Get in touch
victor@salciotti.com
As Head of Product & Design, I took eSapiens through a journey of infusing Design into the strategic approach, definition, launch, and management of its portfolio of B2C products, increasing customer value to over 13 million people in Brazil and abroad.
Esapiens is a Brazilian Venture Builder that serves millions of customers with its digital consumer products portfolio, owning some of the most extensive subscription-based products in Brazil. When I joined the team in 2014, Esapiens was a smaller company facing unpleasant challenges. After good years of exponential growth, its main product, Sexlog, was facing flattening/drops in revenue, user engagement, and retention.
It wasn't hard to find one of the causes: product design was in the hands of just one brave front-end developer. Besides, the tech team used to prescribe design work to freelancers (myself included, before joining the company), who created interfaces by the instruction "Don't reinvent the wheel, just copy Facebook." This practice led the team to build a very messy product that had started to present its flaws.
After mapping gaps and issues, it became evident that it wasn't about product design itself, but the team's mindset towards building products. From introducing new methods to making major business decisions guided by UX, it took five years to mature design at eSapiens. These are the six main initiatives I led to accomplish this change:
Introduce UX research & Design Thinking
Bring design and data science together
Make design work participative
Measure and share design impact
Scale the team and its confidence
Uncover purpose and strategic vision
Steady 20% yearly revenue increase from 2015-2019 – an outcome achieved with a great group of peers.
As a Design team, we introduced onboarding flows, checkout optimizations, and several UX tests that significantly improved engagement rates, MRR, NPS, and decreased Churn numbers.
Significant mindset and culture change from "Just copy that Facebook's feature" to understanding customers and solving real problems.
It's freaking hard to change a culture, but extremely rewarding. This journey was a collaborative effort in partnership with a great group of directors who trusted me to lead crucial initiatives in the company, apply new methods, and test new product building approaches. I'm proud of the results we've achieved together, and I'm sure eSapiens will keep pushing high standards for design work.
