What if... a series of quirky, useful, random ideas for Urban Company

06/01/24

I love hackathons. In 2022, we did five hackathons in the design team. The definition of these hackathons were simple. We'd pick up a theme. Wrap up our day-to-day work to make magic time for this hackathon. Sometimes, we'll take a day of the weekend too to add time. Get together, plan and execute.

When we do these hackathons, we are all hands-on. We all execute. Criteria of these hackathons was mostly, "It needs to be cool, useful, and bragworthy."

In December 2022, we wanted to wrap the year on a high note. All of us in the team have tons of ideas for UC over the years, some small, some big, some ridiculous, some random, some funny, and some bad. Problem is that almost all the times these ideas are floated, discussed verbally. No one typically takes that extra step to give the ideas a basic form.

Inspired by Fantasy's 46 ideas for Elon Musk and Tesla, we thought of changing that.

In the last week of December, we set up two days to do exactly this. Give ideas form. We decided the theme "What if…", gave the team enough heads-up to think about ideas, got together to vote the ideas basis most funny, most useful, and some okay. We shortlisted about 40 from a list of 183 ideas. And, got down to designing, sketching, writing. Page by page, screen by screen, product by product.

Few hours over two days, couple of hours to prepare the right export file for print later, we did it! The amazing work of the team was now ready to feel on fresh pages of our A5 Booklet print. The amazing folks behind it — Shalini Mookerjee, Ganesh Deherkar, Ananya Rane, Sandhya Ravindran, Jatin Gidwani, Kareen George, and Shreyas Patil.

We can't share any thing else beyond what you see here as we kept it confidential and exclusive to only UC employees.

Here are some nice things people said about it:

Raghav Chandra (Co-founder, Urban Company): "Like the user first story line approach, and the painting of picture .. makes it super easy to understand the gist. Can always do a two plus two on outcomes it will drive and sizing. Quick way to conceptualise things and most concise way to paint the picture."

Kanav Arora (SVP of Engineering, Urban Company): "Just went through the whole booklet.
Well curated and quirky. Some of the what-ifs are really good. Especially the ones on Product/Devices related are good tangential and bold. Would like to see more of them!"

Praful Parakh (Business Head, Urban Company): "The What If.. series is a real fun read and is a culmination of thoughts all of us might have had sometime or the other, while at UC. I loved the whacky ideas and also some ideas which I feels should be done immediately.Kudos to the team who made this happen, look forward to more such ideas and also hoping some of these get implemented."

Amit Jaglan (Director of Design, Urban Company): "Very impactful. The choice of form is equally powerful as the idea. Same thing in an Excel sheet or a doc would have been much less impactful compared to the tangible magazine it is right now. I liked the idea mix also. Some were simple, some were funny, some were weird 😂 and some very thought provoking. Made it very engaging to go through vs. it being a simple feature suggestion list. Also, designs were on-point 👌"

Rohan Verma (Director of Design, Urban Company): "Went through the book. All ideas are so endearing. I also love the quality of the print and binding its very well executed"

… and some more!