Tell me about a product you worked on that failed.

S: In one of my previous experiences, as part of field ops workflow, the team has to do certain tasks as when it is assigned to them which is essential to ensure that the team is having high productivity. However, when I looked into last month's data, there were 10% uncompleted tasks and 30% tasks which breaches sla before completion. So, I discussed this issue with the ops managers and understood the challenges faced by the team and then went ahead with implementing buzzer based notifications and sla display on task cards. This feature was widely criticised by pan India ops teams and that led to drop in app usage as well (close to 25% drop)

T: I had to understand what went wrong here and fix the issues accordingly

A: This time I interviewed ops team leads and field executives to understand what went wrong, which gave me the actual picture that these folks need to meet clients and when the task buzzer comes, it is very loud and disturbing for the executives as well as the clients who at times have asked the folks to leave the room due to this constant buzzing. As a result, people had stopped login and few people even uninstalled the app since these buzzers kept coming. So, I quickly went back and changed this flow to a more soundless buzzer and adjusted the frequency of these buzzers as well.

R: This step was well received by the team and the app usage started coming back to normal, while we also saw an improvement in the task completion rate. I also realised that in order to build the right features, we need to understand the process ground-up and talk to the actual users before finalising any product solution.