Rohan Jahagirdar

One of our clients, an up-and-coming bank with over 200,000 retail customers, wanted to navigate the changing financial landscape and make deep inroads into digital financial products for emerging urban audiences.

My co-founder, a team of our engineers and designers, and I worked closely with the client to build the product line from the ground up.

Over a span of 24 weeks, I led the efforts on:
• Identifying new audience targets, principal use cases, and operating models.
• Defining a working strategy and value proposition for a new bank.
• Building the first versions of the products to attract a new segment of customers. And further designed a long-term roadmap for the team to implement post the engagement.
• Identifying opportunities and weaknesses in the existing back-end system—specifically with the user identity, authorization, authentication schema, and solution of new components where needed, using the latest DevOps and API infra practices.
• Implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud, built a custom approval flow based on various roles and profiles of the bank’s users, and integrated Oracle’s Responsys.
• Conducting workshops for customer-facing product and technology teams to build a digital-focused culture and capabilities.

The organization, a fast-growing online cancer care platform was ready to look at the user journey and product offerings completely anew. I led the company's transformation by working out a new digital strategy and aligning the leadership team on it.

Specifically, I worked on:
• Conducting user research that revealed that customers wanted the onboarding process to be more conversational, self-serving, and in local languages.
• Building a thorough understanding of the jobs-to-be-done and aligning the teams on the strategic narrative framed around the jobs.
• Transforming the entire customer onboarding flow with an automated, one-on-one chat-based interface that gave the users the personal attention they deserved while serving at scale.
• Integrating event-based triggers through the flow, with CRMs, support flows, and marketing communications.
• Building integrated conversational flows on popular chat platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram with web properties.
• Identifying ancillary opportunities and building out a framework to test and launch new business lines.
• Setting up and monitoring actionable metrics and CXO dashboards.

Base IFTTT channel was the first flagship product that my co-founder and I worked on in the retail banking space.

I managed all the aspects of the product - conceptualization, development, documentation, integration, and launch.

By putting tech, clever UX, and seamless payment flows at the heart of financial planning, Base delivered a superior savings experience aligned with users’ goals.

• The product came as a result of long-drawn-out consumer research that identified the challenges faced by millennial and Gen-Z consumers in financial savings.
• The product was built to help our users achieve a specific goal of not going broke by the end of the month, a problem that we found many users resonated with.
• I directed the building of a new visual identity scheme that included a color scheme, typeface, logos, and marketing collateral.
• I worked alongside my co-founder to build a web app to handle onboarding, while my co-founder built the back-end API integrations.
• I successfully launched the platform and achieved meaningful traction of 120,000+ savings interactions from over 10,000 users in a span of three months. Over 50% of our users were active users and the average ticket size of monthly savings was about $45/month.

Teabox is an Accel-funded vertically integrated brand that ships high-quality teas from India to customers across the world. The key target markets include the US, UK, and Western Europe.

I worked with one of the partners from Pentagram and spearheaded all the aspects of the brand revision project from Teabox’s end.

• Undertook a detailed consumer research study that enabled us to develop a nuanced understanding of the behavioral and tangible motivations of user persons.

• Developed a strategic narrative that clarified the value proposition, and the brand attributes that lent credence to the narrative.

• Worked with the Pentagram team to design a new visual identity including a new color scheme, typeface, logos, and marketing collateral. The new design system was deployed across all digital (web/mobile) and physical properties (product packaging).
• The engagement helped deliver a 75 basis points uplift in sales conversions, clarify the narrative, and improved brand recognition over the long term.
• The engagement received praise and recognition from several international publications, including Wired, FastCompany, and BP&O.

Buy-side equity analysts conduct earnings research of public companies to identify portfolio positions. This highly hectic task involves processing dense and unstructured information in a very short period.

• I led the product development of an earnings research platform that leveraged OpenAI APIs vector database back end to structure the information without losing nuance. The platform features a specialized user interface for in-depth analysis of US public companies' earnings transcripts and 10-Q filings.
• Collaborated with analysts and portfolio managers to establish a solid business case, detailing high-stakes scenarios, outcome expectations, and environmental constraints.
• Coordinated with product designers and developers to document and iteratively manage product development over a 12-week period. The product significantly reduced the time top-tier analysts spent on earnings research by over 35% during quarterly earnings seasons.