In May, this year, I created a life.

And when you create a new life, you start understanding your own life a tad bit better. In the past 2 months, thanks to this life, I experienced some of the strongest emotions of my life — of unwavering joy in an unbearable pain. I never knew these emotions could even exist together!

But this story of motherhood didn’t start 2 months ago. It started many, many years ago. Years ago, when I could convince you that creating kids was stupid. I could explain it to you with more than one perfectly fine reasoning that’d be hard for you to debate. The only response to this debate that I heard over & over again was — “oh, but love”.

A few years later, I realize it’s indeed just that. And that love makes everything else suddenly look so blah; it’s almost a blasphemy.

When I decided to embrace motherhood, some of my well meaning (female) friends asked me questions such as, “weren’t you super ambitious? what about your career now?”, “how will you ever be able to travel now?”, “have you decided with your husband who’ll change the baby’s nappies?” (no, I’m not making this up 😁). And some elders in the family had all the answers, “you’ve done a lot in your career, now you’re finally doing what you are meant to do & be as a woman”, “of course motherhood will come with a lot of sacrifices and they’re all so worth it”, “being a mom is not easy, you’ll have to be completely selfless now”.

Some people who had been there, done that and some who’d swear by Instagram reels for all the information, acquainted me perfectly well with what I should expect. People’s advice & judgments, I feel, are driven by their own experiences, fears, and assumptions. And if motherhood teaches you one thing really, really well it is to filter & prioritise– your time, what you value, and all the well meaning suggestions & judgements that come your way. It teaches you how to care for your own self first, and hence, your living extension, the life you created.

That said, it’s no less a world of dichotomies.

1 month after I delivered my baby, I was feeling fit enough to start an exercise routine and pretty insecure about my hanging belly. Every morning, when I would fight all tiredness to finally be on the mat, the thought that haunted me was — was I being selfish? Should I instead be watching my sleeping baby?

When I’d pick a book to read, I’d debate myself if I should have been reading a book on parenting! Or better yet, be watching my sleeping baby.

I’d feel jealous of my husband who could still continue his routine (to a modest degree), meet people, head for lunch meetings outside while I’d be stuck at home. A tiny human was now dependent on me for his food & water. But on the flip, I sometimes felt a strong sense of pity for my husband, who being an equal partner, the other parent, the father, could never experience the feeling of bliss breastfeeding could get. I was already the more loved parent, the one my boy always wanted to stick to.

And of course! There’s the biggest dichotomy of all — looking at your baby and constantly battling between, “is he growing fast enough?” and “why is he growing so fast?”

In the past 2 months, with a little one in my arms, I had the opportunity to look at my life every day with a new lens. There was no meeting waiting to happen in the next 10 mins, no deadline for tomorrow, no plans for the weekend, and absolutely no difference between a weekday or weekend. Things were as fluid, and as chaotic, as they could get. And yet, there was zero anxiety. I didn’t know what I would be doing the very next moment, and for a change, that didn’t bother me. I could just be. Be with my baby and experience what they call –absolute bliss. After many, many years, I was finally in no rush. I felt comfortable and settled. I have finally broken free from my obsession with constantly looking at the time ( even if, for some time :))

During my pregnancy, I said no to many new opportunities. I gave up mid way on some new personal projects that I had started. While the feeling of unsettle & guilt still resides, I am glad I did that. It couldn’t have been better the other way round.

At home, I force myself to think about work every now & then — Would dynamics at my workplace be changed when I go back? Will people discount me and make assumptions that I’m a new mother? No more good projects?

I couldn’t care less.

I feel guilty, I feel free of all these doubts. It wasn’t normal for someone like me to not have these thoughts constantly. So I discussed this with a close friend. All he had to say was, “I know you! When you’re back in the groove, you’ll be back in the groove.”

I doubt that.

The question that does cross my mind every now & then is — should I have taken that sabbatical I’ve been planning for years? What am I even doing at work? (With the risk of my coworkers reading this, I still wanted to be genuine of how I’m feeling. I feel good that maybe because of this maternity leave I am finally getting a pause, and a chance to let these thoughts come to the forefront)

On the personal front, motherhood has made me a far calmer person (or so I’d like to believe). Peace & kindness is important, I realised. Not just for my sake, but for this new life who knows nothing better than some sleep, some food, a lot of poop, and tons of love. It’s like someone’s watching you every minute. They’ll learn from what behaviour they see you choose & practice everyday. You’re probably going to be their idol. And one day, some day, they’ll post a pic with you on their Instagram saying, “my mother is the best”. And only for that day, you want to be a better person. Life’s priorities change. You want to be good just so they’re not lying to the world, or themselves. Their mother indeed is the best!.

Life shifts gears, and your title at work, your Twitter follower count, your XIRR doesn’t matter, all that matters is what would your child think of you. Not just when they’re tiny and don’t understand the world, but when they grow old and put all their experiences and your methods under their learned & aware lens. (Don’t we do that all the time? Scrutinising our parents’ choices and holding them accountable for so much!)

Funnily, motherhood also teaches you to multitask. Now there’s a perfectly sound explanation of why humans can’t multitask. But ask the mom in me. She’s suddenly ambidextrous! On most days, I am writing a research paper on world peace with one hand, and cleaning my child’s poop with the other. Some days, not most, I also eat with one hand, and clean my child’s poop with the other. 😁 In my head, I have also learnt all possible Calisthenic poses — you hold my child and I know exactly which leg and which arm to manoeuvre, should I see my child slip away from your weak grip. My mind has played almost all possible combinations of angles in those split seconds I allow someone else to hold my baby.

Motherhood makes you feel so fulfilled and yet so insecure of your child’s safety and well being.

Of the many things motherhood gave me, I’m glad after almost 2 years I felt I wanted to write & publish again. I’m not sure if I’ll ever experience again what I am experiencing now. And for posterity, it’s important I record this.

And oh, in retrospect, “oh, but love” happens to be the most darndest, most correct, and most logical explanation of why I chose motherhood.

Over & out — baby needs a change and feed. Together. 🥲

Few months ago, I was on this dating app called Hinge (you guessed it right — for the noble purpose of ‘research’). While navigating through Hinge, or rather while researching the app, I found some super smart UX flows that actually led me to engage more & more with Hinge.

Before we get into the specifics of these UX flows in Hinge, let’s talk a bit about dating in general. And for that, let’s do a quick mental exercise. Imagine you’re standing in a bar and there’s a really hot person on the other side of the area who you’d really want to pursue. In that moment, how do you feel? Do you confidently walk up to them, or do you stand there frozen never really making a move. When I picture myself in the same situation, here’s how I feel:

• Should I walk up to him?
• If I did walk up to him, what will I say?
• If I did walk up and said something, will I end up saying something meaningful?
• Will he like me?
• What if he doesn’t like me and says something rude in return?
• Oh, he’s with friends! What if he rejects me in front of all of them?
• What if he and his friends mock me?
• Oh my friends are with me too. What will they say if he rejects me?
• What if he rejects me now and bumps into me tomorrow in the supermarket?

And tons of such FEARS!

In summary:

Walking up to someone to ask them out is hard — there’s fear of rejection

Getting rejected is harder — there’s fear of bumping into them again and having your ego trampled

And bumping into someone in the supermarket the next morning after they let you down previous night in the bar is hardest — here’s fear of being recognized, mocked, or introduced as “the guy I rejected last night” to her friend

Enter Tinder!

You’re now sitting in the comfort of your couch. No more do you have to walk up to someone. No more do you have to solve probability maths in your head whether that dude will want to make out with you later. All your insecurities are comfortably placed behind a screen, probably munching on something, on a nice couch. Tinder gives you an altar no product can — suddenly every person in the ecosystem is a probable match. You can right swipe hundreds of them and Tinder won’t put a limit.

Problem no. 1 solved.

Once you send an interest, Tinder smartly chooses to NOT show you who all you sent an interest to, or what’s the status of your interests. In your interest, all of it magically goes in a black hole. If someone accepts you back, you get a notification and a match. But if someone doesn’t, Tinder won’t let you care — there are more fish to catch in Tinder’s pond ocean. If you sent a few interests you can comfortably live in the glory that none of those people ever came back on Tinder and hence didn’t accept your interest.

Because in the world of Tinder, rejection doesn’t exist.

Problem no. 2 solved.

Not only do rejections not exist in the world of Tinder, the 3 second swipe UX of Tinder doesn’t even let you build a mental image or a recall of someone you’re swiping right or left. Once swiped, the potential matches go in black hole and because you spend only a few seconds swiping them, you have absolutely no recall of them. So tomorrow, if they actually bump into you, you won’t ever be able to tell if you saw them on Tinder a night before.

(Not to add, people look different on their Instagram, Facebook, and Tinder, than they do in real lives. Bummer I know ;))

Problem no. 3 also solved.

In short, Tinder’s UX solved the following problems:

1. Big, bold mugshots that tell you to take a decision on a face in less than 10 seconds. (of course, if you’re the non-shallow kinds, you take some friction and swipe up to read more about them)
2. The ability to swipe tens of hundreds of potential matches in just a few seconds leading to very less recall
3. No history of who you swiped left or swiped right
4. No way of knowing if the profile you’re seeing on your phone in the moment — swiped you right OR haven’t seen your profile yet.
5. Reverse the above, and you’ll infer that someone who you right swipe doesn’t know you had right swiped them and hence they technically don’t reject your proposal.

But there are a few problems Tinder still doesn’t solve.

Let’s assume you get a handful of matches. Now you have a match in hand (like literally!) and:

• You have no idea why you swiped them right. That was probably just to up your probability game.
• You don’t know anything about them other than a few stats like their age, their location and a few pictures
• How do you strike a conversation with someone you don’t know such that you get a response (Tinder gives you absolutely no cues)
• What if you do get a response, but they turn out to be creepy, not the most tasteful word choosers or in my case, people with bad grammars (this is intentional :|) or those whu typ lyk dis?!

Enter Hinge!

And its wonderful UX choices. Let’s start:

1. Some of Hinge’s powerful UX starts right from its on-boarding. To create a profile for yourself, you’re not just asked to upload your pictures and tell your age, location and other nonsensical data points but also to answer some random, fun questions about you. Questions such as:

“Two truths and a lie!”

