A Designer’s Journey in a Core Business Team

How I Used Design Thinking to Enhance Razorpay’s Sales Strategy and Achieve Faster Go-Live Time

I’m a designer. Nothing fancy or unusual about that. But, I am a designer and a part of a business team at Razorpay. Now, that is unusual. You all might have come across designers as a part of a marketing team, a product design team, or a user research team. But, I am a little special. Or so I think. I am a designer in a business team at Razorpay whose day-in and day-out job is to sell Razorpay’s products. Here’s my story on how I created an impact as a designer as part of a core business team.

Back in 2021, Vivek Sridhar, who heads the business engineering and solutions team (the BEST team at Razorpay) reached out to me asking if I wanted to be a part of the design team. At first, I was excited because I always wanted to be a part of the Razorpay design team. But after going on a call with the team, I understood that this was not a role as a part of the design team but a full-time designer role as a part of his team, which is a core business team. I was a little skeptical, but as I had more discussions with Vivek about what this role entails, my questions got cleared up.

The business engineering and solutions team at Razorpay meets customers regularly, understands their pain points, and comes up with innovative solutions using Razorpay’s product suite. To give an example, the BEST team could meet with an airline or one of the leading companies in the airline industry to understand what all aspects of finance or money movement come into play for the airline industry. And based on that, the best team creates a bundle of solutions using Razorpay’s product suite. And, in some cases, they go back to the product and engineering teams to pitch a new feature or a product that might have a lot of scope for growth and get it designed and developed. Now, if you take a look at this, the entire aspect of understanding the customer’s pain point, building a bundle of products and pitching it to them is nothing but a problem being solved. So there is enough room for a designer to enter and help solve this problem. After all, design is all about solving problems creatively.

And, that’s exactly what I did as a part of the business engineering and solutions team. I solved problems. The first few weeks were all about understanding the entire scope of what the business team does and also meeting the larger product design team, understanding how they work, and figuring out how I could learn from them.

I understood how for one client closure, the team would make multiple calls meeting the CEO, the CFO, and business and engineering leaders from the client side on multiple occasions. Each call meeting had a different agenda. In some, it was just to understand the client’s problems. And in others, it was to sell Razorpay’s product suite. The team would use multiple pitch decks, prototypes, or flow diagrams to help the client’s team understand Razorpay’s proposition. For me as a designer, the client team was nothing but user personas. And, the collateral used to pitch was the product that I should work on.

As a designer, I understood all these personas first. I had multiple sessions with the existing sales team and understood how these personas behaved in each meeting. What questions they asked, what collateral worked the best, how tech-savvy they were, and how well were they aware of the FinTech jargon? In this teeny tiny research exercise, I understood a few interesting nuances:

1. We understand FinTech. Our clients don’t. So our collateral should be designed for easy understanding. This meant, flow animations instead of static screens for showcasing a complicated flow, and widely understood iconography or illustrations.
2. Pitching everything that Razorpay does won’t work. Exactly explaining how Razorpay can solve the client’s needs were important. This meant neatly defined storylines and a brand-approved voice and tone for all the pitch decks.

Keeping these nuances and personas in mind, I was able to change the storyline of the pitch decks and the imagery. I started using animations to help explain the point better. I used short-form videos to explain complex concepts in an easy way. Also, made most of this collateral white labeled so that the team can re-use most of it for future clients. And, I started training the team on how they can present these stories in a better way for each user persona.

With these tiny changes, we were able to achieve faster go-live times as the clients would understand our pitches better. And an even faster TAT for creating future pitches for new clients. And, that was enough success for me as a designer from a business team!

A huge thanks to Vivek for giving me this opportunity. And, the entire design team at Razorpay for constantly empowering me throughout this journey.

That being said, I recently moved into the larger communication design team at Razorpay. How did I make that transition? That’s a story for another day!

P.S. This is my first ever article on the internet 🙈 Please be easy on me!