A neo-banking platform for businesses in India
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📌 #MVP • #Micro-Interactions • #Dark-UI • #Built-in-a-month
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Note: This isn't a case study but more of a design overview. The project hasn't yet reached at a state to become a case study. We're yet to reach our product-market fit. And from a design perspective, we know tons of things that don't work or we haven't validated enough.
Since the other two projects from Razorpay focus more on the UX aspects, I thought I'll use this one to demonstrate my/our visual design heavy work.
Before We Begin, My Role and Responsibilities
- Led the product’s design and managed designers that worked on its multiple phases.
- Extensively hands-on for the first release. Conceptualised the product architecture and design language.
- Coordinated with teams, organised sync ups and brought everyone to the same platform to keep pace.
- Worked with the product team to define the product construct, came up with solutions and prioritise features.
- Worked with the tech team to come up with solutions that that would work in the constraints we had.
What's RazorpayX?
RazorpayX is a neo-bank for businesses in India.
Dealing with banks is painful and their products aren't built for what the new-age businesses and startups need.
Users and Use-Cases
Eventually, we want to build a platform that serves businesses of all shapes and sizes. The use-cases that we're focusing on right now:
- API Banking
Businesses that want to automate their money-flow. RazorpayX APIs are designed for developers.
- One-stop Replacement for Current Bank Account
By partnering with banks, we want to be the one-stop for businesses to manage all of their bank account and their entire money flow.
Background
- MVP and Early access release
In January 2019, with the early access release, we aimed to solve API-based payouts (payments going out, a subset of use-case 1). Right now we have the product being actively used by a significant number of businesses for the same.
- Consequent releases and feature additions
Since then we've added a bunch of features to further facilitate the use-cases but we aren't done with the features to fully solve use case 2.
How we built the MVP in a Month...
A month-long hackathon
This started back in Mid-November. The leadership wanted to build and release a product in a month, as we had announced the product publicly but the progress had been slow.
Product specs for the main functionalities were detailed out. The core-functionality was clear and engineering had already started work but end timelines were vague. That's when we assembled a war-room and started dedicatedly working on it.
I up took the charge of the RazorpayX dashboard and worked with the team to scope out its features, set up the design team, distribute the work and plan out the timelines. We built more than 200 well thought through screens in just a month with 3 product designers.
Our Secret
Plan & Cut Down → Execute Fast → Review → Repeat
- Backtracking from delivery: We backtracked our timelines from the day we wanted the product to release keeping enough buffer.
- Planning, prioritisation and dependencies: We did extensive planning, prioritised features and cut down on them as needed. We had set daily checks to see if we'd be able to complete it on time.
- Teams working very closely: Everyone who was on this project, worked very closely with each other. We had daily standups apart from that constant sync ups people used to have. We always made sure any blocker is resolved immediately.
- Making it Visible: I worked on a sheet to make it visible how much time would something take. We would know early if any delay may have a domino-effect. Also, created a Gantt chart to do things in a way where we aren't becoming blockers.
- Expand to See complete worksheet