How it started

After a short tenure in a fast-paced design agency, I was seeking something more in my journey ahead — to understand how design processes scale in product companies and be a part of a strong design culture.

This was a tough time for a job switch due to the ongoing pandemic. But luckily, I found out that Recko was recruiting for design interns. At this time I knew little about enterprise products and the problem Recko was solving. I did some research around the company and its product, found it quite fascinating and proceeded with my application. After a few interview rounds (portfolio review + design task + telephonic calls), I was finally delighted to receive an internship offer letter from Recko. During these interviews, I could see my thoughts aligned with the design team and it also gave me a little idea of what diving into enterprise design would look like.

The 8-week internship commenced in August 2020 and by that time Recko had entirely shifted to a remote-working structure due to the COVID crisis. This article is a short glimpse of some of my key learnings during the remote internship.

Recko is presently building a consumer-grade enterprise product for finance teams to manage their day-to-day financial operations like reconciliation, commission calculation and payouts. The first project I was handed at Recko was to revamp their old website. The old design and content of the website fell short to convey how powerful the product was.

The idea was to create something that stood out fresh in the fintech domain and did justice to the capabilities and user experience of the product.

We initially started with finding good references (Stripe, Segment, Mollie, Plaid, Coinbase to name a few) and figuring out how these websites were made. What really helped was breaking the reference website pages into individual components and understanding their structure and relationship with each other.

We also spent a good amount of time laying down foundational guidelines that would align all contributors to a north star. These included the website design principles, column layout and grid, spacing and type scale, colour and the illustration style. Additionally, the marketing team had parallelly begun chalking out the content. Once content pieces were (almost) there, we started designing the wireframes.

Talking about the granularity of these elements and the process that we followed ahead is a whole new topic. But one of my significant learnings in the course of designing the new website was being super proactive in a start-up environment. As a designer, I had to actively take ownership and communicate with all the stakeholders — the marketing folks, CXOs and the Front-End team — to bring the missing pieces together. When dealing with tight deadlines, I split up weekly tasks into smaller daily chunks. I created a prioritized to-do list and kept a track of my weekly goals in Notion. Do watch this video from The Futur, to understand this in detail. This helped me in moving forward with a clear understanding of what I could achieve within a certain time span.

Going ahead, I had to design product workflows. But the primary step was to understand the nitty-gritty of the entire product and its complex use cases. As I was new to the fintech enterprise world, I had to first realize where Recko stood in the entire ecosystem of aggregators, payment gateways, internal order system and marketplace resellers. To gain an in-depth knowledge of the feature-level use cases, I started communicating with Product Managers and Engineers. Communication is important and how you communicate plays a key role when working with multidisciplinary teams.

A few such conversations threw light upon what important role was played by every team member. On a personal level, this helped me with three things -

1. I opened up to connect with new people in the org. which drove me to willingly ask any doubts and always stay curious about tiny details.
2. I realized how team leads were cognizant of what strategy they opted for (solving a new use case vs a use case they had previously encountered in their work experience), to help the team function faster with the available resources.
3. I understood the paramount role of Product Managers in B2B enterprise companies— how they bind the tech, design and business nodes together and facilitate the growth of a product.

These learnings helped me empathize more with the product and its makers, and guided me further in designing product workflows.

One of the important product features that I worked on was the Integration workflow. Integration service allows users to configure Recko to obtain data from other products that they are already using. These products could vary from PSPs like Razorpay, Stripe and Paytm to file storage platforms like Amazon S3 and GCS. You can check the entire list here. Once a user configures an integration with an external product, it then acts as a conduit to fetch files into Recko’s database. This data would then be further consumed by other features on Recko.

Typically in enterprise companies, Product Managers are the custodians of users. They identify user needs and detail out product requirements (PRDs). A similar PRD was created for the Integration workflow. In addition, we conducted Product-Design-Engineering sprints twice a week to discuss different possible user flows. One of the key learning of such sprints was that when designers and engineers collaborate to a great extent, it's a win-win situation for both. Designers understand the complexity of coding the UI and how different APIs work to make something possible. On the other hand, engineers understand the user experience aspect of a workflow and empathize more with the end-users. Many new ideas emerge during such discussions, which in the long run benefits the users.

