What Cultural Products Taught Me About Enterprise UX
My journey from building cultural storytelling apps to enterprise HR tech revealed surprising parallels. Both require understanding human motivation at a deep level—just expressed differently.
Before joining Keka, I built Kashmakash—a platform for cultural storytelling and South Asian narratives. People thought I was crazy to pivot to enterprise HR software. "Cultural products and B2B SaaS? What's the connection?"
Turns out, everything.
Cultural products succeed when they understand why people care. Enterprise products succeed when they understand why people do their jobs. Both require deep empathy, just applied to different contexts.
What cultural product thinking brought to enterprise B2B:
1. Emotional job-to-be-done: In cultural products, you're not just building features—you're building identity. At Kashmakash, users weren't "consuming content," they were "reclaiming their narrative." That mindset shift helped me reframe Keka's offboarding product: HR managers weren't "processing exits," they were "protecting company reputation and employee dignity." Framing matters.
2. Progressive disclosure for complex emotions: Storytelling apps must handle sensitive topics gracefully—you can't dump trauma on users. Similarly, offboarding deals with emotionally charged workflows (terminations, layoffs). We applied progressive disclosure: show just enough to make a decision, hide complexity until needed. CSAT jumped 80%.
3. Community as competitive moat: Cultural products thrive on network effects—users become advocates. In enterprise, this translates to product-led growth within organizations. We built Keka's BGV module with built-in sharing and collaboration, treating internal stakeholders as a community. Adoption grew 3x faster than predicted.
4. Respecting context and nuance: Cultural products die when they assume one-size-fits-all. South Asian stories aren't monolithic—Bengali experiences differ from Tamil ones. Same in enterprise: Indian compliance differs from US compliance. We built Keka's offboarding to be modular and context-aware, not prescriptive.
The pattern: both domains require understanding human systems at a deep level. Cultural products are explicit about this; enterprise products often hide behind "efficiency" language. But the best enterprise products acknowledge the human element.
If you're a PM considering a "weird" transition—from gaming to healthcare, from consumer social to fintech—lean into it. The cross-domain insights are your advantage.