Following the customer’s decision beyond the design handover

Mandate

Make customer choice, time and correction part of the product definition

Outcomes

• Included timing and draft recovery in assisted-user work
• Required review of the person affected by household removal
• Kept unresolved scenarios in release recommendations

Decisions in context

Four heads lead twenty-nine product employees within ₹9.6 crore annual function expense. I report to the CEO and present management evidence to directors when invited, without a statutory appointment. Service head Leena Vazqelri helps examine what happens when the customer needs more time or makes a mistake. The assisted-session and household-edit programmes both challenged the idea that a shorter path necessarily serves the person better. Product management needed to own the warning, recovery and review experience as well as the main sequence of fields. Security, pricing, underwriting and other professional owners retained their authority. The release account preserved the five assisted users and three scripted household scenarios still requiring further work. I want the CPO recommendation to include those limits rather than describe progress only through the participants or cases that succeeded.

Reason for the move

Current role; exploring health-insurance product leadership and a prepared first outside contribution

Concurrent appointment

Executive employment without statutory board service

Mandate

Turn research findings into changes to the decisions a journey asks customers to make

Outcomes

• Withdrew a preselected optional-extra design
• Required a deliberate selection with the total visible
• Retained the limits of repeated-participant research

Decisions in context

Twenty-two employees and ₹6.9 crore annual function expense supported customer-product work. In 2019 I approved a quotation journey whose default had already selected an optional extra. The research finding was uncomfortable because the design was working as I had intended: it made continuation easy. The problem was that twenty-four of thirty-six participants understood the extra as part of the base proposition. I withdrew the design and funded an explicit-choice revision rather than defend convenience as sufficient justification. A repeated exercise left five participants still needing assistance, which remained part of the account. The experience prepared me for wider product responsibility by changing what I asked at approval. I needed to know which decision the interface had made before the customer reached it and whether the person could recognise the consequence of choosing differently.

Reason for the move

Promoted to CPO with CEO reporting and wider product accountability

Mandate

Help customers express a meaningful choice without changing professional insurance decisions

Outcomes

• Connected application research with service questions
• Separated draft interactions from insurance commitments
• Worked with professional owners on the proposition behind the screen

Decisions in context

I joined the insurer with fourteen colleagues and ₹3.8 crore annual function expense. The work required more than transferring familiar design methods into a new setting. A screen might help someone choose an option or supply details, but the product team could not decide the price, accept a risk or settle what a policy covered. I learned those boundaries with professional and service colleagues. I also followed the questions that customers carried beyond the apparent end of a journey. A completed interaction could still leave an expectation unresolved. That experience led me to ask how the product explained the decision being made and which matters remained subject to another process. Moving into customer-product leadership widened the design remit while making it more important to preserve those distinctions in research, release recommendations and service handovers.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead customer products

Mandate

Make observed user difficulty change the proposed service journey

Outcomes

• Led research-to-design decisions
• Separated client commercial authority from design recommendation
• Questioned completion measures that omitted unresolved user needs

Decisions in context

The design-lead remit combined eleven research and design colleagues with ₹1.2 crore of yearly delivery expense. The client retained its product budget and professional approvals, while our team examined and redesigned parts of the experience. I learned that research had little value if the team could absorb every finding without changing a preferred design. A participant’s hesitation or mistaken expectation needed to become a decision about the journey, not merely a quote in the report. The role also exposed the limits of a handover. A useful recommendation could encounter operating constraints after the design team had moved on. Joining the insurer offered a way to stay accountable through those constraints and learn which changes actually helped customers in a continuing service relationship. It required accepting that the professional proposition and the customer interaction had to be understood together, with different owners responsible for each.

Reason for the move

Moved into insurer product management to follow design decisions through continuing use

Mandate

Observe what people understand and do before treating a journey as successful

Outcomes

• Documented task behaviour under supervision
• Distinguished stated understanding from observed action
• Brought unresolved expectations into design discussions

Decisions in context

After completing design studies in May 1998, I joined a six-person research group. I observed service tasks and prepared findings under supervision, without authority over a client’s commercial terms. The work taught me that a confident participant could still understand the task differently from the designer. Continuing to the next screen did not settle what the person believed they had chosen. I learned to record the uncertainty without turning every observation into a universal claim about customers. That discipline remained useful when I later approved designs myself. The 2019 optional-extra case was not a failure to collect attractive feedback; it was a failure to ask whether the default had made the customer’s decision for them. My early research work provides a practical way to challenge that mistake: watch the action, ask what it means to the person and be willing to change the design.

Reason for the move

Promoted to design leadership