PART 3: The process, challenges, and other projects
Designing India’s largest online tuition platform for BYJU’S[Part 3/3]
My leadership experience as Director of Product Design at BYJU’S
PART 3: The process, challenges, and other projects
In the previous chapters, I went through strategy to tactics to execution. This one is a bit of a flashback. I am covering the processes that gave us the direction in the first place and the challenges along the journey to finally helping the organisation build an ecosystem of products that runs the largest online tuition platform in India; BYJU’S Classes
The discovery phase and the design processes
One of the gentle reminders that I have been giving my young team from the beginning was the product we sell is a service, and the digital product(the interface) we design comes at certain points of the service delivery. For example, the mentors connect with students and it is completely outside the scope of the interface design but plays a key role in the success of the overall service experience.
It was important for the team members to understand these differences well as the outcome cannot be delivered through a great interface design alone, but by influencing the influential stakeholders at the right time and place.
Hence, right after the requirement gathering and reprioritisation of the scope of work, we entered into an elaborate discovery phase of the project.
Meeting with actual users face-to-face was not possible due to the COVID lockdown restrictions. Hence, the primary user flow was created by the team using everyone’s memory of going to an actual school and the recent images and videos collected from the internet of various parts of the country. It was not to come up with specific features but to make macro-infrastructural decisions.
The milestones from the brick-and-mortar classroom journey helped us in drawing parallels with the virtual world. This was instrumental in creating infrastructural decisions and understanding the larger system in the problem space.
The offline tuition centres have been there for many years and they have well optimised over time. Studying the patterns from it gave all of us much-needed confidence in the base structure of the service that we are planning to convert into a virtual one.
Without such an exercise, we would have probably ended up making a product that is just a transactional one with audio-video streaming capabilities. From the strategic direction, we were clear that the vision was to bring the spirit of the conventional tuition-class experiences using technology and enhance the learning outcomes.
An example.
We looked into the challenges and opportunities along every key point of the journey. For example, we looked at how getting ready for the physical class gets translated when the class is going to be online. Just like how students prepare for conventional class-going experiences, we brainstormed about the ways that would bring the maximum out of the virtual classroom experience by doing the necessary preparations.
The obvious solutions were about setting up the desk, having enough backup power for the device, checking if there were no technical glitches, etc. Now we also looked at the new challenges and other missing parts when things are moved to a virtual world.
We looked into some behavioural science concepts like ‘the implementation intention’ to ensure the student is getting into good habits of attending classes on time and regularly. This has helped us to discover a lot of meaningful features like system notifications, accountability buddies, smart calendars for their daily routine and other productivity tools to make the most out of the virtual class. More importantly, it helped us to be prepared with a robust infrastructure to bring such features down the line.
Following are some of the screens from the team’s discovery phase discussions.
This discovery process in the problem space gave us a better idea of what should be considered and how to build a future-proof infrastructure. <Read more details in the previous chapter>
The biggest challenge as a leader
It was a new job, with a new set of people in a new environment and every single thing had to be managed remotely, more importantly with negligible experience in doing remote work, especially for a project that had an urgency level very high. The world around me was also not accustomed to the remote work culture.
Without any second thought I can say being completely remote and managing a new team of people I have never met or worked with was the most challenging problem I faced in this period.
1. Challenges in doing research:
Given the urgency, and the country-wide lockdowns we decided to get started with desktop research and form initial hypotheses relying on the literature reviews and ongoing debates and discussions, Tweets, News, Podcasts and live YouTube conferences. Surprisingly the internet was so active and we were overwhelmed with several resources that were already much curated. It gave the team a much-needed kickstart.
2. Connecting with the team members well:
Building a meaningful relationship and earning their trust in me was something I had struggled with in the beginning due to the invisible wall and the distance created by the remote nature of the work (everyone was new to this).
