Perspective
Jio Tesseract is the AR/VR hardware division of Reliance Industries, India's largest company. I led product marketing for their first mass-market consumer VR headset — a device aimed not at early adopters but at households where English fluency was partial, devices were shared across three generations, and every rupee spent was weighed against tangible benefit.
The standard playbook for consumer hardware assumes a buyer who's already excited about the category. Our buyers weren't.
"If my phone already shows videos, why spend more?"— Mother at a product demo, tier-2 city
What the field taught us
Onboarding
40% of users never completed setup. Instructions assumed familiarity with app downloads and Wi-Fi pairing. Confused users disengaged silently.
Language
English and textbook Hindi felt disconnected. One father said the phrasing sounded like a government notice, not a home device.
Form factor
Wearing a headset created anxiety. Users felt self-conscious with hand gestures. Buttons, remotes, and voice prompts were far easier to adopt.
Social use
Grandparents, children, and neighbors gathered to watch together. The device was communal in ways we hadn't designed for.
How we responded
Onboarding redesign
Replaced multi-step pairing with a "TV installation" metaphor. Familiar visuals, spoken instructions, minimal text.
Language rewrite
Interface copy rewritten in everyday regional phrasing. Instructions became approachable, not intimidating.
Use-case storytelling
Marketing shifted to relatable scenarios: a child learning anatomy, a family watching cricket, grandparents on a virtual darshan.
First-use delight
One satisfying experience on first use, not a feature tour. Video explainers replaced dense manuals. Confidence before exploration.
Launch timing
We launched the first AR device during the Indian Premier League — over a billion viewers. The immersive personal theatre feature resonated with audiences and drove a significant uplift in sales during the season.
What I took from it
The assumptions that failed fastest were the ones we'd imported from markets where the category already had cultural permission. Ergonomics mattered more than expected — headsets were set aside after minutes of discomfort. Interactive features drew less interest than lean-back experiences like YouTube and cricket. And the idea of a single-user journey almost never applied; families evaluated together whether the device was worth keeping.
Building for a market where the category itself needs to earn trust is a different discipline than marketing to people who already want what you're selling. Most of the interesting PMM problems live in that gap.