Skip to website
Mitali DovkheraChief Product Officer · Essays & perspective

Design for the space around the product

I am Mitali Dovkhera, chief product officer of the fictional Zerqeli Workshop Furniture in Rajkot. We make workbenches and drawer cabinets for non-hazardous industrial assembly and inspection. I grew up in Agartala and began my career watching how people arranged a working surface, where they put unfinished items and what they moved aside to reach a drawer. Those observations still shape my product decisions. A bench can look compact in a drawing while the task around it needs considerably more room.

Zerqeli employs 820 people and recorded ₹314 crore revenue with ₹26.2 crore operating profit in the financial year ending March 2026. An employee trust holds 52%, a regional industrial investor 33% and the founder 15%. My product function has ninety-six colleagues through six managers and ₹18 crore annual development expense. CEO Vikram Nerzhani retains the business commitment, and design, engineering and quality colleagues retain their respective approvals. My responsibility is to connect what we promise in the range with what a customer needs to buy, receive and use.

Recent decisions have made that promise less convenient to summarise. We replaced a universal compactness claim with two depth propositions after observing twenty-four customer teams. We showed a ₹58,000 task configuration beside its ₹41,000 base bench, because the storage required for that described workflow cost another ₹17,000. We kept a returnable-crate trial limited to two collection hubs and introduced bounded workplace evaluations instead of relying only on showroom visits. Each choice required money and left uncertainty. I want our product story to carry those consequences instead of leaving them for the customer to discover after the order.

Twenty-four teams did not describe one working envelope

Fourteen needed a wider arrangement and ten a narrower one. A 0.9 square-metre bench footprint did not establish the space required for every task; the observed median working envelope was 1.7 square metres in this study.

The task configuration had a different price from the base

In forty reviewed quotations, twenty-seven workflows needed the storage module and thirteen did not. The relevant product account was ₹41,000 plus ₹17,000, with taxes and freight stated separately.

A returnable crate had to make the return journey

Of ninety-five crates in the pilot, sixty-one returned usable, eighteen returned needing repair and sixteen had not returned at the review date. We made no environmental-benefit claim from those counts.

Current focus

Making product selection, workplace evaluation and delivery arrangements describe the customer's complete undertaking rather than the most attractive catalogue fragment.

Conversations I welcome

One first non-executive role where product commitments and customer use deserve a stronger place in board discussion.

Beyond the page

The record behind the perspective.

Mitali brought the cost of a more specific offer into the same discussion as its customer benefit. She did not ask us to believe that a corrected claim or a limited pilot had already paid for itself.
Vikram NerzhaniChief Executive Officer, Zerqeli Workshop Furniture
The full record ↗

Contact

One first non-executive role where product commitments and customer use deserve a stronger place in board discussion.

  • Board appointments
Write to Mitali Contact page