“Never have I ever”

“Typical Sunday”

“I geek out on”

The kind of questions you’d love thinking about. And the kind of questions you’d love answering. Guess why? We LOVE to talk about ourselves! It just makes us feel good. See these:

(2) You said a few things about yourself. Made you feel good. Now lets swipe see a few profiles to pursue. A typical profile on Hinge is not just a big picture taking up most of the screen but a picture plus an answer to a random question (one of which you also answered while creating your own profile). As you scroll down, you’ll see a mish-mash of pictures and a few interesting questions that people have answered. Hinge, through its UX, keeps you invested in the process of finding a date. You spend a good amount of time looking through a profile and reading fun things about them. You also know a bit more about them, unlike Tinder, to make a choice. And aren’t all good looking people great before they open their mouth (to kiss or talk ;))?

Here’s how a typical Hinge profile looks when you fire the app:

And here’s how a full profile would typically look like: (In the interest of not invading someone’s privacy, posting a screenshot of my own profile.)

Side note 1: If you want to sponsor my London trip, please to DM :D

Side note 2: The last few lines are the traits of someone in my life I already brag about. A LOT. :)

(3) Hinge also doesn’t let you get bored. Or ignore them! Each profile isn’t just a mixed layout of answers + pictures but also a different set of questions answered. Hinge does it all to keep you invested AND interested in their product.

(4) Unlike Tinder, Hinge doesn’t let you do a left or right swipe. You either show disinterest in a profile by tapping a ‘X’ icon OR you can like specific things in a profile (an image or an answer) which is then followed by a prompt to write them a message. Hinge makes you put an effort into your proposal — the traditional way it’s done. And the way it can lead to higher conversions! (Imagine swiping random profiles v/s getting some thoughtful messages for a proposal)

(5) The fourth, and the bit that I loved the most, is the fact that you don’t just like or dislike a profile on Hinge. You can choose to like a picture OR an answer on someone’s profile. Soon after you press the *heart* button you’re also prompted to write a message along with that super specific like. Talk about conversation starters? And more so, super contextual conversation starters. Hinge has it all baked in their UX! See this:

(6) Like the good product it is, Hinge shows you who all sent you likes. But doesn’t store any history of who all you sent likes to. Hinge doesn’t want you to know if you’re rejected. Good products don’t break your heart. ;)

Till so far, I’ve shown you how you’re investing your time in sending likes to the people you’d potentially want to date after learning some fun things about them. You also get to like specific things about people. And start a very contextual conversation with them. The recipe of getting a like back and possibly even kick-starting a conversation. Now let’s come to the other side. The way Hinge shows you people who have liked you or sent you a proposal is super interesting too!

(7) Here’s how you get a proposal on Hinge.

Notice how someone has replied to something I wrote and is giving me an opportunity to skim through their profile in a different light altogether. I got my narcissistic kick from the fact that the person who approached me took the pain to go through my profile, liked something interesting about me, and took time to comment on it. The least I could now do is look at their profile in a more invested manner too. And maybe send back an interesting reply myself too?

And best of all, the product’s UX is making me do all of this. All so naturally.

(8) In the best previous image, did you notice that I have 50+ such likes (perks of being a woman, yeah!)? Narcissistic me takes a hot seat and jumps in to see who all liked me, what specifically they liked — was it a picture or one of my clever answers, and what did they have to say to me! But I don’t want to do it one profile at a time. I have a pot of gold and I don’t want to take out one coin at a time. What I want is load up my arms fully. Hinge understands that. And how beautifully it solves that!

Notice the screenshot below

You’ll see an icon for a grid view where I can access all the profiles of whoever liked me, all at once. And so I do, but Hinge being a smart product and having just enough enough psychology understanding allows me to see all the 50+ likes that I got BUT all greyed out. ;) It asks me to upgrade if I want to see all the likes in one go.

That’s not all! The thing I found even smarter was that as I scroll further, I can see the first few words of the messages people have sent me. Ouch! The narcissistic me is now jumping up and down on the chair! How do I not upgrade and read all the cute things these men wrote about me?! Again, it’s all in the UX baby — it has shown me enough, and obscured enough to make me curious about what lies behind the upgrade! And like a good product, Hinge is playing with my mind to make me things it wants me to do

Reserved the best for the last. And that’s Hinge’s chat section.

(9) Have you ever had the anxiety to read a message ASAP on WhatsApp but you don’t want to reply to it right away? What makes you scared about doing that? The blue tick? You don’t want someone to know that you read their message but didn’t reply choice-fully.

Hinge also solves this by not giving a read feedback to your senders. So you can safely read and not reply instantly, without letting the other person know. But Hinge takes this a step further and shows a bright blue “your turn” label on each chat to continuously remind you that it’s your turn to reply — to keep the message on your radar. So a 2 second glance on the screen tells you whether it’s your turn to reply to them or yours was the last message.

Also bonus points for the “Your Turn” copy. It sends out a message that the other person made an effort to say something and now it’s your turn to reply to them.

If you reached till the end, you deserve a light-hearted joke :) (And this comes from a real life incident)

Me: I downloaded Hinge and Tinder on my phone last week. Just letting you know.

Him: *says nothing*

Me: What?! It’s my age to have fun!

Him: It’s your age to also feature on Forbes 30 Under 30. Why aren’t you doing that?

Me: *says nothing*

In closing:

Fin.

P.S. Thanks to FacePixelizer for the blur effect on screenshots

You can reach out to me on Twitter at @taruna2309 and on email at tarunawrites@gmail.com

How Hinge plays with your emotions to get you a match was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

7 years ago my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. We did not know what that meant. We didn’t anticipate that in a turn of events, we’ll be jolted out of the average happy middle class life that we were living into a tragedy which doctors told us would end in my father’s death. And that I would have to be prepared to lose my father, every day, for 6 long years.

It all started when my mother got an unexpected phone call from one of my father’s friend at work. Out of the blue, she began by asking in a rather condescending tone if my parents had a lot of fights at home or there could be a possible reason my father could be stressed. My mother completely clueless about what this lady was talking, answered that she couldn’t think of a possible reason my father could be stressed. She mentioned that her daughters were doing well at college, we weren’t under absolutely any financial loans, and apart from the casual fights that every couple has, there were no major reasons of fights at home. My father’s colleague then went on to tell my mother that my father wasn’t able to perform at work, and would sometimes behave like a mad man who had forgotten even basic things. As vague as all of that sounded, my mother calmly questioned my father the same night and booked an appointment for a full body check-up for the following weekend. My father laughed it off saying he was absolutely fine.

After the reports came in, my mother realised that my father was indeed right. He didn’t have absolutely any ailments. Not even Diabetes, or high BP which was normal for their age. My mother still didn’t stop there. She forced my father to get a neurology check-up as well. In one of the reputed hospitals of Delhi, he was then incorrectly diagnosed of shrinking nerve cells of brain, a common disorder the doctor mentioned, which could be corrected with proper medication. The medication went on for 7 months when my mother started realising that there was indeed something off and the medication wasn’t helping. My father would forget the time, he had trouble driving, and he would leave important things here and there. These little things which we had been dismissing till then suddenly became significant as we had gotten a primer that there could be something major. We changed the doctor and the new doctor saw my dad’s report, looked at him, and asked him a few questions. He asked my father his age, he didn’t know. The time on the wall clock, my dad couldn’t read it. To name a few colors, he sat silent. His birthdate, marriage anniversary, and his children’s birthdays, he laughed because he didn’t remember any. The doctor drew a circle on a page and asked my father to draw it too. My father couldn’t. My father was educated and doing decently well in life till Alzheimer’s chose him.

My mother sat there witnessing all of this. I am not sure what all emotions she must have gone through in those 20 minutes. I wasn’t there. I am so grateful I wasn’t; I wouldn’t have had enough strength to respond to the situation.

The doctor then flinched two sentences, one after the other. The first one was, “Unfortunately this could be Dementia, or worse Alzheimer’s, which is irreversible and has no cure” and the second, “but don’t worry we’ll stretch it by 10 to 15 years”.

My mother didn’t know what either of the terms Dementia or Alzheimer’s meant and what stretching by 10 to 15 years meant. ‘Irreversible’, and ‘no cure’ were the words she went on to hear tens of times in the following months when we went to almost every other neurologist in Delhi-NCR for second, third, and nth opinion. Trust me, we tried rather hard to escape reality.

For almost a year after my father was diagnosed, we spent every evening crying our fate out. It was convenient. The doctors told us we couldn’t fight Alzheimer’s so to keep ourselves busy, we chose to cry. There had to be a way to kill each day when we knew we couldn’t live it. And crying was so easy.

All this while, we didn’t blink an eye to the outside world. To most, my father took a voluntary retirement from work because he was being shifted to a different city. I, in particular, made it a point to not share it with my friends at college, and later at work. I didn’t talk about it except for the odd days when some of my friends would be home and they would see that something was off with my father and question me. All other times, I just avoided. I didn’t want sympathy; I didn’t want help. I didn’t want to talk about it. Talking didn’t make me feel any better. If I did talk about it, it didn’t lighten my burden. My conscious would hear the story along with others and make me feel even more sick. I had secretly become an emotional wretch. So all this while, I tried very very hard to not be myself around people. I was always overly peppy, irritatingly loud and cheerful, and extremely ambitious at work. Sometimes, I also felt I was overdoing the ‘happy’ part in public.

I had also become guilty and afraid. I was afraid that if I told people what was happening within the four walls of my house I would be judged to have normal desires a 20-something has. There were innumerable times when I would be biting food at lunch table in office, and I would suddenly look at someone sitting right in front of me, and wonder that if they knew my father was suffering from Alzheimer’s, they would immediately call me out for enjoying my meal calmly. They’d say, “how can she be so selfish… her family is breaking apart and here she sits looking all normal and enjoying herself” And I was guilty; many times, for being happy and enjoying myself.

So I chose to not open up to people. Pretence gave me happiness. It let me forget things. And I continued living a lie all these years.

While I was always consciously trying too hard to be dramatically happy, there were times when I would lose it. On people, situations, and things that didn’t deserve it. I was called childish and not strong emotionally when I lost it on seemingly little matters of life. I didn’t mind it. Those adjectives helped me hide my emotions when I actually wanted to scream out loud and question existence for choosing my parents for this tragedy. It was easy to be called delicate, childish, or sensitive and mask my real sadness under little abruptions of life.

All this while, I never dated and never got really attached to any friends either. I also kept saying a blatant No to all the times my heart gave me a calling. I just didn’t have the mental bandwidth for any more tough situations, heart breaks, or difficult conversations. I was afraid of getting close to anyone emotionally and having them discover how miserable I was. I also thought that in relationships people expected their other halves to help them grow and there I was, all broken and with no strength to hold myself together let alone take responsibility of or being capable of loving someone else.

