Journey of building HerKey Product - Through my Lens

Today is a World Product Day!! A Very Happy Product Day to all the Product practitioners and enthusiasts out there.

On this day, I want to talk about my latest product that just went live this week. This product is special because for me it comes from a zone of my passion for DEI and that I could use my craft to build a product that helps women to nurture and elevate their careers, I could not have asked for more.

If I go back in my time machine to 1.5 years back, I was just out of my corporate stint and having many exploratory conversations and happen to meet Neha Bagaria (founder of HerKey and erstwhile JobsForHer) at an event. We both connected instantly and decided to meet soon.

In our next meeting at Third Wave, Neha shared with me what JobsForHer(JFH) does and what is her vision for future. While JFH solved a very pertinent problem of giving access to the job opportunities to women especially those returning from break, there are a lot more ways that a woman can seize these opportunities. In this meeting, we both deep dived as what could be the different ways that JFH could branch out and be a constant companion in women’s career through an ecosystem of experts, employers and women supporting each other. This was the start of the idea of the new HerKey app and my association with HerKey to build world's largest Women career engagement platform.

What followed was a very exciting phase of discovery with our users and getting the right team in place for turning this idea into a reality. I was marveled with Neha’s unwavering passion, curiosity and energy to achieve the vision and mission of JFH.

We did a lot of user research with our user personas – Starters, Restarters, Risers, Employers, Experts etc and competitive analysis. Our existing product and the Gold Club were actually our goldmine to understand our user behaviors deeply. This exercise was the foundation to our vision and it gave some amazing insights and clarity to move forward and HerKey Communities was born.

While we were going deep to understand our users and their pain points and deriving insights, we were soon joined by some fantastic team members who strongly believed in our vision and had a passion to solve this problem through the tech product. While everyone is rockstar in our team, but I would like to specifically call out our CTO, Murugan Arjunan and my product head Subhrajyoti Roy Choudhury as they are my co-pilots to steer and accelerate. in this journey.

While I have been an Angel Investor myself for last few years, HerKey gave me an opportunity to work closely with our investors and get their perspectives from other side of the table. This has also been a great takeaway for me.

Armed with strong insights and conviction to solve this problem, we moved on to the next step of designing the product and like in any intense product discussions – we used to have our debates, agreements and disagreements and finally we landed with some beautiful designs.

While we were conceptualizing the new product, we continued to build some strong value driven features in the existing JFH product. This was a great way to seek validation for the new features and experiments from our existing userbase of women, experts and employers.

In April 2023, JobsForHer became HerKey and this was also the starting point for our product transformation.

Seeking validation for your idea from the users is a critical aspect and we followed that to the core and released a Beta version of HerKey Communities late last year to get the pulse of our users and we had some incredible learnings. During this time, we also formed our Product Advisory Council with our esteemed Employers who work with us towards this noble mission and I am super happy to share that it has helped us to get timely feedback and build the right set of tools that will help these employers to maximize the value on the platform.

During this entire cycle of discovery to design to develop I had some amazing learning. The foremost was working with a start-up as I had always worked only in Large Enterprise organizations, second was building a product for Indian audience and third was working with limited resources as no start-up has that luxury and the last one was the pace at which we were moving ahead. While I have always been a very hands-on PM leader, HK gave me exposure to a lot more dimensions like marketing and analytic tools. I was loving every bit of these learnings. It also helped me as an educator to deliver these nuances to my students.

Equipped with feedbacks from various sources, experiments and data analytics we embarked on this journey of building the new version of the product. We have been very nimble, focused on our core capabilities and plugged external tools so that we stay course on our agenda of faster Time to Market. This could not have happened without a “One Team” mindset of our extended team – Marketing, Customer Success, Sales, HR etc.

As we were moving ahead, the technology landscape was changing fast and we made sure we are on that bandwagon too. This was affirmed when we won not one but 2 awards for our AI product innovation including one from ISPM-IIM jury. When I won the “Product Leadership award” from Gain Skills earlier this year, there could not have been a better testimonial.

With so much in the background, I am super thrilled to see the Product Launch this week especially on Mother’s Day(I could not have asked for a better day??) and I am sure that tons of women out there will benefit from our platform and its a melting pot where experts, employers and women are there for each other and support a women’s career. I wish something like this existed in my early career days.

This is just the start and am looking forward to add many more feathers to our product.

If you would like to know more about Neha and her product journey, listen to this episode of my podcast -

https://youtu.be/nyNMsgcyUp8?si=ir8bOu_XhmZwaamU

Check out our new product from:

www.herkey.com

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.herkey&pli=1

You can also tune into our LinkedIn Live session tomorrow

https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7196477634631864320/

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