Designing for B2B & Fintech 👩🏻💻📈
Hello there! 😀
I’m a Product Designer based out of India. I recently completed 2 years at one of the fastest growing startup, Razorpay.
After endless learning and exposure to the fintech Industry, I’m moving in the next phase of my design career. Here’s what it was like designing for one of the best fintech company in India.
What does it take to build the next best fintech company? — A diversely skilled, result driven team? A top-notch marketing strategy? An Innovative Product suite? Yes, Yes and YES!
Somebody: But where does design stand in this whole scenario?
No one: Design! Who cares about design?
The answer is EVERYBODY!
The design makes or breaks a product and is a crucial SDS (Success Determining Step) for any product in the competitive Indian startup ecosystem. Every decision you take will lead to better results if it's complemented with the best design principles and ideologies.
Since I joined Razorpay (a B2B fintech SaaS company) in 2017, we have had been pacing rapidly, providing easy-to-use products and seamless integration to online & offline businesses in India. From ~4 designers to now 17 in just 2 years, the team grew multifold but our approach towards crafting innovative design & product driven solutions remained the same.
🌟 Design was and will continue to be one of the pillars of excellence at Razorpay.
Moreover, the founding team pushes to keep design on the front wheel, the result of which can be seen in the products we have built in all these years.
😐 But designing for B2B is boring!
What does designing at a B2B company sound like to you?
❓A slow-moving environment where products take years to 🚢?
❓Lack of time or very less interest in understanding the user needs?
❓Quick/thoughtless designs made because someone said ‘ad-hoc’?
❓Asking the PM to provide with requirements & relevant data?
We all think that designing for B2B is boring and old-fashioned. But it’s simply NOT TRUE! Not at Razorpay 💪🏻.
We wanted to break the stereotype of design not being challenging enough for a Product Designer at a B2B company, by pushing design thinking & design inclusivity at every step of product development.
What does it mean?
When you think of executing an idea on a large scale, business & market needs can majorly drive your decision making. Being design-first helps you keep a check on the functionality and affordance of the product right from the start. Are we solving the right problems? Will this change the way people look at things? Can there be an easy solution to this?
You try to get clarity by asking all these questions and align the team towards a common goal of crafting the best product experience.
Now, being design-first is tough. We get that! Hence, we have been iterating our processes to finally become the paradigm of a design-first company. There’s still a long way to go.
🆎 AB of Razorpay Design.
As Product Designers at Razorpay, our work didn’t just end at creating neat workflows, low/high fidelity wireframes, or a quirky UI.
We wore multi-colored hats, dealing with business & product requirements, getting relevant questions answered even before we started running our heads around a project, and understanding those key product & UX metrics that drive a product’s success.
Every designer owned their product and took responsibility for what they delivered. Be it dealing with stakeholders, collecting those qualitative feedbacks from users or finding quantitative insights to set hypothesis & back designs, we tackled all obstacles to deliver a better end result.
Moreover, we collaborated with:
- The marketing & sales team to drive product marketing strategies.
- Developers to deliver efficient designs that are built for scale.
- The analytics team to keep a health check on the metrics even after a product is launched.
💡 “If a design is smooth sailing, there’s definitely something wrong with it. Find the issue & Fix it.”
It didn’t stop there. We:
- Prioritized our work to meet user demand and thought about the overall impact it was going to create.
- Followed the old school approach and asked the fundamental question of What? Why? & How? for every project — big or small.
- Strictly followed Buxton’s Rule of design.
- Documented our research and work so that ideas never got lost.
- Eliminated the terror of confusion and worked in a transparent & agile environment.
Here’s a glimpse of what we did on a daily basis:
Fintech in India is booming 🚀
Demonetization, UPI, and Subscriptions are a few decisions that helped shape the Indian financial ecosystem in recent times in India.
💥 And there couldn’t have been a better time to be a part of this fintech revolution.
Companies driving commerce online/offline want to expand their business by gaining better control over their finances and payments.
Razorpay, being a converged payment solutions company, managed to understand this opportunity and tried to capture the market with next-generation products like Subscriptions, Lending, and Business Banking, among others.
Working on such innovative projects helped me gain exposure and evolve as a designer where:
✦ My designed products were being used by businesses across India. I observed people interact with the designs in a shopping mall while making a payment or receiving a payment link from a phone repair guy.
✦ I experienced horizontal as well as vertical growth which proved to be impactful, rewarding and crucial for my design career.
✦ I was able to envision ideas from a broader perspective, which helped in enhancing the overall emotional quotient and empathy towards users.
✦ I ended up honing skills including core design fundamentals, time management, market & business understanding and a lot more.
♥️ There’s no better sight than looking at millions of people using a product on a daily basis that you’ve built.
💯 The Razorpay Story
A Y-Combinator backed fintech SaaS company, Razorpay is a payment solution provider, powering digital payments for over 1,00,000+ online & offline businesses in India including the likes of IRCTC, Zomato, Yatra & Hotstar.
Starting off as a payment gateway aggregator back in 2014, it transformed into a converged payment solutions company in 2017 with a diverse suite of products to solve payment problems of businesses & their customers.
Recently, it has been recognized as one of the 42 innovative startups by inc42, featured in the Y-Combinator Top 100 Companies List and won ‘India’s Best Places To Work’ Award by the Great Place To Work Institute — India. 🏆
To know more about it, click here.
🤓 So, What Next?
The last 2 years went like a breeze at Razorpay and I couldn’t have asked for a better kick start to my journey as a designer. There’s definitely a lot I’m taking with me from here and will hopefully replicate the same on my next avenue.
On that note, I’m more than happy to share that I’ve joined the amazing design team at Flipkart as a Product Designer, hoping to learn a ton of things and make shopping fun! 😀
Peace ✌🏻
I’m an engineer turned Product Designer. Do follow me on Instagram to know more.
Things I do when not designing — 🏋🏻 🎸 ✍🏻 📸 🏏 🕺 👨🏻🎨
What do you think about this article? Was this insightful? Did it break your B2B stereotype? Let me know in the comments below 👇🏻.
