Rohan Jacob Thankachan

Ex Software Engineer, FactSet

+91 9447582350
rohanjacob.thankachan@gmail.com

Education

Govt. Model Engineering College
B.Tech Computer Science
2014 - 2018

Work Experience

Software Engineer
FactSet Research Systems
Jun 2018 - Jun 2021

my case studies

Here is my take on the problem statements which were of particular interest to me. For ease of scanning, these have been structured as follows:
Metrics
Approach
Recommendations
Artefacts
Increase conversion rate for Drivezy by improving the booking flow and motivating users to go on trips
Metrics
  • Increase conversion rate of users completing a booking on Drivezy
  • Decrease number of sessions required to complete booking
Approach
Understanding the user-flow
I looked at the user-flow through the eyes of two user personas and identified the pain points they would encounter on that journey.  The first user is someone who is highly motivated to go on a trip to a specific location and the second user is someone who has time allocated for a trip but doesn't have a solid plan in place.
Recommendations
Allow users to pick destinations based fuel-packages
  • Replace KM based packages with Destination based packages. Users are likely to plan trips for destinations and not kilometers.
  • Destinations shown should be based on the pickup location selected. Data can be obtained by analyzing previous trips taken by users.
  • Recommended route map along with pictures of the destination should be available.
  • Users should be able to customize the package by adding buffer KMs if needed.
Recommendations
Drivezy Experiences
  • Travelogues and write-ups of road-trips with photos from other Drivezy users.
  • Lets users dream and visualize the experiences that are available by booking a vehicle.
  • Ask users at the end of the trip to share their experience. Users can be rewarded with discounts on their next trip for doing the same as well as a chance to be featured on the app.
Interested to know more?
Helping users choose the right car for their needs and improving customer retention for Spinny
Metrics
  • Number of Test Drives
  • Lifetime Value of a customer
Approach
Understanding the Indian used car market
The used car market (4.4 million) moved 1.6x more units than the new car market (2.8 million) in 2020. It is set to grow rapidly over the next 5 years to 8.3 millions cars sold in 2026 (2.1x more units than new cars).

It is a highly fragmented market, with over 30,000 dealers existing in the space. Most of these are unorganized players and they account for 80% of sales now. Organized tech players are entering the market and their share is expected to grow from 20% to 30% over the next 5 years.
Approach
Who are the buyers of used cars in India?
67% are first time car owners, 33% have previously bought a car

  • Mostly upgrading from 2-wheelers
  • 80% have a budget less than 5 lakhs
  • 50% needed a car for family commuting needs and 47% looked in the used car space
    due to budgetary constraints
Recommendations
Requirements Quiz
  • A questionnaire with a few questions that will help Spinny capture what the
    user is looking for.
  • At the end of the quiz, Spinny can suggest a few cars which would match the user’s needs and encourage users to book a test drive session with these cars.
  • The ‘Cars’ feed will be personalized and sorted on the basis of relevance to the
    user’s answers.
  • Spinny can send hyper specialized notifications knowing what the user is looking for with the answers from the quiz
Recommendations
Courtesy Cars
  • Provide users whose cars are in for service or repair with a replacement car from Spinny to offset the pain caused by not having their car.
  • The car that is being provided should ideally be from a segment above and should be of slow-moving stock (cars that haven’t been sold for over 2 months - we can include cars from the TrueBil subsidiary too).
  • Users will have to sign an agreement to not drive the car for over 50km/day. Duration to be capped at 10 days.
Recommendations
Shareable Shortlists
  • Allow users to share the list of cars they have created with shareable links. Can also be used by sales representatives to send personalized lists of cars to users.
  • Users should also be able to comment on the cars in the list. Commenting will not require users to log-in, only require them to enter a name. Can be remembered across sessions using cookies.
  • Create a message template that can be sent easily
Interested to know more?

My Product Observations

How Amazon's Kindle app encourages reading through gamification
  • They have added a streak counter that tracks how many days and weeks a users has contiguously read for. The streak is kept active even if the user opens and reads one word but it nudges a user to open the app daily or at-least weekly.
  • People are usually 'loss-averse' which means losing something is a bigger deal than gaining something. In this case, as users don't want to lose their streak, they will keep coming back to the app.
  • This also creates a type of 'lock-in' to the kindle ecosystem as users are more likely to pick up their next book on Kindle once the book they are currently reading is over to keep their streak going.
YouTube's 'Remind me to take a break' feature is poorly done
Option available on the YouTube App
  • The Call To Action buttons that it pops up are 'Dismiss' and 'Settings' - Neither of these make me stop watching and in fact, nudge me toward getting rid of the reminder. It would be more helpful toward the user goals if the buttons were 'Close App' and 'Dismiss'.
  • The 'Dismiss' option is made to look more appealing with it's choice of background color and placement.
  • It doesn't introduce any friction toward watching the video and it is too easy to ignore -Making the video B&W until the reminder is dismissed would force the user to make a choice.
How Google Photos goes beyond being a photo gallery
  • ‘Rediscover this day’ feature helps remind users of things that happened on that date in previous years.
  • Photos is careful not to spam users with notifications every day where it may have some photo for. It checks for quality of photos, number of photos and the people involved in the photos before sending a notification.
  • It uses Google advanced algorithms to make photos searchable by faces, places and objects. This means finding a picture is easy and search is very intuitive.
  • Photos auto-creates content by looking for patterns that come up within pictures. It could be people, objects or themes that are common across pictures. Photos uses this to come up with curated collages, short video clips etc which are fun delighters that keeps users coming back to the app.