Over the period of 6 months, I had the opportunity to work on Concur Mobile's critical product pain points. I worked with Concur Labs team to develop wearable and mobile applications. I was also selected as the best intern from a intern cohort of 105+

The Internship

Product Management Intern- Mobile R&D at Concur Technologies, Bellevue HQ

 

Limited details shared on this page due to the sensitive nature of information as per the signed NDA.

 

Key projects

  • ExpenseThis- iWatch app for filing expenses under 10 seconds
  • AttendIt- iOS app that enables adding expense attendees as easily as adding friends on facebook
iWatch app screenshot

iWatch app screenshot

The ExpenseThis Problem

Concur made filing for an expense easy and hassle free. However, many executives using the Concur mobile app complain that it takes long time to create and file an expense. Approximately, 3-5 mins on leading mobile platforms.

Solution Process

  • Market Research
  • Requirement gathering
  • Feature list
  • Prioritizing roadmap
  • User flow diagramming
  • Hypothesis driven development using
    • Hypothesis
    • Use case
    • Success criteria
  • Usability testing and user feedback
  • Validation and reiteration

Deliverable

The delivered solution was an iWatch app that files an expense in 10 secs. All a user has to do is 'Tap' on app icon, 'Say' - "ExpenseThis" and 'Done'. The app figures out what This meant in a particular context.

“Tap - Speak - Done. I love it!”
— Elena Donio, President, Concur
 

Secret sauce: location from iWatch app is mapped to last transaction on your credit card with a timestamp; an expense is filed as soon as the transaction record is found.

 

Research. Develop. Validate. Repeat.

 

The AttendIt Problem

Internal stakeholders believed that adding attendees to an expense report was a real pain. This was primarily due to different attendee types and searching from multiple databases in which their information resided.

On the web, sessions involving attendees could take upto 20+ mins, found during initial researches. 

Checkout the final product of our work. The process involved is listed below.

 

Deliverable

The above video shows how the final experience felt versus the current approach. The new experience is expected to save workable time of employees of our clients, resulting into savings of Millions of Dollars for the clients.

“It is a big pain. This makes it so easy. Brilliant!”
— Mark Nelson, CTO, Concur
 

Secret Sauce: Pre-fetching multiple databases using contextual prioritization for a smoother experience.

 

Other Interesting Projects

  1. Concur Mobile App Expert Review
  2. Designed Concur Mobile Usability Framework
  3. Simplified Concur Mobile Product Owner's Dashboard
  4. TripIt Hackathon

Final Thoughts

Details of the above two projects cannot be disclosed since an NDA was signed. A large amount of my work involved validating ideas and modifying roadmaps using data from internal analytics, data science teams and market research. I managed development teams of both ExpenseThis and AttendIt involving 5 developers and 2 designers.

I learnt leveraging upon the data sources present in the ecosystem in order to make informed decisions while defining a product roadmap. Power of LEAN Startup mentality and Agile methodology were the key takeaways from this experience.