I was given 3 junior members as a team to start with, and the rest I had to hire on the go. The first mistake I made was to call for the first-ever meeting with my team at 8:30 a.m., which was a normal thing for me, but I had no clue their day starts much later during the day. Secondly, I started with how I wanted to get the processes and team rituals going forward without asking them or knowing them how they were doing, or at what level they were to accept these quick changes overnight. No amount of justification or pressure from the management can justify such a mistake as it may have jeopardised my trust in the team. So things started on the wrong foot and I knew that had made it more difficult for me.
Immediately I loosened up my plans and restarted in an organic way letting them take charge of the project where I was leading without pushing. I moved to a mode where I was only moderating the discussions and used it to seamlessly segway to relevant topics in the form of questions, examples inspirations, etc. A lot of the activities were done to bring the confidence back in the team for the success of the emission we were on and to gain their acceptance of me as their leader on this journey.
Having confidence in oneself as a leader is useless if we failed to instil confidence in the team you lead.
3. Earning the trust of the other department leaders
Working remotely had created invisible walls between people, especially with the leaders with whom I would have collaborated naturally in the workspace. Ironically the mission we have taken up for the product is also the same but for the school children and their class environment.
I was just a name for many people with no visibility to understand the capabilities I would bring in. There were no platforms to mingle and connect with leaders, in the beginning, was making it tough for me as a design leader to collaborate and ask for their bandwidth to my own team’s advantage. In the beginning, most of the requests were denied and I felt helpless in moving ahead.
Later I initiated open presentations by the quarter end of the design team where we invited other leaders and teams to come to attend. Had to make the invitation exciting enough to pull people to come and check, and also made sure the presentations were recorded for higher reach later.
This was one way we managed to influence the other teams and earn the trust of the other leaders to be able to collaborate better. Every passing quarter we made better progress and a higher voice among the other decision-makers through systematic evangelisation to overcome the blues of remote work.
4. Transforming the team into a department and building our own culture within.
The team grew from 3 to 30 in fifteen months. After the team size crosses 8–10 members it must function like a department with multiple other responsibilities.
There is a strong emphasis on promoting design quality through competency-focused, systematic, and collective problem-solving within the team. This is an integral aspect, right from the time of hiring, to our day-to-day functioning, and most importantly, the growth of each member. Becoming a specialist or a generalist is still left to the individual to decide, but we create an environment that enables each and everyone to focus on what they enjoy the most.
The department was internally divided into 6 of the below pods and had its growth plans and responsibilities with highly distributed ownership among the team members.
Other project initiatives for BYJU’S Classes
Many new features and project ideas came out of the extensive discovery phase. Some of them we had explored as internal design projects parallelly and as internships. Please find them below.
- Designing AI bots to drive user engagement in BYJU’S classes
- Building Productivity -tools for BYJU’S users
- Gamification for better student engagement
- Illustration system
- Email communication system
- Notification system
- UI style guide & design systems
- The admin and tutor dashboards
The final impact we had on the business as a team
First and foremost, the product we designed has become the most revenue-making service for the brand within one year time.
We know the effort was a success when the business decided to migrate all the other similar services(synchronous learning) to the interface and product ecosystem we had designed. Initially, it started with the K4-K10 business unit for its 25 students per batch model. Then we also explored another variation for Aakash BYJU’S(K11–12) with 100 students per classroom. The same interface was tweaked to accommodate a Master Class service called Xcel Classes, which was attended by a 30k+ audience in its initial episodes with an ability to hold 100k.
Within two years the platform was transforming into an internal SaaS platform for BYJU’S to deliver all the synchronous learning services. BYJU’S Tuition Centre and BYJU’S Home tuitions are the other hybrid models that are also moving to the same platform.
The platform currently is an ecosystem of multiple products including CMS, An In-Class product for tutors and teaching assistants, Dashboards for all types of tutors (hybrid and online only), and a robust Admin Dashboard for managing the tutors and their onboarding.
Meet the team
Here is the dedicated webpage for the team that built the largest tuition platform in India.
<The end of 3/3 part blog.>
