Product That Brings Opportunities

Product Innovation driving Emerging Possibilities

Dating back to my experience as a director of product for a small team, our role was in the fintech space. In 2014, the company had some core capabilities made change across scope, but we had limited direct digital consumer-facing potentials. The organziation goals were also to be part of new digital experiences being build by Uber, Apple Pay, AirBnB, and other fintech/consumer apps. The idea revolved around: what kinds of capabilities a large enterprise company creates quickly to develop direct customer experiences.

Identify Market Opportunities, Target the Audience and Move Strategically

The first step towards this was to identify the audience. We quickly analyzed our audience group at the onset and realized that an audience segment was important. The first group was today's digital giants like Apple, Google, Samsung, etc., who became our prime audience. The second group was the fintech startups, and the third was the large enterprise firms like banks and merchant processors.

The second action was ideation; we understood their pain points and came up with ideas that could be useful for the target audience. Then we scored those ideas, looking at 4 - 5 different indicators, which helped us work our ideas.

To begin with the indicators, the first one was measuring impact. If the pain point that we were solving was critical, and even if we did succeed in eliminating the issue, would that only affect one target audience or broader. Afterward, we looked at the confidence score — how confident we were in order to build the capability. That being said, we had the talent, data, and machine learning algorithms, all we had to do was figure out the benchmark.

We also observed the level of competition that existed. Whether it was a new entry or an existing capability, we had to combat customer adoption. The other ways to look at this were the level of acceptability that came with these capabilities, the effort to build that, and then the strategic impact.

We used those five indicators to score our capabilities and came out with a test and learned approach. Ideally, if it were a 2 by 2 metrics, we would be required to go with the highest impact versus the lowest effort. In most cases, that may not happen, and that is when we had to look at the two other sets; if it were a Gantt chart, we would figure out the factor that was in the middle and the one that allowed us to do "test-and-learn."

The approach was explicitly useful because the APIs can be expanded. That was the beauty of API, where we could create an interface, and even if the background changed a lot, the interface would not change. These capabilities and approaches were our holy grail in identifying some of the early successes and then building up based on that.