Design Management - Platform Design

My Role

I was responsible for the overall design strategy and execution of these projects. I worked closely with the Product leaders, Engineering Managers and the Design team to ensure that the project is on track. I was also responsible for the hiring and mentoring of the design team as we scaled. Few key projects include

Integrations > Platform Design

Having started working on Integrations(E-commerce, CRM and Payment Gateways), my responsibilities started to include other areas and eventually the Platform Design team was board. The team was responsible for the design of the core product areas such as Checkout, Analytics, Multi-product foundations, Integrations, and Payment Gateways. The team also worked on the design system and the design operations.

In the journey of working on these key projects I had the opportunity to lead a team of 11 at its highest and nuture and groom amazing designers, writers, Design Technologists who have gone to become leaders in their own right. I have also had the opportunity to work with amazing Product Managers, Engineering Managers and Engineers who have helped me grow as a designer and a leader. I built the Research and the Design Technologist(hiring a fellow local club cricketers) team from scratch and worked with the team to build a strong foundation for the team to scale.

Some key projects that we worked on

1. Entitlement Management System (EMS)

This was a great opportunity to build the feature from scratch. We quickly created the designs to help the team understand the vision and the scope of the project. A small team worked to build an MVP and conduct a research and refine the understanding. The adoption of the feature was great and the team worked on the next iteration to improve the experience. The feature was known for the effective self-serve capability.

2. Checkout

Checkout is always-on project at Chargebee. As platform design team, we worked on the features and also on the long term immmprovements.

The checkout challenge was to get the customer using v1 and v2 checkout to the next version to reduce the development efforts. In April 2019, A research project help us better understand the v3 Customers and plan for the revamp. The team worked with to work with the engineering team to understand the technical constraints and build a system that scales to cater to the needs of the customers. A small team worked to build an MVP to conduct a research and refine the understanding for building a Fullpage experience. Post the MVP, the team is working on the limited customizations in full page experience. The trick was to figure out the right amount of knobs to give the customers to customize the checkout experience and this is always an iteration. It is always WIP.

3. Analytics

RevenueStory is Chargebee’s subscription analytics platform that enable our merchants to take better business decisions with data. Revenue Story was built as a sepearte product that focuses on Subscription Analytics. A couple of years of its existence, a decision was made to bring it as a part of the core Billing Product (Chargebee) There was a significant design debt as the team had constantly catered to the unique requirements of the Customers. The time was right for a revamp which focuses on building a UX System which scales to cater to varied use cases such as Report builder and embedded Analytics. It was a multi year project which saw Stakeholders changing across the teams. The team delievered an system that scaled to meet the requirements of 3 products - Core Billing, RevRec and Receivables.

Sathyan: I wanted to link the detailed case study of analytics here. I'm working on it in the next version of the site. Rendering .mdx files in full page modal might not be a great apporach to build the portfolio pages : ) Lesson learnt after 3 weeks of coding : )

4. Receivables, RevRec, Design System and many more.

Apart from the team also worked on Transfer Configurations, Integrations, Payment Gateways, Multi-product foundations, and other key projects. The team also adopted TailwindUI to prototype and help towards the development of the Design System leading to the adoption of it in 2 aquired products - RevRec and Receivables.