In the past 3 years, I worked from home couple days every week to help take care of my father. Help, my mother. Because ultimately she was bearing the backlash of this disease just next to my father. She was the primary caregiver and she had to take the maximum toll from losing a partner bit by bit every day to feeding my father with her hands every meal and cleaning his shit.

Even though I am extremely hard working and ambitious at work, I saw my fair share of struggles sitting at one place on my bed every day working remotely in a company which otherwise didn’t have a remote culture. I missed tens of monthly cake cutting ceremonies, my own work anniversaries, and so many Friday evening events. I got myself miscommunicated hundreds of times when I tried to explain my problems in chat or emails. I was also never around my manager for him to see how hard I was working so many days. I couldn’t become part of office politics and I hardly got any gossips (yes, the 20-something me pined for those also sometimes). On some days when I would go to office, I was made fun of — for being treated royally at work and for having fun sitting at home. I didn’t have a conventional remote job where I was travelling or sitting in coffee shops to get my work done. I was sitting alone, on the same spot of my bed, and working 10+ hours non-stop, every day. Fun is the last adjective I would choose to describe it.

All this while my father hardly spoke. Around 4 years ago, he lost his ability to construct meaningful sentences. He forgot our names and he didn’t know where he lived. We had to keep an eye on him 24X7 because if he walked outside the boundary of our house unattended, he wouldn’t be able to find his way back home. And we would be condemned to a life of forever anxiety, guilt, and misery. 2 months before he left for his heavenly abode, he did walk out of the house one day. My mother was alone at home then. Few minutes later when she realised my father was not home, she started running around the street to find my father. She walked half a kilo-meter and came back home thinking that she should first check the house properly. My father was nowhere inside our home. She then rang the bells of a few neighbours to help her. Few minutes later, someone my mother didn’t recognise walked my father back home. My mother almost broke down on the road and took my father inside. That day he came back and slept on the bed and never got up. He became bed-ridden for the following 2 months. I still thank God for bringing him home that day. For giving us a chance to bid him farewell. And for not punishing us with anxiousness for the rest of our lives. I shiver when I think what would have happened if he didn’t come back home that day. We didn’t know then that he had just 2 more months with us.

After he became really sick, he was hospitalised and in a week’s time the doctor asked us to take him back home. My mother kept begging the doctor to keep him in the hospital for a few more days so she could take a healthy husband home. She argued with the doctor twice and in the third sentence the doctor almost shouted back saying if we were foolish to not realise that my father was living his last few days.

Yes, suffering does give you the title of foolish.

All these 6 years, there had been uncountable conversations when our long lost relatives, friends, or neighbours would call us foolish and blame my mother for not taking enough care, for not feeding my father with almonds, for not showing him family pictures which would bring his memory back, for not taking him to that baba who would press my father’s nerves and magically make this deadly disease vanish from all our lives.

Every now and then, someone would slip in, “but how can this not have a cure” and some of them even went on to add, “of course you are not doing enough…”. Each time one of these sentences was said, I wanted to shout at these people, tell them to get out of our house and let us be. I never did that. I would lose strength. This anger kept getting repressed and when it would reach my throat, I would pick a fight, make an argument, and start crying.

While the doctors always kept prepping us for the worst, nothing can prepare you enough for a loved one’s death. In every quarterly visit to the doctor, my mother would ask the doctor in the same helpless tone, “so now he can’t ____, what would happen next?” and the doctor always said the same thing, “it will get worse”. He would then go on to do a permutation and combination of the same 7–8 medicines and our visit to the doctor would conclude. I liked that doctor. He never sugar-coated truth, never told us things would be better, or that he would take us out of these sufferings. He just told the truth. And things did get worse. I not just saw my father deteriorating each day, I also saw my mother become physically weak each passing day battling this deadly disease with unconditional, selfless love. My sister who I had never seen express a lot of emotions all these years, couldn’t be pacified after my father left us. I felt the most helpless I ever have when I saw her crying. I couldn’t believe my strong sister who never ever spoke in a loud tone, who never got frustrated even in the gravest of situations, who never lost patience while juggling between her home, her office, taking care of a <2 year old, and taking care of my father, and who I had virtually never seen cry, would become so weak one day. I never imagined I would have to witness so much loss in a single day. My sister always has a smile on her face. Every day when she would come from work she would talk to my father like usual, in the same cheerful tone. Even when he never answered her back all these years.

The day when I saw my father lying on the floor motionless and still, all these years of strength couldn’t help me bear that sight. I realized howsoever much I screamed that day my father would not hear me. Howsoever hard I jolt him, and take his fingers in my hand, he would never respond back. From there on, he would not be a part of any of our family pictures, our meals, our birthdays and festivals. I had lost my father. My mother had lost her husband. And whether we liked it or not, we now had to accept this hard fact and live with it.

All these years shaped and wired me to become a person I didn’t choose to be. I was a pseudo-atheist who has woken up in the middle of the night and has had her hands folded praying to God so many times. I have questioned the importance of money — it can’t buy shit. I have questioned the importance of relationships — they overwhelmed me. I have questioned why were we chosen for this. And if my family could be really, genuinely, happy ever again. The answer to last I have finally accepted is a plain No.

All these years while I was insecure, an emotional wretch, and a terrible human being who just didn’t react well to so many life’s situations, I also felt light and free. I repeatedly told myself that my family had gotten their share of tragedies and absolutely nothing else could go wrong in our life. Why not? All the world’s troubles are not for us. We got ours and I have strong faith that nothing else, ever, will go wrong. It logically can’t.

The day when my father finally left for his after life, I had hundreds of people in my house and almost everybody told us to be strong. They didn’t realize that keeping strong was not a choice we had. My father’s death in the world’s eyes was a singular event, for my family, it was an episode that stretched 7 long years. And all this while we didn’t have a choice but to be strong to keep up with life.

My father was suffering so much that in these years I have also prayed for his death. Many times. To phrase it out in words, even in my conscience, needed strength. I had to see my mother crying every other day. I had to witness both my parents become so weak that they couldn’t hold themselves together. So many times. That needed strength. I have heard people call my mother foolish right in front of me. That needed strength. The time women are pampered and taken care of with so much attention and love, I have seen my pregnant sister work from home to take care of my father. I have had to say bye to her from the gate of our house with terrible, insecure thoughts in my head. That needed strength. I have seen my mother cry because her job was in danger. My mother who loved to have an individuality of her own was suddenly being caged by destiny to sit inside the four walls of the house and take care of my father. She was chosen by destiny to suffer along with my father. To witness that every moment needed strength. Few days after my father left us, my sister and I were talking something and suddenly burst into a laughter. In reaction, my mother started crying and told us that any form of happiness in the house bothered her. To not give in to crying in seconds that day and hold her together needed strength. I had to witness my father slowly and steadily forget our names, us, himself, and then even the basic urges of life — of food and excretion. I don’t remember him asking for or complaining about food. He ate whatever and how much we fed him with. And whenever we felt hungry. He peed and shit anywhere — in his pants, on the floor, in the dining area, wherever he felt convenient. Howsoever hard I try, I can’t remember what was the last full sentence I heard from my father’s mouth. All of this needed strength. And we never had a choice.

Last night I dreamt that my mother, my sister, and I was in a deep trench and we were trying really hard to come out of it. I saw my sister crying again. I immediately woke up. And I didn’t think too hard about it.

I have accepted this life. I don’t have a choice. And I have 6 long years of training of being irritatingly cheerful.

Let me tell you a secret that the product management industry is hiding from you, or maybe not saying it out loud — we don’t care ‘too’ much about the hard skills. And what hard skills? Writing a PRD? Doing user interviews? Understanding UX? Knowing business and tech?

There’s more than what meets the eye here. And more than UX, Business, and Tech, that’s required to become a better Product Manager.

Few years ago, when I started my Product Management career, almost every Google search on, “What do PMs do?” or “What skills are required to be a good PM?” landed me on a Venn! This Venn:

The Venn diagram tells you Product Managers sit at the intersection of tech, design, and business. This Venn was a good insight into what I’d be required to do and learn. And so, rather frantically, I started hoarding books on each of these subjects and read up, if not less, 50 odd books in a span of less than a year. During that time, I even achieved a personal record of reading three books in a single week. Here’s my Facebook post from then, basking in some narcissistic, limited world-view glory:

Taruna Manchanda

And then, reality hit! Or might I say, I plunged into it.

It took a fair share of building products, shedding tears (literally), and a lot of tough days to learn that Product Management is much more than business, UX, and tech. In fact, business, UX, and tech are just a part of a product management job.

At its heart, PM-ing is a job of grit, of incessant patience, of constant emotional battles, and still being happy!

After spending close to four years in the product management industry, building and collaborating on some super successful products with some of the brightest minds in the country, I collected a lot of learnings along the way. All of these come from sheer experience of making mistakes, failing, and getting “I wish I handled it better” thought at the end of the work day. And now knowing what that better looks like.

Here goes:

Lesson #1: Product Managers can’t be sad.

Weird, you might say? PMs can’t be sad? Does it mean we have to constantly be happy? And how does it even matter?

A typical day in the life of a PM is not about sitting in a corner of the bay and silently, thoughtfully, writing a Product Requirements Document. Instead, it’s a day full of constant nudges by (hoping you guessed it by now) UX, tech, and business folks. A typical day is a lot of meetings, conversations, a lot of alignment, and back-and-forth of ideas and objections.

PM-ing is the kind of sales job where the sales call never ends. Where every moment is show-time! It’s a job where in one single day, you’ll have to interact with tens of different stakeholders with different temperaments, personalities, motivations, and their varied needs and emotional states. How, then, can you afford to be sullen, gloomy, or not in your best, most excited self at any point of time? How then can you afford to be sad? How can you win any of those big and small sales meetings being all tired, exhausted, or anything but enthusiastic?

Happiness is the key, baby. Literally.

Lesson #2: No, the product is not your baby

You’ll hear the opposite of this a lot — That the product is your baby. And that you have to care for it, and rear it, and love (and defend) it like your own. The reason cited is that you have to give it selfless love, 24X7 unbiased attention, and blood and sweat — just the way you’d do to your own baby.

That’s wrong! For not one, but two reasons.

First, have you ever considered murdering your own baby? Would you be okay with hearing criticism about your baby?

