WhatsApp Business Directory

From businesses’ perspective

WhatsApp Business directory is an efficient, secure, and user-friendly tool for discovering shops, restaurants, and other businesses. By signing up on the directory, businesses can increase their customer base by reaching out to new prospects at no cost. Business profile within the directory can be used to promote the business by sharing important information such as business name, address, category, business hours, and description.

From end users’ perspective

WhatsApp users can easily look for businesses on WhatsApp and connect with them without having to leave the app. Since all businesses on WhatsApp Directory are by default WhatsApp users as well, customers can make use of WhatsApp chat to connect with the businesses. Not only that, users can also easily access businesses’ catalog at a glance and use various types of filters to find what they are looking for, for example filtering by distance, opening hours, category etc.

My mission

I joined as a product engineer, and got involved in development of the MVP version of Business Directory. My mission was focused on owning features end-to-end, starting from ideation process all the way to feature launch and post-launch analysis. I worked closely with lots of functional and cross-functional teams to deliver the features to the world.

As a hobby project, I joined the Kotlin adoption workforce and actively advocated for adoption of Kotlin within WhatsApp. I shipped one of the first features entirely written in Kotlin, and motivated the rest of the developers to start shipping features in Kotlin. As part of my contributions, I held technical talks, improved infrastructure tools and provided my assistance to my fellow engineers to switch to Kotlin in a smooth way.