I can confidently say that Umang is among the top 1% of her peer group when compared with colleagues with similar experience and tenure. I see Umang as a self-starter, a team player, and a professional with excellent communication skills. Umang has demonstrated these qualities repeatedly in multiple engagements, thus, making her one of the top performers at the company.
Early on, Umang was quick to spot the importance of launching a ‘cart’ functionality on the website to increase the value/ ticket size for an average order. This was a herculean task, and required coordination with senior managers, backend development teams, and design teams. Umang took ownership of this project and determined to see it through a successful implementation. Given the stringent timelines and multi-stakeholder synchronization, Umang set up team huddles every alternate day to track progress, ascertain possible bottlenecks, and set in place course correction measures. These meet-ups streamlined the design and development process and brought everyone on the same page. The result was an immediate increase in revenue by INR 10,000 daily post addition of this functionality, and a steep increase in order size over the next few months.
She is sincere in her communication with others and manages expectations amicably. This trait has empowered her to develop several lasting relationships for the firm with alliance partners. She independently identified external partners for the website and worked with their as well as our own engineering team to integrate payment gateways such as Paytm, PhonePe, PayPal, AmazonPay and Freecharge. Today at Lybrate, 80% transactions are via these gateways.
As a product manager in a growing start-up, Umang has shouldered many responsibilities without being fazed by pressure of timelines. However, Umang has a knack of going into too much detail which makes it difficult for her to work with the same ease as otherwise.
During one of the projects around product description pages where detailed explanation of product is given, Umang noted a conversion rate of only about 10%. Post a few days of churn analysis, Umang realized that most users left because they did not have the attention span to fill a form in the product page that had 10 fields. She came up with a very exhaustive plan to factoring in changes to all 10 fields. But that came at the cost of a long development time. I advised her to adopt a funnel approach, and focus on the changes that impact the highest number of customers. She took the feedback in a constructive manner and prioritize her efforts. This helped to improve the immediate conversion rate by almost 40 points.
In subsequent projects I worked with her, she proactively asked the right questions and ensured that key objectives are clear to her and implementation plan is aligned with it.
HEC has a reputation of creating leaders who understand the emerging market and consumer needs and I feel that Umang would be a great addition to its community. With her diverse experience, she will be able to significantly contribute to the HEC community. Her natural instinct of looking at the solution of every problem via the lens of technology and translating the same into a usable product, proven ability to deliver in a fast paced startup environment, hands on understanding of the healthcare sector, and managing expectations of the management will cumulatively aid the overall learning of the cohort. I am confident that she will come out the HEC MBA program with all the skillsets required to become a visionary product manager.