Studio: Streamlined service delivery experience
40 business categories serving over 10 million customers with a single design
Home services go beyond mere transactions; they're personal. Unlike a simple food or grocery drop-off, the real work kicks off inside your home. Each category we serve, be it beauty, appliance repair, or cleaning, demands a specific set of standards on top of our overall platform guidelines.
Fact: Ensuring top-notch service delivery requires our professionals to follow a meticulous process - everything from an OTP handshake and hygiene checks to providing accurate quotations and proof of work through invoices, among other steps.
We have over 30 unique flows for delivering jobs. Every time, any of the businesses needs any improvement a new project has to go through design and development. There is endless design and tech debt in each of the flows that is a pain to manage.
Problem: The product team has to say NO to majority of requests due to limited resources. The high revenue businesses take away majority of the resources and new businesses suffer. This was limiting the growth of business and realisation of the best customer eperience.
Hypothesis: a unified architecture that's tailored to guarantee the optimal experience for every service we offer, ensuring each interaction is seamless, from start to finish.
Anti-hypothesis: This project is too big to be realised. Even if we build the product, it will be impossible to move to the new system without a losing business. Unifying such diverse business flows is not possible.
Simple
Flexible
Scalable
Customer product architecture
Partner product architecture
Handshake between the two users
Customer Product
Customers always get a consistent experience that focuses on the job to be done.
Partner Product
Any business or SOP can be delivered through the same consistent product experience.
Both the users have access to the timeline of events and perform required actions.
Add-on modules
In Q4 2023, we tackled a significant issue for our beauty services: ensuring all products used are genuine. Customers told us it's important for them that the products touching their skin, especially their faces, are real and high quality. To address this, we used our Studio platform to add a step in our partner workflow, allowing us to verify product authenticity for customers.
This update was implemented without adding any new components. Our team focused on improving barcode quality, speeding up scanning times, and tracking how customers reacted to this new feature. Now, more than 95% of our beauty services include a successful product check before starting the service, boosting customer trust.
In Q4 2022, we launched Studio, significantly enhancing our system's efficiency and impact without increasing support costs—all achieved within the quarter.
Studio now works seamlessly across all categories, both in India and internationally, providing a uniform experience for users and simplifying operations for our partners and business owners. This means no retraining is needed for partners, and business owners can easily adjust operations without overhauling the product's architecture.
The app redesign has streamlined our framework, allowing us to focus on backend improvements, halve our product rollout times, and consistently deliver superior quality faster.
Studio's launch marks a move towards better adaptability and operational efficiency, cutting unnecessary costs while improving the user experience, embodying our drive for innovation and excellence.
As the leader responsible for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) of the studio project delivery, I played a pivotal role in ensuring that the team fully understood the problem, developed a simple yet durable solution, and delivered it within the stipulated timeframe. My involvement was crucial at several key checkpoints throughout the product development process.
Key Checkpoints and Contributions:
Problem Definition: What to achieve, what to do and more importantly what not to do.
Outcome, scope and priority: Collaborated with other product leaders to define the project's scope and set priorities, ensuring alignment with every imaginable stakeholder. The product scope overlapped with every possible pod in the technical organisation.
Execution Plan: This project was impossible if we didn't break it down to micro projects that can be executed while continuing business. I provided the unique leverage of being the bridge between supply and the job delivery workplaces to ensure the lego pieces fit in together.
10%, System Architecture: Built a system architecture that simplified complex problems into manageable chunks. Once the team had a simple structure built on need-to-know, good-to-know they could work autonomously. This early involvement was crucial to setting a solid foundation for the project.
50%, Coverage and Resilience Testing: Ensured the system's simplicity with brutal reduction of patters. Creative reuse of patterns is great for users, and the company. This phase was critical for identifying and addressing potential issues early on. Every possible use-case was reviewed with real data to ensure the patterns can scale across the board.
99%, Final Interface Consistency and Quality: Final audit to drive consistency and quality in visuals, copy and corner-case handling. This phase focused on refining the user interface to ensure it delivered a delightful user experience.
Follow through: Ensuring the promised quality in designs is realised in production. The designers, product managers and engineers worked together to achieve this with screenshot and life cycle tests. I limited myself to setting the standards and supervision.
Through these structured and strategic checkpoints, the project was successfully delivered on time. There were hiccups and we had to roll-back the release and improve on the product before its scaled to 100%. But that's the nature of building complex digital products that run businesses.
The goal of transitioning to a single framework was achieved by end of 2023. All Urban Company businesses use the studio framework for anything related to service delivery. It gives me joy to see business owners come up with unique ideas for improving service delivery for customers without bothering about the hassle of releasing a product.
© Rohan Verma, 2024