • Implemented a resource review mechanism that offers a comprehensive perspective on performance evaluation. This method enhanced the reviewing process by eliminating biases, allowing for a more objective assessment. It not only streamlined performance evaluations but also facilitated the identification of appropriate corrective actions or recognition and rewards.