If not, then stop considering the product as your baby. It’s not. It’s a product. You have to work to make successful, and be totally emotionally detached. Least of all, have feelings for it like you’d have for your child.

Second, a child may require 24X7 attention, a product, for its own good, does not.

Sometimes, you have to shut off to be able to listen. Come out of the box, to be able to think outside it. And unplug yourself from the current state of affairs of the product to be able to find a blue ocean for it.

Why I say this?

Product management is a journey of constant improvement of the product. It’s also the journey of abandoning bad ideas, bad products and features, and sometimes even sun-setting them when they’re not working as per expectations. Having feelings for your product makes you blind to all the criticism for your product. Sometimes, it may also make you defensive, and unable to take feedback or the voice of the user in the right spirit. And all of that is the recipe for bad product management.

So, today, for your own good and the product’s good, look at the product as what it is — a business to solve a customer need.

Lesson #3: Looking for instant gratification? Maybe look for another job

While in one of the previous points I compare product management to a sales job, the key differentiator here is that there’s no gratification at the end of the work day. The sales pitch is made, the sale is done, but there’s no ringing of coins in the background.

That sales call you just made is not going to end in a deal today, tomorrow, or even six months later.

A product is not a sales deal, or a contract, or few lines of code, or a design. It’s a journey.

A journey that keeps going on, and on, and on. And do you know the worst of it all? You didn’t make that contract, you didn’t market it, you didn’t write that piece of code, and you didn’t design it (in most conventional PM jobs) and hence the feeling of gratification of having finished something at the end of the work day, is rare to come by. Very rare!

Yet, you’ll constantly be making improvements, iterations, generating insights, optimisations, and taking the right decisions at each point — it’s a never-ending cycle!

Product Management requires incessant patience to see things through. To keep learning and to keep iterating. And to get to the results, which then again, become the starting point of another set of optimisations.

So if you’re looking for immediate kicks, maybe this is not the right stream for you.

Side note: Getting too patient is bad as well. As a PM, one must also exhibit a strong bias for action and be impatient enough to get your products out of the door sooner.

Too many conflicting ideas? Who said it was going to be easy?

Lesson #4: Learn to seek the truth, not validation

As a PM, you’re typically expected to come up with radically good ideas to solve user problems which are better than existing solutions by a delta of at least 4X. In this journey, you’re required to do a lot of research on the problem statement, on who you’re solving this problem for, how big the problem is, and what are the existing set of solutions for the problem.

Also, in this journey, many PMs tend to build a hypothesis along the way on what the plausible solutions could be. Once done, they try to back it up with more research on how well the particular solution could solve the user problem. And in that process, documents are put together, product hypothesis are created, a vision is written down, and some impact analysis is done.

Good going so far! Once at this stage, after having spent weeks (or maybe months) trying to find a solution to a problem statement, it is but human to get attached to your solution. And that’s where the problem starts. Once they are attached to a solution, PMs tend to start seeking validation of their thought process from everyone around, rather than finding the truth. Investment in the idea leads to attachment, and attachment leads to your defence mechanism kicking in — absolutely human!

In times like this, here’s what I do — rather than going around asking if something will work, ask people to tell you three reasons where your idea could fail. Don’t settle for less, ask for three sharp reasons. Once you do that, and talk to just 10 people, you’ll have 3X10 — that’s 30 perspectives different from yours to ponder and think on.

The catch here — use your best judgement still. Not all of these 30 perspectives are right, important, or immediately implementable. The idea of this exercise is only to make yourself okay to seek the truth, and not settle for validation.

Lesson #5: The ‘but-I-have-done-my-bit’ syndrome

This is the most important lesson of all. And possibly the shortest. I started with saying that the product management industry doesn’t care too much about the hard skills. This also means that the shiniest of Product Requirements Document, or the most valuable of insights generated don’t matter if the product doesn’t see the light of the day.

Early on in the game, I would get frustrated easy, and early. My excuse to myself (amazingly, all these years I have worked for bosses who trusted my judgement and gave me a lot of autonomy, and hence the phrase ‘my excuse to myself’) was, “but I have done my bit…”. I wrote the Product Requirements Document, I did customer interviews, I did all tech discussions, I did this, and I also did that… still the truth was, the product was not out.

As product managers, you’re really orchestrators of the entire show. You can’t do a part of the thing and sit and watch things from the fence.

You have to really be in it, to win it. This means, as product managers, there’s no bit you have to accomplish and move on in life from there. You’ve to sit through the entire process — help the engineer where she’s stuck, get enough insights to design a brilliant experience on, be the champion of the product to help marketing and sales understand the product better to do what they’re good at, better. Essentially, any loose end in the journey is your bit. And your bit, is large enough to not qualify as a ‘bit’.

Lesson #6: Don’t build the product for thyself, thou artist!

Far too often, we fall in the ‘everyone is like us’ bias. We begin to believe that there are two types of people in the world — people who are like us, and people who are not like us. And everybody who is like us, obviously, thinks, operates, and behaves like us. Which means, if I have this problem, everyone else, who I think is like me, also has the problem. And the problem is so big, and so widespread, it needs a solution. And the moment it is out, all you’ll hear is, “here, take my money! I had been waiting on pins and needles for this product to come out”.

Only, that doesn’t happen.

Philosophy aside, what the above means is that we start believing in a world where our problem is too big to have a business value to it. We start solving our own problems with so much passion that we never look up the tunnel and right size the market. We don’t look around to see if solutions, which we maybe are not aware of, exist! And maybe do a better job than our hypothesis.

And since it’s our own problem, we mistakenly also tend to believe we know all about the problem, and don’t need to hear from others if the problem really exists — going even deeper inside the tunnel.

Don’t do that — don’t build products for yourself. Come out of the tunnel, and do enough research on:

• If the problem you’re facing is being faced by enough people to make business value out of it
• If the problem is big enough to be solved
• If solutions already exist and what is the delta improvement your solution is going to make on the existing ones

Side note: Facebook, one of the most successful products in the history of the digital era, came out of someone solving their own itch. But there was enough market for that itch and it was established fast and early. Know where to draw the line and do enough research.

Lesson #7: Launch is NOT the time to celebrate

Confession: I have done it far too many times.

Weeks of research, followed by weeks of execution, followed by weeks to prepping up to ship. And finally the date of launch is here — don’t we all deserve a breather? A celebration?

Of course, we do.

The only trouble is, many of us take this celebration far too seriously. We think it’s done. We think that the ‘happily ever after’ is here.

Much like we do in marriages? But when, in reality, the date of tying the knot is where the effort really starts. Much like marriages, the real test of your relationship with your product starts the day you start sharing real space — the idea is no more that, it’s a real product, sometimes with shape and form.

Once your product is out there in public, is when you know what all those months of research and effort really meant. Whether your initial hypothesis of the solution fares well with your customer base or not. Whether all the talking you did is even going to get some moolah in the bank. The launch is actually the beginning of some serious work.

And hence, even though it’s okay to scream and shout and feel awesome about your launch, the time to celebrate is when the first customer has used your product, when the first pay cheque lands in the bank, and when many more customers use the product, and many more pay cheques land in the bank!

Time to celebrate is when the hypothesis has worked and your product struck a market fit. And time to celebrate is when your customers become your marketers and salespeople.

Side note: Celebrations are good. Celebrations for milestones are also good. But know what message you’re giving away in the celebration — whether it is, we achieved it, and we’re done OR whether it is, we’re calling cheers to a new chapter!

P.S. Dear reader, I’d love to hear of your unusual and previously unknown, product management lessons. Share it in the comments section below. Also, if you like what you just read, do recommend it, and share it with your network.

You can reach out to me on Twitter at @taruna2309 and on email at tarunawrites@gmail.com

Product Management Skills NO ONE talks about ;) was originally published in HackerNoon.com on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Today, do the right thing. Sometimes the right thing will be very difficult to do. Then, be nice. But still, do the right thing.
2. Today, talk less. Avoid talking frivolous, evil, or harmful thing. And say what you want to, in thoughtful, concise, chosen words.
3. Today, at any point during the day, if you feel like, take time off. Guilt free.
4. Today, don't compare your life with anyone. You only know those parts about them that they choose to show you.
5. Today, don't talk about your problems with anyone.
6. Today, don't cry in front of people.
7. Today, don't make a hasty reaction. Weekend over it.
8. Today, respond. Don't react.
9. Today, look at others with respect. Hear them out. They could teach you a thing or two.
10. Today, don't talk about yourself.
11. Today ensure you don't tell a lie.
12. Today, ensure you don't throw food.
13. Today, at workplace, don't talk about your worries or fears. With anybody.
14. Today maintain a line between your personal & professional life.
15. Today, make things work.
16. Today, just be in the moment. Don't over calculate future.
17. Today, don't ask for love, attention, or time. Invest in yourself to become worthy of it.
18. Today, be consistent, predictable, and honest in your work. Nobody cares about the value you created in past.
19. Today, be cool. But also be warm.
20. Today, don’t expect the world to be fair.
21. Today, don't think that people are obliged to love you.
22. Today, be flexible.
23. <to be continued, one sentence at a time, every few weeks> :)

The story of how we revamped Swiggy’s Delivery Partners app…

Swiggy recently became the fastest growing unicorn in the country! This makes a lot of people curious on how things are done at Swiggy, how products are built, and what problems we are solving on a day-to-day basis.

More often than not, when all of this is being thought of, what comes to the mind are Swiggy’s consumer products — the app and the website! That’s what all of us interact with, and that’s where seemingly all the moolah comes from.

But for us, that’s truly just one side of Swiggy’s universe.

Being in a 3-way marketplace, we don’t just have a one-to-one relationship with our customers, but also with our delivery partners, and a multitude of restaurant partners onboard with us in this journey.

As of today, Swiggy employs 120,000+ delivery partners. Together, they travel 6 times the distance between Earth and Moon, every single day. And yet, this world doesn’t get all the attention and the talk it deserves. We’re so boringly efficient & predictable in our delivery that it almost seems like the Swiggy app just pops food out.

But if you ask us, the real magic begins well before you even launch the consumer app.

As an example, tens of systems fire up their engines together to determine the number of restaurants serviceable at any location or to calculate their delivery time that you see on your apps. Without going into details, to estimate these, we rely on the number of delivery partners logged in at any point of time, along with their exact coordinates.

And to tell us the same, our delivery partners communicate with us via our delivery partner app. In this blog, we are going to take a closer look at this app, and how and why we decided to revamp it.

