Directed brand refresh of Kodo Card from a virtual card startup to a fully automated corporate spend management platform. Set up a team and led the redesign of spend approval workflows to slash task completion time by ~50%

Overview

Kodo is an all-in-one payments solution platform that helps new economy businesses spend smarter. Kodo’s customers - mostly start-ups, accessed the platform via a Progressive Web App (PWA) both on desktop and mobile. At the time the platform supported some universal use cases like card payments, a basic payment approval flow, managing employee spends through a dashboard that allowed admins to control and flag out-of-policy spends, generate reports, add and remove users and so on.

Key challenges

Kodo’s main value preposition at the time I joined in Feb 2022 was a credit line the company offered mostly to startups in the form of credit and prepaid cards and a dashboard to manage spends across the company.

• Kodo aimed to be an all-in-one corporate payments solution for companies big and small not just startups.
• The product offering covered basic use cases and fell short of customer expectations from the stated promise of an all-in-one payments solution.
• The product and engineering teams’ focus needed to shift from cards to an integrated payments solution including UPI payments via linked business accounts and the efforts aligned accordingly.
• The shift needed to be communicated across all marketing channels including the website.

My role

In my fully hands-on Head of Design role at Kodo Card, I hired and led a small product design team of 2 to deliver designs for new features, kick-started efforts for a complete redesign of the Kodo Card app, laid the groundwork for building a new design system, initiated rebranding efforts and redesigned the corporate website.

Design activities I led with cross-functional teams and the Founder & CEO

1. Brand strategy workshop

For the shift to happen from a credit card focused value preposition to an all-in-one payment solution positioning, I proposed a brand strategy workshop to the co-founders in order to discover ways in which we could pivot not only the external communications, for example the content on the website but also the in-product messaging, and navigation to reflect the shift.

2. UX research

I led the design team to gather insights into emerging customer needs via interviews. We discovered the need for a new reimbursements feature and a better approval workflow during these sessions. We built and validated prototypes for both.

3. Product design sprint

Facilitated the first product design sprint to reimagine the end-state customer experience. The key components of the experience prototype that were built as part of the sprint were the customer onboarding journey, the user and admin dashboards.

Solutions and outcomes

My team designed, built and launched new features and feature enhancements aimed at addressing evolving customer needs leading to better retention.

• Launched employee reimbursements, ability to switch between companies within the Kodo account, an enhanced approval workflow, scan and pay and many more.
• In parallel, I initiated efforts to reimagine the product experience end to end, in line with the company’s vision. Delivered detailed designs for the new admin and user dashboards, a configurable payments approval flow, new navigation system and a new onboarding flow.
• The existing product used an undocumented design system. We recreated and documented a library of reusable UI components as the base for a new design system.
• A new corporate website that better conveyed the value preposition of what Kodo now offers.

Kodo app reimagined

Wireframes for the redesigned Kodo dashboard, payment approval workflow configurations, chat feature

Kodo Scan & Pay

UPI for small corporate spends - we had a first-mover advantage since no other corporate spend management platform offered this feature.

New company website

Redesigned the corporate website and co-ordinated its development with an external agency.