About Me

Pika

Service Pitch & Rebates

Founding designer at Pika

Jul 24 - Present

Overview

Problem

HVAC providers face a dual challenge:

  1. selling complex, high-efficiency units and
  1. navigating the cumbersome process of filing the rebates that incentivize these sales.

Solution

A unified solution across two products:

  1. ServicePitch, an iPad app for the sales team to create compelling presentations for high-efficiency units
  1. Pika Rebates, a web dashboard to streamline the back-office process of filing rebates.

My Role

  • Founding designer. Drove over $1.6M in combined revenue by owning the end-to-end design & research for core products.
  • Led the conversion of web tool to a native iPad app, converting monthly active users into daily users .
  • Led research that resulted in a strategic pivot to a 0-1 dashboard that transformed a manual back-office workflow and doubled revenue.
  • Defined the design process, established a critique culture, and introduced an AI prototyping workflow and a basic design system to operate at the speed of 5 developers.

My Team

  • VP of product
  • 3 full-time developers (including the founder)
  • 2 contract iOS developer leads
  • GTM team of 5

Key Designs

1

Front office: Preparing for a sale

Created some of our most loved features

2

Front office: Data rich presentation

Refined presentation UI to highlight differences

3

Back office: rebate filing dashboard

Built & validated a dashboard to break data silos

4

Dashboard onboarding

Designed a self-serve onboarding flow to help us scale faster

ServicePitch (Q3 24 - Q1 25)

User overview

HVAC salesperson called a comfort consultant, typically a white male between 30 to 50. Motivated by company swag, in person conversations and their experience with technology widely varied, but all had an iPad and iPhone for work. They were dealing with clunky presentations, doing real-time math on eligible rebates, and poor connecity, amidst many others.

Pika's goals

To address these comfort consultants' problems, we equipped them with a presentation building tool that helped them differentiate the kitchen-table selling experience. Product goals were to

Boost HVAC sales
to capture marketshare

Integrate seamlessly
to drive adoption

Build habits
for stickiness

ServicePitch features

When I joined Pika, it was a web app for versatility, but its lack of offline mode was a key barrier to adoption. I led the product's transformation to a native iPad app, designing and launching offline functionality while making quality of life updates. This led to securing one of our biggest clients, SILA.


From web to iPad


Offline mode


More user-friendly presentations

Pivoting focus to rebates (Q2 25 - Q3 25)

While my design work on ServicePitch was driving strong engagement, the business identified a new opportunity. A test-product, Pika Rebates, was generating equivalent revenue with less effort because it was more lightweight. This led to a pivot to focus entirely on scaling the Pika Rebates business.

We developed a human-in-the-loop strategy. Our short-term objectives were:

Decrease time to file

By reducing logins across applications, automate manual steps & streamliming communication

Enable new contractor to start filing within 2-3 days

Allowing us to rapidly scale our filing capacity

Rebates 0-1

As the sole designer, I redefined our design process by introducing an prototyping workflow for rapid validation. I used Lovable to validate core concepts and and conducted continuous research sessions to validate our assumptions.

Prototype (built with Lovable)


The core data challenge

Disparate models across integrations: I first determined which data points were critical for filers. I then worked with engineering to define a system that bridged conflicting language (like 'customer' vs. 'location' details) across various contractor systems like ServiceTitan and HouseCall Pro, to build a scalable model for us. Refining from a single job to a "job group": While earlier iterations focused on a single job, we quickly realized that the required data belonged across a series of jobs. So I updated the data architecture to reflect job groups, being careful not to introduce new language into the product.

Iterating on attachments

Trying a "document checklist" Iterating on the attachments view

Driving alignment on reporting

Driving alignment on reporting

Validated the new direction
with customers

Led testing with internal
filers to inform the roadmap



Results

My end-to-end design and research drove over $1.6M in combined revenue for Pika. The strategic pivot to rebates successfully doubled revenue and both products still yield highly positive customer feedback.

$380K + $635K =

ServicePitch + Rebates

...$1M

Total Revenue

"I went through and audited everything in there. BLOWN AWAY!!! Thank you!!!

HVAC Install Manager

"I'm happy to help y'all in any way. You've been a tremendous help"

Head of Rebates

It's fun working with you guys…I'm excited about how this can really improve our business"

HVAC Business Owner

Learnings

Sharing design vocabulary

  • I learned my role as the sole designer went beyond design to educating the team on best practices. My PM and I introduced a process document, with phrases like"Problem Jam," for the team to learn to provide timely feedback on concepts before we moved to high-fidelity design critique.

Protecting my time

  • I learned to protect my bandwidth by saying "no" to low-impact requests. My focus on the most critical projects would drive greater value for the business. For example, for our latest website redesign, I advocated to hire a contract designer.

Building a relationship with users

  • I learned that at the heart of driving revenue and growth was building trust with users, not just the perfect product. I built rapport through small gestures, like sending a user wine after a research session, which made them feel valued and led to more thoughtful, candid conversations.

Illustration Credit: Humation

Specialized in 0-1 & growth

Anushri Kumar

anushri.kumar@gmail.com