It all began with a problem statement

As we were growing, age & scale were causing all the problems to us that they do to just about anything and anyone. In August of 2014, we began our operations with just 6 delivery partners in one area of Bangalore. We started out being the most predictable consumer food-tech product out there. You order food on Swiggy, you get it in the promised time, no strings attached, no bling.

To keep up with that aura, our delivery app was also pretty functional. It served all the basic use cases — a place to receive orders, fulfill them and then see earnings against each delivered order. Simple.

As Swiggy grew big, and the demand on our platform multiplied, scale brought with it some interesting challenges.

From when we were employing 6 partners to when we started employing 6,000, the situations changed drastically. In parallel, as we got more restaurants on-board, the demand started spreading out too.

Put simply, we had to ensure that:

(1) Our delivery partners were closer to the restaurants which were getting us orders,

(2) They didn’t have to travel a lot to fulfil an order (quick note: our orders are a combination of first mile and last mile — first mile is the distance between the delivery partner’s location and the restaurant, and last mile is the distance between the restaurant & the customer’s location),

and

(3) We were able to make their jobs enjoyable & fulfilling by incentivizing them at the right times

Not just that, we also had to ensure that all our delivery partners got equal opportunities from the system, and that we were able to help maximize the earnings of the ambitious and hard-working ones.

And as we started scaling and our use-cases became more sophisticated, the app started falling behind

The challenges

To begin with, Swiggy’s delivery app and the consumer app have completely different users and completely different use-cases! This meant that there were not so many learnings that we could draw from our consumer app. It was clear to us that the delivery partners app had to be thought, designed, and built very differently. To quote a few examples:

• On the delivery side of the world, the way we do in the consumer world, we don’t have the leeway to release a new update every few days or go all ballistic with our UX and design when adding new features
• While consumers came on the app at the will of their time to buy convenience from us, for the delivery partners, the app is their livelihood.

Hence, we can’t afford for them to wake up one day and find an all new app and expect them to unlearn the old ways of working and adopt a new style with one update.

Any change had to be lot more careful and lot more thoughtful.

• Owing to the nature of the product, the delivery app sees an insanely high repeat rate, and an insanely high %age of DAUs (daily active users). Logically extending, the habits formed with the delivery app are almost difficult to break.

And hence, the problem of redoing the UX and the product were far more tougher to crack in case of the delivery app.

Before we designed a pixel, and wrote a piece of code, we hit the roads

One of the interesting things all of us here at Swiggy are expected to do is to go on the roads and deliver orders. The objective is to understand the Swiggy ecosystem better and be able to empathise with the delivery side of our universe. This exercise is called ‘A Day in the Life of a Delivery Executive’. If stories flowing in the bay are to be believed, Rahul, our CTO, still does a few deliveries every month himself. (So next time you get your order, do take a close look of your Swiggy Delivery Executive, he could be a tech-junkie, millionaire CTO delivering your order himself :P)

When we decided to revamp the app, the responsible Product Manager not only hit the roads doing deliveries on his own, but also did deliveries for other platforms with an objective of understanding the delivery world better.

The delivery partner app product & design teams also did number of focused group discussions and one-on-one in-depth interviews with a variety of partners — new in the system, part-time, permanent & been in system for a long time, permanent who dropped out but then joined back again, and a variety of other personas. All of this, to get a cohesive, yet diverse point of view on how this side of the world looked like.

To research a bit for this blog, I also got an opportunity to meet tens of delivery partners in Bangalore. The most interesting part about this exercise was that a lot of my personal myths were shattered that day! (And for good. :))

I learnt, that much like us, our delivery partners also think about how they can keep getting better at their jobs and grow in the career ladder. They care a lot about their incentives and will push themselves harder & smarter to achieve their goals. Some of them were also really tech savvy — not only were they able to give amazingly pointed feedback on the app but they were also power users of many other apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Google Maps.

Talking about taking pride in their jobs, I can’t hold myself sharing this fun narrative that I heard from one of Swiggy’s delivery partners who has been with us almost since Swiggy’s inception:

Ma’am, aapko pata hai mujhe kuch din pehle kiska order aaya tha? Nandan sir ka order aaya mere pass! Pehle mujhe laga koi aur honge… wahan pahuncha to Nandan sir hi the. Photo dekha tha mene unka newspaper mein. I gave his order, he shook my hand, and he said thanks!

P.S. For the uninitiated, Nandan is one of Swiggy’s co-founder.

P.P.S. Yes, the delivery guy switched to English as he came towards the proud part of the story :)

The guy had a beaming smile on his face as he narrated this incident. And I thought only I got excited about the prospect of meeting the c-folks. :)

When the design & PM teams met with the delivery partners through various means & channels, their learning of the problem statements solidified even further. The team didn’t just do a lot of talking, we also watched tens of session recordings of the delivery app to see how the delivery executives used the app in real life and also studied data on drop-offs, and support queries.

What did we learn?

While we learnt many things that helped build a theme for the revamp project, some of the more prominent ones were:

• Map to navigate wouldn’t load up quickly, and switching between the map and the home screen was painful for our delivery partners.
• Earnings were accessible one level deep because of which partners were unable to see them upfront along with the orders they delivered. Unknowingly we had increased their work as when we went to the fields, we learnt that some of them kept notebooks with them to keep track of all their earnings.
• Since delivery partners needed internet all throughout their work day, their phone batteries would drain quickly because of which they had to carry a bulky power bank with them all the time.
• New delivery partners in the system didn’t know where they should be physically present to get more orders. They weren’t sure which restaurants were the popular ones and at what time of the day. (We solved this problem in a super interesting way, watch out for a separate blog on that ;))

While the delivery app was thought through keeping in mind all the feedback we got, the possibilities of future, and the scale we were achieving & anticipating, we formed some product principles to fall back to for decision making.

Principles behind the Project Revamp

Some of the principles that we formulated for ourselves before beginning to build the all-new delivery app were:

• Build for muscle memory — since the app is used by Delivery Partners on a day-in, day-out basis, in a repetitive fashion, we had to ensure that the app was built for memory rather than pure-play delight. Simply put, we designed for pointed taps rather than any exploration.
• Important stuff, up front — since our Delivery Partners have to do some repetitive tasks (fulfil live orders, check their payout for the order, handle the floating cash) throughout the day, it was important that for any of these use-cases, they didn’t have to go one click deep. And everything was available to them upfront.
• Big and bold visuals — unlike our consumers, our Delivery Partners are always on the go. This means that they are accessing their apps in bright daylight, dim lights, or night light. Hence, to give them the best experience on the app throughout their workday, it was important that our UI language was big and bold.
• Think & build for scale — unlike the consumer app which we keep updating every few weeks, we can’t expect Delivery Partners to update their apps each time. Also, if this is an app on which they are relying for their livelihood, we couldn’t afford for any of them to miss out on any new functionality/use-cases. Hence, building for scale became a key tenet for the delivery app.

Tech considerations unique to our delivery app

We also made some special tech considerations and changes keeping in meeting the widely different target audience and the unique use-cases the app was catering to.

But for that, stay tuned to part 2 of this blog where we’ll talk specifically about all the interesting tech choices we made for our delivery partners app.

Hope you enjoyed a preview into the other side of the Swiggy-verse. And while you’re waiting for part 2, why not have a meal delivered?! :)

—

P.S. Aman Jain is the product lead for the massive project in which we completely revamped our existing delivery app. Feel free to direct him any product, UX, or general curiosity questions you have.

Other Side of the Swiggy-verse was originally published in Swiggy Bytes — Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

… from idea to go-live. In a record of 100 days!

What is Swiggy POP?

Imagine a typical user journey on Swiggy — first, you have to scroll through a list of restaurants to find ‘the’ one, second, you’ve to look through the menu to select the dish you want to eat, finally, you have to order quantities per your requirement. All this, when all you wanted to do was satiate your hunger. :)

Too much hard work?

Welcome Swiggy POP — where we curate 20 to 30 different, single serve meals from various restaurants within a fixed radius around the customer. It lets customers order a meal-for-one, at a flat price, free of any delivery, taxes, or packaging charges. POP was also Swiggy’s first Big Bet which went from an idea to go-live in a record time of 100 days.

But what’s a Big Bet?

Very briefly, Big Bet is a sharp initiative that we estimate can be done within a quarter with a visible impact on our bottom line. The idea is to have all teams focus on these chosen, few important projects each quarter and make them successful. POP was one of the first projects to be taken up as a Big Bet. POP was special not just because it was one of the first big bets we took up, but also because it required changes to all the 3 vertices of our 3-way marketplace.

And

So here begins the story of these 3X challenges; the story of POP!

Day 0: Ideas, problems, (and solutions) were discussed!

Not only do we work at Swiggy, but we’re also hardcore Swiggy users (and fans!). And hence, much like an end customer would, we also experience aspirations, disappointments, wishes, and the feeling of having that one extra feature on Swiggy! This means that many of us are very passionate about many different problems we wanted to solve for Swiggy. Some of these were:

• The complications of ordering for one person — for example, you shouldn’t have to go through the pain of choosing bread, then curry (which is usually sufficient for and priced for 2 people) if you’re ordering only for yourself!
• Delivery fee was a big hindrance for people who were ordering food only for themselves. They didn’t seem to like paying 35 bucks of delivery fee for their 100 rupee meal
• Generating predictable orders for certain dishes from certain restaurants
• Maximizing earnings for delivery executives during a day
• Having the construct of a flash sale on Swiggy! Where everyday certain dishes, from certain restaurants went on sale for a limited period of time
• Paradox of choice! How does one make a decision from hundreds of available menus?
• Unpredictable demand for restaurants leading to preparation time going higher, and hence the delivery time
• And more...

Out of all of these, one theme that came out strongly which everyone wanted to solve for, was improving the experience for people ordering meals only for themselves, remove the paradox of choice for them, and make it an affordable & quick experience.

This kernel of idea was always there when we brainstormed i.e. to solve for paradox of choice, but this was the first time we were trying to dig deeper to find a solution.

To find out the impact we could make by doing this, we looked into certain data.

So, first, we tried to understand what exactly was a one-person meal. The definition we arrived at was a combination of a certain item count and the type of items being clubbed together in the cart. To understand if there was a market for single serve meals, we found out various data points. Some of these were:

• average item count in a typical Swiggy cart
• % of orders which fit into our meal-for-one definition
• % of orders which fit into our meal-for-one definition AND were made from a restaurant offering free delivery
• % of order flows which fit into our meal-for-one definition BUT had a delivery charge applicable AND were abandoned at the cart

To build further on these insights, we conducted an experiment: giving free delivery coupons to users who were ordering a “meal-for-one”, to see if they would come back & order. Unsurprisingly, the repeat order rate for these users went up by a sizeable percentage.

