TL;DR: FuelBuddy's B2B platform depended on petrol-pump owners as fuel vendors, and activating each one took over a day: a full working day plus a next-day review. After 300+ conversations with pump owners, I turned onboarding into standard validation and compliance rules inside a Vendor Management System. Onboarding dropped to under half a day, across 150+ vendors. The same platform later carried UPI Intent and QR checkout, piloted internally with FuelBuddy's own teams.

Built at FuelBuddy · Product Manager · Shipped

The problem

Every new fuel vendor had to be checked before they could take orders: who they are, what documents they hold, whether they meet compliance requirements. That check ran case by case. A vendor took a full working day to process, and then waited for a review the next day before going live.

For a handful of vendors that is tolerable. At the scale the platform was growing to, it made vendor supply the bottleneck, and it meant the quality of each check depended on who did it.

Evidence

The product came out of 300+ conversations with petrol-pump owners. Those conversations showed where onboarding actually stalled and which checks mattered for compliance, and which were habit. That is what decided the rule set: the checks that had to be done every time became standard rules; the rest went.

How it works

The VMS replaces the case-by-case review with the same validation and compliance rules for every vendor, so a complete application can be cleared in one pass instead of waiting for a second-day review.

flowchart LR
	A["Pump owner<br>applies as vendor"] --> B["Details and<br>documents captured"]
	B --> C["Standard<br>validation rules"]
	C --> D["Compliance<br>rules"]
	D -->|"Pass"| E["Vendor live<br>on B2B platform"]
	D -->|"Gap found"| F["Vendor fixes<br>and resubmits"]
	F --> C
	E --> G["Orders and<br>deliveries"]
	G --> H["UPI Intent and<br>QR checkout"]

Rules over judgement. The validation and compliance steps are written as standard rules, so two reviewers reach the same answer and nothing waits for a senior sign-off the next day.

One platform, more than onboarding. Once vendors were on the platform, it became the place where other product work could land. That mattered when the platform added payments (below).

UPI checkout inside the B2B platform

Specified and shipped UPI Intent and QR checkout for the B2B platform, piloted internally with FuelBuddy's own teams in Gurugram, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and smaller clusters in Odisha: 2,000+ transactions in month one, tracked in Amplitude and Tableau.

Separately, I partnered with the GM and CEO on Project Arjun, an EV and oil & gas retail infrastructure plan built on 100+ fleet and EV operator interviews; plan approved by leadership.

Decisions and trade-offs

• Standardise the checks before automating anything. The gain came from agreeing one rule set, not from new tooling. It meant some vendors who would once have been waved through on judgement now had to fix gaps first.
• Start from pump owners, not from the internal process. 300+ conversations took time up front, but they stopped the team from encoding steps vendors didn't need.
• Pilot UPI internally before wider rollout. Running checkout first with FuelBuddy's own teams on the platform that already had users meant the payment flows got real transactions, and real bugs, before customers relied on them.

What I cut