Krew Guru is an HRTech startup in the maritime sphere. It helps seafarers from all over the world to find jobs at sea and helps employees (crewing companies, shipping companies) to find the best employers for the positions they have.

2,000,000
Is the amount of positions on the merchant fleet that are to be closed at least twice each year. With an average contract being 4 to 8 months (according to BIMCO Manpower Report) that’s 4 million vacancies per year.

1,177,000
Aboard positions were in the cruise industry according to the CLIA State of Industry report 2020. These positions also are to be manned at least twice a year. That’s 2,2 million vacancies per year.

2,000,000 +
Positions on private yachts and fleets generate about 3 million public vacancies a year.

Industry - commercial and industrial fleet

B2C (Seafears)

• Gender portrait of seafarers - 95% men. Women on ships are rare and usually come as doctors or cooks (barkers)
• Age 20-55 years old Under - unable to work for legal reasons. Older - very rare.

B2B (Crewing companies/Shipowners)

• Employers (Decision Makers) in the industrial and merchant marine industry fall into two subcategories:

1. A crewing agency employee.
2. Employees of the ultimate employer.

• Essentially the decision maker is an office employee who, in most cases, does the personnel search using a work computer and, to a much lesser extent, using a smartphone.

Working in a startup has its daily challenges, hard and interesting tasks, large volumes of new information, and working directly with the team. Due to frequently changing processes related to new business insights in Krew Guru I was fully responsible for B2C product directions, generating new hypotheses and moderating the backlog for the past six months.

Efficient communication is very important in a startup, so I always worked with the development team directly:

• creating and describing tasks
• having discussions with frontend/backend developers/CTOs
• doing design reviews after the development team's work is done

I like the startup approach. It allowed me to quickly test hypotheses and positively influence the product making it as user-friendly as possible.

Research is the most important part of the design process. It lets you understand the user needs and environment of habits. Research for this project began with an overview of the market, what users use and what competitors look like. CX and UX basic research formed the product directions. It is very important to specify that B2C and B2B sector studies were conducted at the same time to identify insiders and to figure out the business needs.

Next, we moved to the qualitative research of the first features and creation of the MVP - CV Builder. The research was mainly done directly through social media due to the fact that the product was new and the respondents were very eager to communicate. A script was created to study user experience with creating a CV in order to make this process faster and more convenient.

Extra A/B tests and quantitative research did later helped add more context and better understand user pain for JTBD.

Based on user and market research results we created a map of the product which we used to build the roadmap and specify priority tasks for further development.

I would also like to describe the base funnel for the B2C user, which was built after conducting research. Here is a base B2C user funnel, which can vary depending on the sources of traffic.

It is mandatory to create clickable wireframes during hypothesis testing to conduct qualitative feature research. Such wireframes help understand if the interface is designed in the right way and if the user understands it.

I designed a UI kit that fit all the business and service requirements. It expanded with instructions and components and in the end evolved into a fully functional design system.

The main value for the business is a seafarer, specifically the quality of that seafarer's CV. That's why our MVP was the CV Builder.

About CV Builder:
• Creating a CV is divided into 3 steps, each representing a CV level and functions available to the user;
• Each CV creation stage starts with a tutorial, which contains all the important information;
• Presenting information in such a way decreases the time a user spends on CV creation by 4 times.

Getting hired is a very important part of the user journey. They have to clearly understand their chances of getting a job.
• The most suitable vacancies are shown first so that you can respond quickly;
• A convenient filter system helps promptly find relevant vacancies;
• Design adapted for all devices makes job search easy on the go and at home.

Here you can find all the basic information about the platform and employers

• A simple yet effective notification system leads the user to take the correct action;
• An option to instantly apply for the most relevant vacancies;
• JTBD-based motivation system.

All application details and statuses are gathered on this page so that users can comfortably track their progress or any updates in one place

• All applications are divided into different categories based on their status;
• An option to request feedback;
• You can easily see your application status or track any changes.

There have been many accomplishments on my side in this project, but I wanted to specifically highlight developing and implementing a solution that reduced the time it takes to create a CV by 3 times (compared to major competitors);

For me, it is crucial to have close contact with the entire team (development, marketing, analytics) in order to test hypotheses as quickly and efficiently as possible.

In Krew Guru we have developed both the Skeleton view and the Sailor goal animation (saving CV, reaching Maximal CV, etc.)