Problem statement was clear — how do we make ordering a meal-for-one a quick and affordable experience?

We then broke the problem statement down into a number of smaller problems that all needed to be solved, together. These problems were:

With an unbiased mind, we decided to marry the problem, and not any one solution in particular.

To understand how our customers were solving these problems today, in part, or completely, we did a number of user interviews. We got on calls with hundreds of people and even called some of them to our office for in-person interviews. Not just our customers, we also went to our restaurant partners to get their perspective on how these problems could be solved.

In parallel, we looked at the food-tech space and tried to understand how others around us were solving these problems. Interestingly, none of our competitors or others in the space were solving it really well for single person meals. More often than not, everywhere, it was a blanket experience, whether you were ordering only for yourself or for a group of 20!

We decided this had to be solved; and POP was born.

To make it clear to the reader, it wasn’t as straightforward as finding a few problems and merging them together to form a feature. :) We did fiddle with a lot of different problem statements along the way, and we also made certain trade-offs and tough choices.

Day 9: PR & FAQ was written

What’s a PR & FAQ?

PR & FAQ stands for Press Release & Frequently Asked Questions. With a PR-FAQ, the expectation is for PMs to go in the future, imagine their product was already launched, and write down a Press Release the way they imagine newspapers will cover it when their product really launches. To keep this realistic, PMs actually add quotes from their ideal customer, from business & ops team at Swiggy, and various impact numbers they intend to achieve on launch.

(Credits to Amazon for this, from where we picked this practice)

Each line of PR is thoroughly critiqued before presenting it to the leadership or the wider audience as it ultimately becomes our decision to make the blueprint when building products. Things like value proposition, price-point, the GTM plan which includes expected date of release, areas in which we’ll be launching, and more, are all put down in this PR-FAQ to help us come up with an exhaustive list of product requirements.

From this PR-FAQ, POP was finally conceived as a dish-first product offering a menu full of single serve meals at a flat price inclusive of all charges. Through POP, we wanted to solve for affordability, discovery, selection, and ease of ordering of single serve meals. It was decided that POP would sit inside Swiggy at a prominent position and would surface 20 to 30 different, affordable, daily changing, single serve meals, with no extra charges, and a quick checkout experience.

We went to solve one problem, ended up solving three!

For POP meals, we wanted to give free delivery to our customers. This meant that we had to find a way to make POP meals economically sustainable for Swiggy. So instead of opening up just about any meals from any restaurant, we decided to make manual polygons in the entire city such that distance between any two farthest points in these polygons was less than 3 kms. The next thing we did was that we manually curated certain dishes from certain restaurants within that polygon. This did 3 things for us:

1. Choice making for customers became super easy!
2. Since restaurants got predictable orders, they were better prepared to handle these. This also meant that a Delivery Executive’s wait time at the restaurant reduced down to just 1 to 2 mins, cutting the total delivery time for customers significantly!
3. Also, since we were getting multiple orders from the same restaurant during pre-defined time slots, the probability of batching two or three orders together went up.

How the 3-way marketplace benefit from POP?

For customers, POP took away the paradox of choice. Everyday, on POP, we curated tens of different dishes from a variety of restaurants in the customer’s neighborhood. Not only did this reduce the hassle of sifting through a list of restaurants and menus, but it also removed all doubts around the portion size.

Since, for POP meals, we got rid of any extra charges (delivery fee, packaging, or taxes), this was also an affordable way for customers to order meals all day, every day.

As far as restaurants were concerned, they were happy that something like POP was going to be up there soon. It gave them:

• A dedicated real estate to showcase their dishes
• A way to build predictability in demand (and hence inventory) for certain dishes at pre-known time slots

For our delivery executives, POP served as a boon too! Since the serviceability radius was reduced, Delivery Executives could do more deliveries in a single hour. Also, since we were getting multiple orders for the same dish from the same restaurant, POP gave us the ability to batch orders allowing our Delivery Executives to do more than one order in a single trip. Additionally, given that we had struck a deal with restaurants for these dishes, restaurants were better prepared to keep these semi-ready and hence the preparation time and in turn the wait time at a restaurant for Delivery Executives went down to less than 5 minutes. All of this helped optimize for a Delivery Executive’s time, allowing them to do more deliveries per hour, in turn helping them earn more.

Win, win, and win! :)

Day 15: We started sketching the solution…

For POP to become successful, it was important that we were able to communicate its value propositions through the in-app design.

To make the ordering experience quick & seamless, we designed in such a way that it took an average customer less than a minute to order on POP. For that, POP’s discovery on app had to be right at the launch, and the experience just one click away.

And so, POP found its place on the bottom of the home screen, in form of a big circular button within the footer.

Second, to help customers make quick decisions, we had to help them with more visuals — it was decided that each POP meal would have an accompanying image.

Third, since we didn’t intend to add any packaging charges, taxes, or extra delivery fee on POP meals, we didn’t require a separate cart page. And hence, to make the checkout experience super convenient for our customers, we also auto picked their preferred payment method. This meant, that they could place an order for a POP meal just by swiping one finger.

All this done, an average POP ordering experience was a total of only 3 clicks.

Day 32: A wall was put up!

Every product review meeting at Swiggy starts with one sentence,

“Show, Don’t Tell”

Which also happens to be Anuj’s (VP, Products) favorite sentence. His next favorite being

“कस्टमर को क्या दिखेगा?”

And so, a huge wall with cuttings of the entire POP flow was up. It was there for anyone & everyone to come view what a customer would see at each step in the funnel and be able to visualize the complete journey. Also, as a rule, no lorem ipsum copy could go there. The wall had to mimic exactly what the customer would see — each dot, each comma at its exact, correct place.

The wall was also used to get the leadership and other stakeholders alignment on the design and information architecture of POP. If anyone had a question on the user flow of POP, one look at this wall would answer all their queries, with ease.

Day 34: Metrics (and check metrics) were defined!

As a culture, we don’t celebrate launch of products, we celebrate their success. Hence, even before a project goes into development, its success criteria is defined. For POP, we put together an estimation of the various metrics we intended to move and the metrics we wanted to keep a check on.

As an example — one of the success metrics for POP was to increase the repeat rate by 10%. And one of the check metrics was that in a single order the preparation time should be less than or equal to 5 minutes (this, for the entire batching math to work).

Day 35: A 70-page PRD was written!

And hundreds of comments & questions were posted on it within a few hours by everybody from leadership, engineering, design, PMs, and even those who weren’t working directly on the POP product! Some comments were resolved, some were scoped out for later releases, and some were marked as misses in thinking which were immediately accounted for.

Day 39: MVP was scoped

Not everything that was mentioned in the PRD needed to be coded right away. And neither did we want it to happen like that. Here, we sat down with our super talented engineering team who helped look at all our requirements from a tech standpoint, helped us through the edge cases, and in understanding various trade-offs and where it was ok to cut corners. During this process, many a times, we consciously also chose speed to market over the perfect product which could have otherwise taken 6 to 10 months to build. It was necessary to define what is the minimum that we could build which would delight the entire ecosystem to the maximum extent possible.

What helped us scope the MVP right were two things:

1. The PR-FAQ which we wrote long back! It became a blueprint for our prioritization process — anything which we talked about as a benefit to the customers, the delivery executives, or the vendor partners in the PR & FAQ had to become a part of the first version.
2. As a rule of thumb, customers trumped internal users. Against each requirement, we identified whether the particular requirement would make lives of our internal users better or our customers better. Anything that made customers’ lives better was always chosen over internal team requirements.

Day 40: GTM was defined

As part of our Go-to-market strategy, among many other nuanced details, we also clearly identified the launch city and area, our first set of restaurant partners, and the exact dishes from them.

This meant that even before development started, we had the exact view of how the POP menu page would look like on the day of launch.

Day 45: Engineering began!

And this day marked the starting of the most important part in the journey — the actual building of POP.

With a bias for action, this being one of our core values at Swiggy, engineering team put the cooker on stove, and the baking started in the ovens. Coding began! And a huge engineering gantt was prepared which exactly accommodated for each pod’s effort, analytics & data instrumentation requirements against each moving part, relevant QA checks, and also the frequency and pace of various milestones and internal demos for the entire POP program.

After a rigorous job from our engineering team, who ultimately gave life to all the ideas, theory, and designs, POP was ready to be launched.

Day 90: Bug Bash Happened

For the first time, we also did a company wide bug bash. In this, everyone was given a demo build with POP on it and was asked to go through the end-to-end flow of POP, find bugs, and report them. Of course, there was bounty for those who logged the maximum number of bugs and for those who logged the most pesky bugs. :)

The philosophy behind a bug bash being that QA in a B2C company is everyone’s responsibility. After all, all of us at Swiggy are not just building Swiggy, but also using it day in and out, much like our customers, to order for our meals.

Day 100: And finally POP was born

On the day of launch, we opened up POP only in Koramangala, Bengaluru, and for just 5% of the customer base. At 2.5% adoption rate of the app, when the first POP slot went live, we got 20+ orders within a few minutes. :)

Today those numbers stand in multi-thousands of orders per day. And here’s Swiggy POP team celebrating the launch ;)

Day 101: And the journey continues…

POP continues to be launched across India, one polygon at a time :). And we are also continuously optimizing various funnels in the POP journey to improve the offering.

Now you must be wondering that POP was a Big Bet one quarter, what now? How do the various optimizations get prioritized for POP now? And how do we even get alignment, resources, and people to work on POP?

Well, a few months after we experimented with the Big Bet way of prioritizing, we realized that only having a few Big Bets, each quarter, was not enough. Given the name and stature, without really communicating explicitly, Big Bets became the de facto way of getting things done. If something had to find attention & resources, the only way was the Big Bet way. Of course this wasn’t the most optimal thing to happen. And a lot of long term initiatives, tech scaling and optimizations were getting ignored because of this. Hence, to give visibility and opportunity to various kinds of projects, we have revised our prioritization structure to now include 3 more BBs, making it a total of 4 BBs, namely, Big Bets, Bread & Butter, Brilliant Basics, and Breaking Bad.