Once the groundwork was laid, we started designing the wireframes. The architecture was designed to be modular+scalable, and at the same time deliver a consistent experience for all the integrations we offered. When designing the UI, I was ecstatic to work with Recko’s very own Design System (DS) with over 500 components.

Adopting a design system at Recko has significantly impacted the way teams collaborate and function:

1. Designers could afford to spend a lot more time with engineers to understand different APIs and figure out the correct UX, as UI design sprints had become faster.
2. Both the design and engineering teams having built a library of components could avoid redundant work. It’s a plug-and-play mechanism for both teams.
3. QA team spent zero time on testing the same component twice, consequently, features could be released swiftly to production.

The Recko DS has constantly evolved over time. Components in the library mostly cater to 80% of the use cases, but when required, we don’t shy away from upgrading or introducing a new component. For eg: while designing the integration workflow, we significantly improved our ‘card component’ to handle multiple errors and introduced a better hierarchy in its elements.

Furthermore, the DS is an extension of the Recko Design Principles. These principles have guided the thought process and helped the team reach solutions to product problems in cases of ambiguity. Click here to read in detail about the Design Principles.

Unlike consumer products (like Uber, Amazon and Netflix) which are designed to satisfy individual user needs, enterprise products (like Oracle, QuickBooks and SAP) fulfil both organisational+user needs. Consumer products have traditionally always cared for their end-users. But for a long time, enterprise products majorly focused only on fulfilling organisational needs with very little attention to designing for end-users.

This notion has changed over time and the B2B space has seen remarkable growth in the last 10 years. Companies like Stripe and Nutanix have emerged as global market leaders as they heavily invested in designing for end-users. Likewise, companies that failed to understand the importance of it have often suffered huge losses. Click here to read how Citibank lost around $500 million due to its inconvenient UI design.

In the enterprise world, we design solutions for users who belong to a very particular domain and perform specific tasks. For example, at Recko we are designing a platform for finance teams to perform a set task of monitoring and executing reconciliation and payouts. Users in this domain have a certain understanding of financial terminologies and their interconnection with reconciliation concepts that are mostly foreign to people who are not associated with the domain. Enterprise designers need to understand these terminologies and the complex data models underlying different user flows before designing anything. As regular users of apps like Swiggy, Dunzo, Netflix or Uber, designers generally tend to have a good sense of the architecture and user flow of many B2C products. When designing for B2B, this may not be the case. One has to diligently invest in researching relevant references and have a good understanding of first principles thinking.

‘Why I design enterprise UX, and you should too!’ by Uday Gajendar is a must-read if you want to know more about enterprise design.

The design team begins their day at 10 a.m. with an hour-long ‘Design-Sync-Up’. We review different tasks we have in hand, discuss blockers and iterate on possible solutions. It's the time when some of the most important learnings take place. These learnings are not just limited to solving product workflows, but also fundamentally understanding how an individual in the team solves a problem in their own unique way. The design team is lean which allows everyone to undertake ownership to a great extent.

When a feature is released, the learnings and insights are well known to the designer, engineer or the QA person leading that particular feature. But sharing this knowledge across the entire organisation is equally important. For such a cross-learning within the organisation, we have weekly ‘Demo Sessions’ where individuals participate to give 20 min feature walkthroughs to the entire org. Additionally, we have bi-monthly ‘All Hands’ meeting to understand the growth and vision of the company to achieve its next quarterly goals.

Recko has a passionate team working day-in and day-out to build a strong financial tech stack for the finance teams of tomorrow. Their strongest asset, undoubtedly, is their people. They have hired folks who are extremely self-driven and constantly motivate you to go that extra mile. During the internship, everything from onboarding to designing solutions with teammates was virtual, but I always sensed a strong collaborative work culture in all my interactions.

Closing notes

The internship ended with the most exciting news of Recko offering me a full-time role, and the journey so far has been a constant learning curve. Grateful to our leaders Saurya and Prashant who truly believe in the value of design for building an enterprise company. Building a disruptive product and being a part of an awesome team has been an enriching experience.

Last but not the least, a huge thanks to Parikshit, Rohit and Suwardhan for being the best possible mentors early in my career. Being surrounded by good designers who add clarity to your vision has been very crucial to my growth.

Cheers!