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A developer can help organisations build a good product but to make a successful customer-centric product requires team effort. Along with developers, visual designers and product teams play an equally important role in understanding and anticipating customer needs and then ensuring the product is both useful and user-friendly.

Product and design teams at Draup, an AI-driven SaaS company, are working towards making the product experience convenient for the end-user.

“These two teams at Draup act as a bridge between customers and internal teams including technology, data science, research etc. We identify customer needs, conceptualise solutions and coordinate with several teams to bring ideas to fruition. The new capabilities enhancements lead to a better user experience and eventually result in product referrals,” says Yashodhar Jain, Chief Product Officer, Draup.

Customer-centricity is the key

Yashodhar has been leading Draup’s product team since the very beginning and has been a witness to its evolution over the years. The team has grown in both size and responsibilities and is now covering a wide spectrum of use cases in the talent and sales departments.

Both the teams work with the objective of solving a variety of problems which include account and buyer intelligence, industry ecosystem for sales clients and talent intelligence, recruitment, reskilling, university hiring for talent teams.

Draup’s senior product designers Rahul Kondi and Anoop Mandodi, who helped build the design team from the ground-up, believe in quick resolution of client issues. Each initiative at Draup is supported by feedback from customers and insights from the usage data. This allows the product and design team to ensure customer centricity in all its newly launched products. “We routinely connect with customers to gain new insights, get feedback on current features, and validate our roadmap,” says Anoop.

Building globally competitive teams

For Rahul, working at Draup is an exciting stint where the team works with a healthy sense of urgency. “We help thousands of executives make better, data-informed decisions instead of gut-based decisions. Knowing that our work helps our users save several hours of their time and provide accuracy is very fulfilling, and always keeps us on our toes,” he shares.

Draup encourages a culture where all employees are empowered to express their opinions and take decisions accordingly. A culture of healthy debate is encouraged to bring out the best ideas and maintain a productive work environment. A lot of emphasis is also laid on the upskilling and long-term growth of employees.

Recognising the competition in the market, Draup’s focus is on building globally competitive in-house teams. “We encourage everyone to take up courses and build new skills to grow. There have been plenty of occasions where team members have picked up tasks they have no expertise in, this helps in upskilling and also makes work fun and surprising,” says Yashodhar.

Collaboration with customers

Organisations levelling up their growth trajectory need to expand to new locations, identify future opportunities, and build relationships. The product and design teams at Draup enable such organisations in taking crucial business decisions that further help them build better reputations and gain millions of dollars in savings or revenue. The process involves an in-depth analysis of the problem, scoping the technological constraints, gathering reliable data sources, and translating abstract concepts into usable interfaces.

“Recently, we conceptualised and implemented a series of features that help our customers hire more diverse candidates for their organisation. One of the key innovations was a talent discovery experience using natural language search. We worked in collaboration with our customers to develop this and it was well-received by them. Our product and design teams had a crucial role to play in building this complex solution,” shares Yashodhar.

The culture of collaboration is deep-rooted at Draup. Whether it is with the consumers or cross-team collaboration, the goal is to achieve the best possible results for the greater good of both employees and the company.

Whiteboard challenges and weekly tech talks help employees interact and engage while sharing innovative ideas. “Each successful product release is celebrated with pizza, just how it should be,” says Rahul.

Sharing the roadmap for the future, Rahul says, “We will continue to strengthen our relationship with our customers and improve features with more actionable intelligence. As a team, we are going to expand not just in terms of adding more members, but also upskilling ourselves to be more creative and productive.”