Any smaller tasks that are improvements, optimizations, and features that take 1 to 2 sprints are all added in a Bread & Butter backlog. These are prioritized separately, and added into engineering sprints periodically. Brilliant Basics are any optimization or platform improvements to make technology powering all our systems, robust, scalable, and powerful. These run for anything from 3 months to a year. The last, Breaking Bad, are projects that can be classified as anything outside of current Swiggy scope — yes, interesting things are being cooked here.

Today, POP optimizations form part of a steady stream within the Bread & Butter backlog and are prioritized across different teams within their sprints as and when required.

In closing, here’s some Twitter love we gathered ❤

Prabha Raj on Twitter

Sugar cravings level so high, I can eat a piece of paper if you write sugar on it Swiggy POP you are going be the bane of my existence

Harry #TheHustler👏 on Twitter

In total admiration of #SwiggyPop and #OrderLater options on @swiggy_in Gives great #CustomerExperience on the fingertips on the user! #success #Food #delivery #nomnom 😋💪👌

Vineetha👩🏻‍⚕️ on Twitter

OMG! In love with all these new features @swiggy_in is coming up with! rn so glad for #SwiggyPop The best one yet! Kudos❤️ #SwiggyAlways

Food For Your High on Twitter

SwiggyPop just delivered my food in less than 15min! Way to go @swiggy_in

KhepiAri on Twitter

@SwiggyCares the Swiggy Pop is the best idea you guys have come up with. :) It's so helpful when I am hungry and I don't want to browse! #foodlover

sukin shetty on Twitter

First time I tried swiggy pop, ordered lunch within 60secs. Amazing @swiggy_in

Sanjay Swamy on Twitter

I just tried @swiggy_in new offering #SwiggyPOP today! They sure got the name right 🤣 #needSwiggyMomToo!!

Abhineeta Raghunath on Twitter

How to make a workaholic's life easier: 101. @swiggy_in sometimes I take you for granted, sometimes you're a lifesaver. #SwiggyPop #TearsOfJoy ❤️

Ankit Nagori on Twitter

Completed an order on @swiggy_in pop in less than 10 seconds.. insane!

Ankit Nagori on Twitter

@swiggy_in Pop is a great product!

Bonus section:

Wondering how Swiggy POP got its name?! Here’s how:

The idea behind POP was to make meals-for-one an affordable, quick, and seamless experience. In more crude words, the idea was to make it as simple as putting a slice of bread in a toaster and waiting for it to POP out a warm & crisp toast. :)

Hence, we wanted a name which was short, crisp, and had the feeling of simplicity, and agility attached to it. “Why not call it POP?!”, someone in the team had a hallelujah moment. And it immediately struck a chord with everyone in the room. :)

POP being a short name, went well in our branding, in-app buttons and various promotions we did. Also because POP is a single syllable word with vowel sound of o (as in /pɒp/), it was also easy to pronounce and it rung beautifully well with Swiggy with vowel sound of e (as in /ˈswɪɡi/)

Try it in your head, say Swiggy POP, and tell us how you like it. Or better yet, order a meal on Swiggy POP, and tell us how you like it. :)

P.S. If you read through the article, we are hoping you learnt a thing or two. Do tell us the favorite product management lesson you picked from this story in the comments section below.

P.P.S. We are on a lookout for super awesome product folks to become part of Swiggy’s success story and help us build even more amazing products. If you’d like to join us in the mission, do reach-out.

Here’s a quick slideshow of the story, which Anuj, Swiggy’s VP Product, recently presented at a HelloMeets event.

Story of how Swiggy POP was built… was originally published in Swiggy Bytes — Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Taruna Manchanda on Twitter

Dear world, we don't want/need/deserve 'a' day. kthxbye #HappyWomensDay

I didn’t publish it then because I was afraid it might sound narcissistic. While the intention of the post is really to express gratitude.

Gratitude for all the bosses, colleagues, and friends of the opposite gender who’ve helped me grow both professionally and personally at all my workplaces.

From my worldview, feminism is all about considering yourself worthy of equality. I have seen (and been in situations) where people shun the society, others around them, and situations, calling them unfair. Unfair, when they themselves don’t consider they could be worthy of love, that promotion at work, or that compliment or appreciation. Like most things, feminism is a 2-way street. Sometimes, one doesn’t have to beat themselves up when getting the things they in fact deserve. I have personally been in situations where I have been scared of getting a big title at work, getting that hike, that surprise bonus or an appreciation email. I have had impostor syndrome grip me so tight that I couldn’t express gratitude at so many of these life situations.

From all the reading I have done, I have only read how unfair corporate culture is to women. Pay gaps, lower titles, indirectly/directly being asked to shut up, not getting that corner office, not being asked to show up in meetings, not being taken seriously and so much more. Rarely have I come across a line of gratitude about how that same corporate culture has uplifted and helped grow many of us. I am unsure if I have been insanely lucky or just with the right people, but coming from an average college, it’s a huge feat for me to be where I am today. And that’s all because of many of the male bosses & colleagues I have worked with in the past 5.5 years who thought I was worthy of the opportunities and who placed an insane amount of trust in me.

So for this women’s day, instead of the usual male bashing, I thought to say thanks to all the men who helped me grow at all my workplaces so far.

I am thankful to my first ever manager at my first ever company who told me I had this ‘spark’. He was thrilled when I got a better job a year later, saying I deserved better.

To my second manager, who sat next to me and allowed me to silently listen to all his conversations with everyone else at office. He told me he liked that I showed enthusiasm instead of telling me I was nosy.

To that same manager, who corrected my emails a thousand times before letting me hit ‘Send’.

For getting his fleet of women reportees a t-shirt that said, “Cometh the moment, cometh the punjaban!”. Telling us that when the moment called, his girl squad was always ready to take on the challenges.

For telling us, he was scared of this girl squad! :D While he really meant we were unstoppable. :)

I am thankful to my third manager at work who taught me how important it was to read. Who became a mentor and guided me to the best of books. He instilled in me the habit of reading which still helps me get my perspectives & logics right.

For sending out public emails that our team will cross our goals by 2X or 3X when there were just the two of us in that team. :) And thereby, giving me the huge confidence and trust that I could do it.

To my fourth manager, who I not-so-secretly loved (platonically :)).

I am thankful for a thousand things that he helped me with. But if I have to count a few, I am thankful for that one afternoon when I cried profusely in front of him. The kinds when your nose starts dripping tears too. :) I remember saying, “I am sorry I am being such a girl! Crying like this.”. I also remember being corrected with, “No, it’s absolutely fine. Crying is a very human thing to to. I do it too. Sometimes.”

For letting me do my grand mistakes in public and telling me in person, “Don’t worry. You’re new to this. I’ll coach you.”

For really coaching me.

For giving me the credit when it was due.

For giving me tens of opportunities and putting crazy trust.

For those one-line emails saying I did an excellent job.

For telling me that I brought great perspective to conversations. Instead of shutting me up or ignoring what I said.

For listening to my rant & nonsense. So many times. (I ‘was’ a tough kid.)

I am thankful to that male founder of a very hot SaaS startup in the valley, who told me he wanted to work with me. Who replied to my emails saying he was sure I will kick asses in future.

To that really smart man who interviewed me very recently and said, “So you have an offer in hand. I won’t listen to what that is but I can promise you a 30% on top already.”

I remember going for this interview battling with fever & cold, and my insecure, under-confident self. :) I remember coming back feeling high. :)

For that male colleague, who whenever he’s facing a difficult decision in life, tells himself, “What would Taruna do?”. And does that! :)

To another one who told me I was so much like him. And he saw his female version in me.

I was secretly thrilled when I heard this. I had been crushing on this guy’s smarts, again, not-so-secretly. :)

And for someone who at one of my farewells from a workplace told me,

“You have this fire in you. Don’t let society happen to you.”

I not only remember and try to implement this every moment of my life but I also tell this to so many other women I meet.

In the past 5.5 years of my work life, I have heard more good things than bad. I can campaign a #MeGrateful stronger than a #MeToo (while the #MeToo hasn’t left any woman I know. Neither me. Story for another day.) I have been given more confidence, than ignorance. I have been greeted with more respect than smiles in meeting rooms. And I have gotten more tough one-liners than flowers.

And for all of that, I am very very grateful.

To all the males in my work life,

Cheers!

Hungry? Want to eat something interesting? Don’t know what that is? And want it ASAP? Allow us to help! :)

At Swiggy, our biggest goal is to match you with the most amazing food available, in the minimum amount of time, in a hassle-free way. One way we achieve this is by sorting restaurants on Swiggy intelligently, according to our customers’ taste & preferences.

On a given day when you open Swiggy, there’s a huge probability that more than 300 restaurants would be serviceable in your area. Given the breadth of options available, it’s not always easy to make a pick. And any time spent figuring out what to eat, adds up in the time taken for the food to come to you. In order to help our customers with this choice, we decided to come up with a way to sort all serviceable restaurants smartly.

Understanding our customers & restaurants better

To be able to rank these 300+ restaurants in a manner that is relevant to you, it was important that we understood not just you, but also all the restaurants on our platform very well. As the work began, we were faced with a couple of interesting challenges.

First, taste and food preferences are very subjective and very personal.

Some time back, we did a quick hallway test at the Swiggy office, and it was an interesting find that most of us couldn’t describe our own taste preferences very well. “It depends” was an answer that came up most often.

One’s choice in food on a given day & time not just depends on internal factors such as his/her dietary habits, the favorites, mood of the day, but also on external factors such as time of the day, the weather outside, and things such as the food items that we were exposed to in recent past and got tempted by.

Second, while we thought humans were the only ones who are unique and special, we couldn’t have been proven more wrong when we started digging deeper into the restaurant space. On analyzing thousands of menus, we realized that there was absolutely no coherency in the dish naming space. Some restaurants decided to call their dal makhani, dal makhan wali, others called it dal-e-bukhara and still others called it kali daal (with butter). At the end of the exercise, we realized that a dal makhani in India could be called by 100+ different names. And pizzas, we discovered, were also called flat-breads!

It was clear that a simple text based matching would never work in this domain.

Third, even after we decided that the dish behind the jazz was actually a dal makhani, we couldn’t score it or say with any accuracy whether it was better or worse than the dal makhanifrom any other restaurant.

It wasn’t as simple as an iPhone, is an iPhone, is an iPhone. For meals, the description changed with every next person who tasted it.

Solution

To bring structure to this problem and solve it, we came up with a homogeneous scoring system. Each restaurant was scored on a set of predefined ‘topics’.

