Product Manager | E-commerce in super-app | Tata Digital

overview

Product

Tata Neu Super-app ecommerce (product listing to order confirmation except payments)

Contribution / Responsibilities:

As the lead & only PM for end to end shopping experience (except payments), I was responsible for detailing features, conceptualizing, overseeing the software development, launching & refining the product. Reported directly to the Chief Products Officer, had two reportees and worked with a 52 member development team.

the product

The period of this project was before the Covid pandemic and went on through the peak of lockdown. While this an extremely grim time for humanity, this was a great time to attempt and launch an online shopping application in one of the world's fastest growing major economies. 

There were around 600 million people with the ability and willingness to pay, and quite a few of them were about to be first time online shoppers. 

We decided to keep the basic journey the same because it very closely follows a consumer decision process: discovery, consideration, shortlist and purchase. 

We did two things differently: 4-step end-to-end purchase and in-context cross-sell and upsell

Quick checkout minimizes distractions and is a boon for the lazy user, provided there is good data entered once. The design and user experience reflected our mission of rapid and undistracted checkout through smart use of modals, progress bars, reduced recommendations and minimal use of widgets. 

In context up-sell or cross-sell is a step ahead of a regular AI/ML based recommendation engine. It's having the ability to suggest a sunscreen to the user if they have booked a flight to a tropical destination. The AI of 2026 can very well do this, but at the time AI was good at recommendation based on a user's past purchase history or population trends. We attempted this through few pre-determined combinations of products we called "bundles". There were bundled offers for electronics, beauty, bundles, dining and for occasions like Valentine's day and more. What's more: a user could choose variations without losing sight of the larger bundle or getting distracted. 

It was a small, simple, "not-impressive by today's standards" product that worked very well.

challenges

Firstly, magnitude & complexity of product + cold start problem. We were essentially trying to build another Amazon but in a crunched timeline. What helped was to stay focused and build in order of core prod > must have > good to have by customer needs. Starting day with 1 hour of planning & prioritizing tasks also helped greatly.

Secondly, with many internal teams including other products like loyalty and payments, marketing, customer service and external teams like technology vendors and brands, it is challenging to maintain a balance of stakeholder, business and user priorities, not to mention - reach a consensus on important product and business decisions. I am grateful for a trusting boss and a cooperative team who gave the autonomy and room to take good decisions in my role as the only product manager for such an ambitious product.

Thirdly, team morale was hit during the peak of Covid and complete remote work. Covid or not, I always treated team with respect & encouraged frank inputs. During this time, I took few extra minutes to connect with each of them to understand what was going on with them. I could see that it made a difference.