Two designers, no product manager, full autonomy, and seven days to turn our operational and technology capabilities into a credible consumer product concept, work that went on to support leadership's strategic conversation with Coca-Cola.
The CEO and CTO brought two of us in, myself and one other design manager, and handed us a single, open ended goal. Take the operational and technology capabilities the business had built, and turn them into a consumer product concept worth putting in front of Coca-Cola.
There was no product manager, no requirements document, and no predefined use cases. We were given full autonomy over what the product should be and how it should work. That kind of trust is its own kind of pressure. With nothing scoped for us, the definition of the problem was as much our job as the solution.
No PM, no brief, no use cases handed down, just a capability, a counterpart, and a week. Defining the problem was half the work.
With only seven days and no one above us managing the backlog, the working model had to be deliberate. We divided the product surface between us by feature, worked in parallel, and reviewed together every day, using those daily check ins to keep two independent streams converging into one coherent product rather than two halves that didn't meet.
The split was roughly equal. We discussed the use cases jointly, agreed who owned what, and iterated wherever the time allowed. Running a 0→1 concept this way, peer to peer, no PM layer, high tempo, depends on a shared definition of "good" that you don't have time to write down. That's where the next decision mattered.
Early on, I took ownership of the visual language, the aesthetics, and the product philosophy, the throughline both of our streams would be built against. With two people designing different parts in parallel against a deadline, a shared visual and conceptual language isn't decoration. It's the coordination mechanism. It's what let independent work read as a single product without a manager reconciling it after the fact.
Once that foundation was set, we both designed within it. The philosophy gave us a fast way to make consistent decisions alone and trust that they'd cohere when we brought them together at the daily review.
A note on what's shown: these are selected screens from the concept. The full product thinking and the deck it became remain confidential, happy to walk through them in person.
We iterated as far as a week would allow, then presented the concept to the CEO. From there it was incorporated into the pitch deck taken to Coca-Cola, moving from a design exploration into the materials supporting a genuine strategic conversation between the two companies.
That relationship is now public. The Jubilant Bhartia Group has since agreed to acquire a 40% stake in Hindustan Coca-Cola Holdings, the parent of Coca-Cola's largest bottler in India. This work was one small input that supported the strategic discussions along the way, not the reason for them, but it's rare for a week of design to sit anywhere near a conversation at that altitude.
For a designer, that's an unusually short path from canvas to boardroom. The work wasn't a feature in a live product. It was a vision used to make a case, which set a different bar. It had to be desirable enough to feel like a product, and credible enough to stand up in a room making strategic decisions.
A few things stuck with me. When you're given autonomy instead of a brief, framing the problem well is half the work. When two people build in parallel under a deadline, a shared philosophy is what keeps the pieces coherent. And design made for a strategic audience has to carry conviction, not just be usable. It was a rare chance to work at the front of a business decision rather than the back of one.