A topic was anything from a dish family (biryani), to a dish (lemon cheesecake), to a group of similar dishes (Indian sweet dishes such as gulaab jamun, phirni etc.). We iterated on a number and variety of such topics to come up with a combination which was useful, could be exhaustively applied to each of the 4 million+ dishes from the 25,000+ restaurants on our platform, and could scale up in tandem to our growth.

So every restaurant on our platform was scored on each topic, keeping the total for a restaurant equal to 1. The total was kept 1 to make the comparison easier. For example, and putting it very simply — a restaurant whose score was a 0.54 on biryani would be matched more frequently with a biryani lover, than another restaurant with a score of 0.16 on biryani.

This scoring or tagging was a function of many different variables such as, items on a restaurant’s catalogue, what’s an item’s repeat within a restaurant, how were people rating an order from a restaurant, and so on.

In parallel, we were also continuously learning about our customers’ preferences and their affinity to each of these topics/dishes. Some of the variables we used here were, which restaurants a customer digitally browsed, which ones did she order from, the dishes ordered, ratings given and so on.

Once we could confidently match a few restaurants with a user, ranking within them was done by adding a few more variables to the equation. These were variables such as discounts, time to deliver, popularity of the restaurant in the neighborhood, and more.

After all these hundred ingredients (err… variables we talked of above) are permuted & combined, we are able to come up with a secret sauce to uniquely rank restaurants for millions of users, according to their taste & food preferences. This way of sorting is called the ‘relevance’ ranking logic in your Swiggy app.

And all of this magic happens in the nanoseconds you open Swiggy and we present to you the list of restaurants serviceable in your area. :)

Testing the Solution

To ensure that all of these months of hard work to come up with the ‘relevance’ sorting, were actually in the right direction, we tested it against a number of different ordering ranking logics.

Results

Below we compare the results of the ‘relevance’ logic with a commonly known ranking logic: ‘popular’ logic (ranking restaurants based on how often people were ordering from them or how popular they were in a neighborhood).

For users who were shown the list of restaurants sorted by the ‘relevance’ ranking logic (in comparison to the ‘popular’ ranking logic):

1. Time-to-order dropped by 20 seconds.

2. Customers searching for a dish or restaurant reduced by 2%.

Our hypothesis — people were able to find what they were looking for right on the homescreen without having to search for it.

3. For the popular logic, if customers were scrolling past X restaurants before finding the restaurant to order from, for relevant logic, they scrolled only to X-10 restaurants.

4. Number of people who came on the app and left without doing anything dropped by 1%.

Our hypothesis — new users didn’t get bogged down by the amount of choice available and probably found their favorite, known restaurants on the homescreen giving them a sense of familiarity.

5. The median rank of the first restaurant to be digitally checked out bumped up to 9, from 14.

And most importantly, increase in App Store and Play Store reviews with heart stickers! ❤

Get to your favorite food faster — Swiggy it! was originally published in Swiggy Bytes — Tech Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Having been to multiple conferences and meet-ups in and outside India, my only motivation of attending such events is to network with smart folks who are in the same domain as I am. Peer learning is the best form of learning and so I like to flock (shameless vocabulary plug-in for our sponsors :D) around people who are smarter than me, and from whom I can learn and become a better professional. While a conventional conference or event has its own benefits — one can learn a ton from speakers and finally get to meet them. However, the concise learning stuffed in an hour or half’s slot has never been able to do justice to the topic.

We, the Zeta design & product team, love to attend meet-ups & conferences. However, we also feel that such events are not always structured for what attendees look forward to the most — networking! Hence, we decided to change the design of such meetups.

Let me share the story of how we went about this year’s edition of Bangalore Dribbble Meet-up, what was the inspiration behind, what was the model, and how our meet-up’s design almost forced people to network, become friends, and collaborate on projects.

The meet-up started with the attendees checking-in with our custom designed passports, our first endeavour to get people to network.

Each passport had a borderline ‘insane’ team name on it and everybody with that same team name were… erm, part of, one team! We did our best to keep all passports in random; so much that even if you came in a group of upto 20 people, the probability of you teaming up with one of your acquaintances or friends was reduced to zero. Here’s how our passports looked like:

See the funny team names up there? There were 20 of those! And each team had 10 to 12 participants. As soon as it was announced that all teams needed to team up, we could hear people shouting things such as, “All brain farts come here please!” and “Everybody who is late or early please come to me”. In a moment, chaos ensued; and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it! Life became even more difficult for those who came in late. They had to go to each table and ask, “We don’t care team, I am here, please care!” :D and the “We don’t care” team really didn’t give a (the word your mom told you not to use)!

P.S. Brain Farts, Late or Early, and We Don’t Care were few of our team names. :D

This was our first step to break the ice. No formal introductions, no awkward ‘hi’s and ‘hello’s, no introverts hiding in corners, just some uber talented designers running all across our office shouting out weird team names.

Mustafa Quilon on Twitter

Forming teams @BLRDribbble #BlrDribbble https://t.co/BetZgvyMWD

That said, you maybe wondering what’s a passport without a few proud stamps?!

Well, we had tens of mini competitions and games during the event, which made attendees eligible to win a stamp on their passports. Maximum number of stamps on their passports in turn made them eligible to win a big surprise towards the end of the event. Folks seemed to thoroughly enjoy this gig of ours. <My stamp was also stolen. Twice.>

Hiran Venugopalan on Twitter

OK. Here is the seal, what am I supposed to do now 😂 #Blrdribbble #cheatcode

And while everyone was busy, weirding it out, stealing stamps, and more, I caught this shot for myself! :D

This year’s theme

Zeta is a part of the Directi umbrella. And an amazing product blooming in our gardens is Kapow — a gaming app that you can enjoy with your friends. On top of that, all of us in the organising team are gaming fans. Hence, we decided that this year’s theme could be, GAMES!

The main event of the meet-up was for all teams to design a board game. There were 20 teams and towards the end of the meet-up, we got to witness 20 brilliantly designed & conceptualised board games.

Once the teams were divided, we didn’t stop there. All of us in the organizing team went to each table to do small fun games for even further ice breaking between teams to help them know each other and collaborate better. Yes, they could win stamps on their passports in these games.

Some of the games we tried were:

• After the first half an hour, we went on each table and challenged people to tell names of everyone in their team. Out of the 6 tables I went to, 4 failed gloriously. And the moment I turned, I could hear them laughing and discussing each other’s names. :)
• We did a game where everyone in the team had to count one after the other, except for the times it was a multiple of 3 & 5, when they had to say a “No” instead. This was to help them listen to each other better, be better heard, and be alert of everyone’s opinions in the team.
• We also did a pictionary. Where people’s quirks came out and everyone in the groups had fun. The evil organizer Ramakrishna Venkatesan gave words such as fart, sour, and swarm. Wonder where his obsessions come from?!
• Another activity towards the end of the day was that each team had to tell interesting facts about each other in their teams. During this activity, we discovered that one guy was air-lifted, another dated a stripper, a girl had worked in a pizza shop before finding her real calling, and yet another who could flap both her ears together. Wow!

In the passports, there was also a section to doodle away. And we witnessed some fantastic doodles there. Here are some of them:

There was also a section to solve a Sudoku game and a designer being himself, turned it into a tic-tac-toe!

Our sponsors

Last year, we spent 3 whopping lakhs on Bangalore Dribbble Meetup! Zeta, our current company, sponsored it FULLY! No questions asked. :)
Since it’s a social event, this time, we didn’t want to put the burden on our company alone, and we decided to become self sustainable (though our sweetheart CTO Ramki Gaddipati gave us a green light for this year as well)! After all, Zeta is a start-up and we didn’t want to put the pressure of 3 whopping lakhs again on it!

Hence, we came up with two ideas to fund this year’s meet-up — sponsors, and the crowd i.e. you!

To make this community self-sustainable and grow even bigger, instead of relying at one source for funds, we made it crowd-funded! We ran a campaign on Ketto and urged all product, design, and startup folks to contribute their part in building, motivating, and appreciating the community of designers who are making our lives better, every day. We weren’t able to raise the entire money from this campaign itself as we started it late, but we still managed to get a decent amount from the crowd. Hence, it was decided that the principal sponsors in this year’s meet-up would be the crowd, and YOU!

Also, a heartfelt thanks to various companies which made this year’s event a huge success.

• Flock — a team chat and collaboration platform
• IndieFolio — a marketplace for creative professionals
• DesignBoat — a UI/UX studio
• Iconscout — India’s first icon marketplace

How we built the designers community this year

Flock, a team chat and collaboration platform, was our primary sponsor. Thanks to Flock, we were able to kick-start our meet-up, much before the day of the meet-up. :) We created a team on Flock and ran multiple games, quizzes, and contests to help people know each other better and keep the momentum on before the D-day. Presently, we have close to 500 design enthusiasts on our Flock team. <If you wish to join us on Flock, please use this link>

Keeping up with the spirit of this year’s theme, we had multiple games to enjoy within our office premises. Apart from Foosball, and TT, courtesy our Zeta office; we also hand made a few games such as Ring Toss, and Can Throw.

When everyone was done with designing their board games, we all gathered for a quick breather (or not) and did some squat and push up challenges organized by our in-house fitness maniac, Kshitij Pandey.

The main event — Game Design Competition

Much to everyone’s awe, towards the end of the day, we saw some amazingly designed games. From reimagining Mahabharata’s board game, to a beer game, to a space game, to — you couldn’t have guessed it — a startup game! We saw almost everything gamified on boards in front of us.

Here are some shots of games, people busying it out while designing & making them, and final presentations.

Towards the end

The day ended with Saptarshi Prakash taking the stage to announce the winners and thanking everyone. Winners got Zeta Platinum Cards with digital cash pre-loaded in them.

No, we didn’t end the day without the customary meet-up swag! Here’s what you missed in case you didn’t attend the Bangalore Dribbble Meetup 2017

The organizing team had some serious fun putting together this year’s meet-up for all you folks. If you have any feedback, comments, words of appreciation, please share them with us in the comments section below.

Till next year,

Practice safe design, and use a concept! :D

Much love! ❤

— on behalf of the organizing team (Ramakrishna Venkatesan, Saptarshi Prakash, Kushagra Agarwal, Abhisek Mishra, Mustafa Quilon, Kshitij Pandey, Vivek Ravin, Rahul Menon, Anuj Chaudhary, and Taruna Manchanda)

Designing our way to new friendships! was originally published in Zeta Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.