IC + Manager projects
Most of my work in Swiggy has been a blend of hands-on work and leadership in parallel. Since I owned multiple charters as the New Initiatives Design head, my contribution entails architecting frameworks, enforcing craft and emotional design, and ensuring the final outcome has a clear story to tell.
Launching Instamart in CoVID
Time frame
May 2020 - Aug 2020
Business need
During COVID, people needed groceries delivered quickly and safely. This created a need for a fast, simple, and reliable grocery shopping experience—designed to meet customer expectations and build trust.
Goal
Work with cross-functional teams to build a disruptive and innovative 0-1 grocery app from scratch. The bottomline was to launch fast to get first mover advantage.
Key constraints
Tech stack in web view, not native — for faster launch
1 month for design of pre-order & post-order flows
Contributions as IC
Iterate home page, listing and search experiences with product and peers
Prototype navigation and Add to cart micro-interactions for devs
Hand-over and pixel perfection of some flows with engineers
Define guidelines for merch & monetisation properties
Home page
Listing scroll
Merch assets
Contributions as Leader
Work with category team to design the storefront around inventory
Work with marketing team for in-app/off-app promotions
Guide visual designers for storytelling properties (first use of 3D images)
Ensure product finesse through rigorous reviews & feedback
First time user video
Using 3D images for storytelling
Impact and results
3 months
record time to launch 0-1
89% fulfillment
of items ordered (vs 55% in Stores)
8.5 items
average basket size
Rs.295
Average Order Value
Improving conversion of Fruits category
Time frame
Jun 2023 - Aug 2023
Business need
Currently the purchase share of fruits : vegetables is 45:55. The Average Sale Price of Fruits category is almost 3x of vegetables — however, the penetration of this category and repeat rate is lower than expected.
Goal
Increase the awareness & desirability of fruits to repeat Instamart customers through design interventions — taking the fruits:vegetables ratio to 65:35
Target users
New to fruits - repeat users who didn't purchase yet
Dormant in fruits - users who stopped buying fruits
Barriers to buying fruits online
Lack of personal choice
Customers can’t pick fruits based on ripeness, size, or purpose
Low Awareness of Variety
Customers don’t know about full range of fruits, especially exotic options.
Trust Issues with Quality
Past experiences with damaged or poor-quality fruits leads to hesitancy
Design interventions
1️⃣ Improve impressions of fruit SKUs
We redid the photography to make fruits and vegetables, highlighting their freshness, realistic textures and packaging to build customer trust. Photo guidelines were made and handed over to the merch team.
We also designed trust markers to showcase our approach to ensure quality & reliability for fruits as a category
2️⃣ Guiding user in selecting right variety
We added sourcing information and one-line tips to help customers differentiate between varieties of same fruit or use cases. We also created a dedicated landing page for customers to discover fruits suited to their needs.
Information layer on fruit SKUs
Fruits destination page
3️⃣ Driving awareness in strategic touchpoints
We used the prime real estate of homepage and search to drive awareness of this category to the 2 target customer cohorts
Home page entry point
Show fruit store in search
Impact and results
10% GMV increase
for fruits category
4% increase
in total orders with fruits
15% less issues
leading to better trust in fruits
6% improvement
order queries than Stores
Build self-serve ad portal for brands
Time frame
May 2023 - Aug 2023
Business need
Instamart currently runs manual keyword based ads (KBA) for brand partners, but we wanted to open up the service to advertisers directly to create and manage ad campaigns on KBA. We also needed to catch up with other players in e-comm and q-comm space in providing detailed ads dashboard to brand partners
Goal
Create a self-serve portal that empowers brands to create KBA campaigns, view performance as well as download campaign reports. In future, we will scale to other ad formats like banners, collections and other sponsored products for advertisers
Target users
Brand partners for Instamart
Agencies hired by brands to run ads on their behalf
Constraints & challenges
No existing web components
Instamart ads are usually run through excel sheets by category managers
Tight timelines for release
We had only 3 months to launch the self-serve dashboard for ads
Design bandwidth crunch
This was an ad-hoc, L-sized project. All B2B designers were unavailable
How I made it happen
1️⃣ Hiring the right design freelancer
Given the tight timelines, I reached out to my design network to identify a designer with strong experience in ads and monetization, who could hit the ground running. That’s when I found SK, who has worked on projects with Google ads team previously. She joined us as a subject-matter expert under my leadership & guidance.
The team (names withheld for confidentiality)
2️⃣ Creating a design process
To ensure alignment and speed, we set up a daily communication loop between SK and the PM, along with twice-weekly design reviews for structured feedback. We spent the first few weeks creating a solid 3-month design blueprint, which included:
Defining the end-to-end dashboard architecture
Conducting competitive analysis to benchmark ad dashboards and improve partner usability
Adapting DLS text tokens for desktop screens to maintain visual consistency
High level principles and IA
3️⃣ Design & ship the MVP
With the framework and DLS in place, Shailly completed the entire product and visual design execution of the Ads dashboard MVP in just over a month! We worked tirelessly every week to identify gaps and blockers, proactively show prototypes to select brand partners for early feedback, and finalize on designs that would be easily scalable for more ad formats down the line.
Steps in the self-serve KBA flow (6)
4️⃣ Ship immediate fast followers
After launching the capability to run an ad campaign based on keywords, the immediate fast follow projects were to be able to find ongoing or past campaigns, in order to track KBA performance and get insights
Fast follows - Search campaign
Fast follows - Campaign performance
Impact and results
20% increase in CPM
from Rs 623 → Rs 745
24% increase in RPO
from Rs 5.98 → Rs 7.40
Next steps
Project owned by newly formed B2B design team after SK's departure
Dashboard scaled up to newer Ad types like Banners, Speciality collections
Became foundation for two new products — Brand partner portal & vendor partner portal
Key charters that evolved from the initial Ads dashboard
Key takeaways
Balancing my roles as both IC and leader is rewarding but tough, especially when handling multiple projects at once. Sometimes gaps in solutioning happen because my focus is split between these roles, but I learned to delegate and rely on my team to consistently deliver quality design solutions.
