Hi, I'm HIMANK NAGPAL !

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I joined Nykaa E- Retail Private Limited, Gurugram office on 22nd Aug 2022. I was an early joiner by a week as compared to the other 5 incoming interns from NID who joined a week later.

 

My role

1. Initially the intrenship started as an exercise to understand user stories and convert them to VDs. Then once I understood the “system” and work, I was given independent responsibility and accountability to convert the user stories into Visual Designs (VDs). So much so that 3 months into my stint, I  kind of held the fort in my manager’s absence. This is the kind of “Trust” which made me feel valuable during my stint at Nykaa.

2. Adtech, the main project which I was hired for is being built ground up to cater to Nykaa’s needs: self serve platform akin to what amazons, flipkarts, myntras etc of the world do. Currently the system is unintelligent but our vision is to build an intelligent one powered by logic, learning and AI to rank and display ads and also show personalized ads to our end users. Simultaneous, is the need to optimize the use of our inventory, drive revenue, provide visibility to various stakeholders like Brands, finance team, strategy teams and so on.  We were targeting “Visibility” first. Then in the upcoming quarters, plan was to milk it out, introducing other ad revenue models like CPM, CPC etc.

3. “Campaign Manager” is the main portal under Adtech for which I helped create user manuals from scratch in my initial days. 

4. I Shadowed user interviews as an observer first. I was asked to take notes in the later interviews. The next step was to interview users myself. In some of my colleagues’ projects, I gave mock interviews to help them frame questions. Collaboration and support with and for colleagues was icing on the cake which was instrumental in my learning.

5. Campaign manager project was broken into phases. Phase 1 was completed on time within a month of my joining, phase 2 also ended in Feb end. By the time I was nearing the completion of my Internship we had begun with Phase 3. For Phase 3 we were targeting building Ad relevance and then automation.

6. I was happy that the Portal which we had created was successfully started to be used by the Brand Managers at Nykaa. Ads on some of the sections on the Nykaa website like “Brand you will love” on the makeup page, “Everyday at Nykaa”, “Only for you” and so on were taken live directly via the Campaign Manager in Phase 1. In Phase 2 of the project we targetted the inventory Groups on the Home Page which itself had undergone a major refresh. As next steps we were in the process for fixing the creative guidelines for our Brands so as to provide a curated, personalized, neat, standardized and delightful experience to our users from the Ads which they see on Nykaa’s multiple websites or the purchases that they make over there.

7. The MVP phase 1 had “heavy” VDs of getting a structure in place to be created the phase 2 has been more about detailing it with features and validations as well as new use cases like multi brand, multi creative, more inventory, same day ads, AD proof, discounts, stopping/editing a live ad and so on.

8. I helped Conduct virtual/online User Acceptance Testing (UAT) of the MVP in Phase 1 to various stakeholders. It was an iterative process of refining the designs and providing training to them. 

9. Design reviews: I asked for reviews on designs and iterations from fellow designers whether junior or senior especially my manager.  Some of my Design interviews I was able to crack because of good tips from them.

10. Design Debt documentation: Usually not all components were available so we used a mix of components from ag-grid and storybook. Endeavour was on to build our inhouse Design system for the Enterprise team as we have for Nykaa beauty, Nykaa fashion, Disha and Superstore. 

11. Conversion of data to actionable insights: Once we had shipped out the MVP, the push was on to drive the adoption. I remember an anecdote of discussion with my Product Manager where I was able to get a critical flow changed which turned out to be critical drive adoption in the MVP phase itself.  Then from MVP our push was to build a Minimum Lovable Product (MLP). 

12. Annual operations plan (AOP) was set into motion where all the teams had to provide roadmap and justification of the operations. This was when I got to know that I won't get a chance to work fulltime at this great organization.

13. Retool “Ad moderation” deployment: To speed up our development processes, we adopted a low code platform Retool. I built the Ad Moderation panel on the platform which was used by our Curation and strategy teams to moderate Ads.

14. I did UI sanity checks and all interaction checks of the Retool panel, simple scripting etc. wherever required.

15. Documentation : I helped created Design debt documentation, interactions' documentation, UAT feedback and next steps documentation, Minutes Of Meetings (MoMs). I also created user manuals for the site strategy teams for Ad moderation singe-handedly.

16. Other tasks: I was given an additional responsibility of creating a repository of Design events for betterment of our Design team which I really enjoyed. I was also a volunteer in  Designathon event which was supposed to happen during our last week but it got delayed.

17. Lastly, I am a part of Lean research plan for the AdTech (It was 2 month plan but my internship got over 3 weeks into the plan): My most recent task at hand was doing a product audit of the system we have built, get usability statistics and look at it from a fresh perspective again after doing market and secondary research. Here I got a chance  to do deep research into other Ad Portal products and how we can use those lessons for our use cases at Nykaa.

 

Overall, work at Nykaa was good: I had those “Aha” moments and silly moments as well. Folks here were highly intelligent, self-aware, contextually aware and highly accessible. Great part over there was the Design Culture built ground up as well as the “Design Evangelism” push which was taking concrete shape due painstaking efforts by the Design Leaders under whom I got the chance to work and drive value. 

 

Thank You Nykaa.