When I joined FYERS as Chief Experience Officer in August 2021, its products had grown through different teams, vendors and design approaches. I helped build specialised disciplines, shared practices and systems so experience quality could become an organisational capability, rather than depend on a few people reviewing every decision.
The products looked different because the work happened differently.
I had known FYERS as a Domy customer. Joining meant going inside the organisation and staying long enough to see whether experience could become a capability, rather than an isolated design project.
Different services looked different. Websites came from different vendors. Products didn’t always appear to belong to the same company.
We began with coherence: modernising the brand identity, establishing visual consistency, working on the website and introducing a common design language. But fixing the current screens wouldn’t prevent the next product from inheriting the same friction.
I built the disciplines the experience needed.
I developed specialised capabilities around the work. UI designers focused on interface quality. UX designers could spend more time understanding customers, researching flows and reducing friction.
Content Design became a dedicated capability. Words inside a financial product aren’t decoration: a poorly chosen word can make someone hesitate before moving money, or make a functional product feel unsafe.
Front-end engineering also became part of the organisation I led. Together, these disciplines gave us broader capability. Adding people, though, didn’t automatically create quality.
Quality needed a system, not my constant presence.
We introduced research and design processes, product pods and reviews involving design, stakeholders and engineering. The purpose was practical: question flows before implementation, catch broken patterns and surface technical concerns earlier.
We needed enough structure for disciplines to work independently, without so much structure that nobody could move. That balance was harder than drawing an organisation chart.
What needs to exist so good decisions can happen without me being in every room?
| Starting point | What we worked towards |
|---|---|
| Different product and vendor approaches | A shared design language |
| Quality dependent on individual intervention | Research and review practices |
| Gaps in specialist capability | Dedicated UI, UX and Content Design |
| Fragmented engineering ownership | Unified technology leadership |
Repeated interface work also led us towards a governed component system connected to reusable production components. The aim was to carry decisions across products, rather than rely on someone remembering the previous implementation.
The right structure meant making my own team smaller.
Front-end engineering had grown within my organisation. When Pranav joined and earned my confidence as a technology leader, it became clear that front-end and backend engineering made more sense under unified leadership.
I proposed moving the front-end team under him. It substantially reduced the number of people I led on paper, but it was the right structural move for the company.
Headcount was a poor measure of leadership. Holding onto a fragmented structure to protect my reporting scope would have meant managing territory rather than helping the company.
My responsibility was to build capability that could grow with FYERS.
During my years as Chief Experience Officer, FYERS grew from roughly 100,000 customers towards one million. That is the context for this work, not a claim that design caused the company’s growth.
The experience organisation needed to grow with it: stronger disciplines, repeatable research and reviews, closer design-engineering collaboration and shared systems. The succeeding mobile experience also established a stronger customer-rating baseline, eventually sustaining ratings above four.
What I’m proudest of is often less visible than a screen: designers who developed, managers who learned to lead, and practices that helped people challenge work before customers had to.
I was helping design how the company designed. Sometimes the thing worth designing is the capability that creates it.