Chief Product Officer / India
Three product decisions and what each cost
- Sales bookings
- ₹1,180 Cr
- Year ended March 2026
- Homes under construction
- 4,900
- Thirteen RERA-registered projects in Chennai and Coimbatore
- Median snag closure after possession
- 17 days
- 1,240 homes handed over in the year to March 2026; 52 days before the change
Decisions & consequences
01Replacing the completion percentage with dated stage evidence
When I became chief product officer in April 2022, our buyer app showed each tower's progress as a single percentage. It was calculated from planned cost incurred, so a tower could read 64 per cent while its seventh-floor slab was still unpoured. Buyers compared that number with what they saw on Saturday visits and with the quarterly updates we filed on the RERA portal, and the three accounts rarely matched. Queries asking where a tower stood were running at about 2,300 a month across thirteen projects.
I proposed removing the percentage and showing eleven defined stages for each tower, each published only when the project engineer had signed a stage record with dated photographs, alongside an expected window for the next stage and the reason for any slip. The sales head objected. Two towers at our Guduvanchery project were about five months behind, and the percentage had softened that. Sales also used the figure in advertisements. The projects director worried about site engineers' time.
The managing director agreed to a three-project pilot. We aligned the eleven stages with the payment schedule, so the stage a buyer saw was the stage they would later be asked to pay against. Site engineers spent about six minutes per record in a field app; quality colleagues reviewed every photograph before publication, and we excluded workers' faces. We stopped quoting the percentage in sales material.
Over nine months, monthly queries fell to about 780. The cost was real. In the two delayed towers, 31 of 412 buyers cancelled, against roughly 4 per cent elsewhere, and the sales head estimated about 60 fewer bookings in those towers during the period. Our board pack now draws on the same stage register as the app and the RERA filings.
What I would do differently: agree the rules for the expected window with the projects team before launch. Our first windows were too optimistic, and we revised them for nine towers within a quarter, which spent some of the credibility we were trying to earn.
Issuing payment demands only when the lender's pack was complete
About 68 per cent of our buyers pay through a home loan under a construction-linked plan. In 2023 our demand letters went out on the day the architect certified a stage. The lender then needed the certificate, photographs, an updated statement of account and often its own technical valuer's visit before releasing the tranche. When anything was missing, the buyer's due date passed while the bank waited, and we charged late-payment interest. Because RERA expects the same interest rate to apply whether the buyer or the promoter is late, those charges were not a minor irritation. Disputes about them reached about 520 in the year.
I had seen this from the lender's side at Thiravyam. I proposed that a demand should issue only when a complete pack existed, with the due date counted from that day, and that, with the buyer's consent, we send the pack straight to the lender. The chief financial officer disagreed firmly. His analysis showed issuance slipping by about six days on average and around ₹38 crore of collections moving from March 2024 into April, which affected the year-end position he had discussed with our minority investor. He also noted that late-payment interest brought in about ₹2.1 crore a year, although much of it was later waived.
The managing director backed the change on one condition: finance would receive a weekly view of packs awaiting documents. We built the pack inside the buyer app, agreed formats with our five largest lenders and stopped charging interest wherever the delay lay with our own paperwork.
The median time from demand to receipt fell from 39 days to 21, and from stage completion to receipt from 44 days to 30. Interest disputes fell to about 90 the following year. We gave up most of the interest income.
What I would do differently: involve the lenders' technical teams before the pilot rather than after it. One large lender changed its form during the first month, and about 200 buyers received a second request for documents they had already sent.
Closing the resident marketplace to rebuild snag closure
In 2021, as head of buyer journey and digital, I approved a home-services marketplace inside our owners' app, offering interiors, modular kitchens, cleaning and rental management from partner firms in return for referral commissions. By 2024 it earned about ₹1.6 crore a year and occupied nine colleagues. Meanwhile our possession process still recorded snags on paper sheets during the joint inspection, then retyped them into spreadsheets for the contractors' crews. Median closure took 52 days, and 38 per cent of owners reported a snag again after we had marked it closed. Owners were being offered a modular kitchen while a bathroom leak waited.
In August 2024 I proposed closing the marketplace and moving seven of its nine people to a snag product. The sales and marketing director disagreed: interiors partners funded offers at launch events, and two agreements had more than a year to run. The designer who had built the marketplace argued, fairly, that usage was rising. I accepted that it worked on its own terms. My concern was that it was the wrong work while the handover itself was unreliable, and while RERA holds us responsible for workmanship and structural defects reported within five years of possession.
We paid ₹38 lakh to end the two agreements early and gave up the commission. The new tool recorded each snag room by room during inspection, with a photograph, a category and the contractor crew responsible, and an item closed only when the owner accepted the repair in the app. The contractors' supervisors cut our first list of 140 categories to 46.
Across the 1,240 homes handed over in the year to March 2026, median closure fell to 17 days and repeat snags to 14 per cent. Launch-event offers became smaller.
What I would do differently: I should not have launched the marketplace before the handover worked. I would also bring the contractors' supervisors into the design in the first week, rather than after a pilot they found awkward to use.