Delivering Multiple Growth Products for a Fintech Leader

The Client: Fintech Leader

Founded to empower eCommerce businesses, our client has partnered with thousands of online merchants to understand and address their most pressing challenges. Recognizing the barriers that hinder growth and cause sleepless nights for these entrepreneurs, our client provides tailored financing solutions and actionable insights. By doing so, they not only alleviate financial constraints but also fuel faster growth and help eCommerce businesses realize their full potential.

The Mission: Interim Growth Product Manager

The mission champion was the Vice President of Product for the company. Key stakeholders included the Director of Engineering and Vice President of Design.

In Q2, the Growth & Acquisition (G&A) team was organized into three workstreams—Website, Lead, and Referral work—each with two senior engineers. The team's high skill level allowed for rapid progress, often outpacing product planning. However, rapid company scaling introduced challenges, such as involving numerous stakeholders from dependency teams and business representatives, leading to frequent scope creep. Without a dedicated Product Manager (PM) for several months, engineers had to manage direct interactions with business stakeholders, acting as interim PMs. This resulted in an excess of opinions and complicated product development.

The absence of a product manager created an opportunity for Product People to step in and provide crucial structure and support. Engineers were managing stakeholder requests alongside their development tasks. This highlighted the need for coordination, prioritization, and structured planning within the team's product development process. Our intervention helped streamline communication and bring structure to the team, which allowed them to focus on their core responsibilities, ensuring that development stayed on track and stakeholder needs were effectively managed.

The PM vacancy created a gap in leadership and coordination, forcing engineers to handle stakeholder interactions, leading to inefficiencies. Our intervention was necessary to restore structure, streamline development, and ensure that stakeholder concerns did not overwhelm the engineers and derail progress.

The key expectations from our mission included:

• Effective Mediation: Acting as a buffer between engineers and stakeholders to streamline communication.
• Focus on MVP: Ensuring the development efforts remained concentrated on minimum viable product (MVP) features.
• Scope Management: Preventing scope creep by managing stakeholders' adjustments and additional requests.
• Rapid Scaling: Supporting the company's goal of fast growth while maintaining high-quality output.

By addressing these key areas, we aimed to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the G&A team, allowing them to achieve their potential within the rapidly scaling company environment.

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Our Main Quest: Increase the Lead Yield

Key opportunities were identified within the G&A team’s scope where we could make a substantial impact by focusing on automating processing and increasing the quality of leads to decrease costs and increase results.

Funding Eligibility Flows

Problem:

Our client’s website required users to fully sign up and connect their e-commerce store and bank accounts to determine their funding eligibility. This process demanded a significant commitment from users upfront, which could result in frustration and wasted effort if they ultimately did not qualify for funding.

How we solved this:

We collaborated with the customer portal team and design to build a noncommittal user flow for each of the funding products that our client has, that ends with a funding estimation screen, helping the user know whether they are eligible for funding and, if they are, how much. This will lead to higher-quality users applying for funding, which will lead to an increase in revenue per lead serviced overall.

Referral products

Problem:

Partner Referrals have been traditionally done manually by the partnership team. This is a very manual process and restricts the number of partners and leads that the team could manage. These leads are usually quality leads as the partners are knowledgeable about our client’s requirements and usually have insights into the lead before referring them, resulting in higher quality leads coming to the partnership team. Our client needed a way to scale this without scaling the costs as well.

What has been done:

We built the requirements and vetted 3rd party providers. Once we had shortlisted the providers, we proceeded with a proof-of-concept style test to see if any or all of these providers could carry out the requirements.

After selecting a provider, we integrated Hubspot workflows into the partner portal and uploaded partner history so that we could correctly payout future referrals (previous referrals impact new referral payout structures). We selected 10 high-performing partners and onboarded them onto the tool as an MVP.

We also used the tool as an internal method of managing all existing partners. This meant a reduction in time managing partners and their requests, as all the information about their referrals lived in a central tool.

We successfully automated the payment of the first month’s referral commission with 100% accuracy.

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Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Improved Sales Targeting and User Clarity: Developed an early-filtering user flow that directs eligible applicants to the underwriting workflow, enabling the sales team to focus on high-revenue customers. Unfit users are clearly informed of additional criteria, enhancing transparency and reducing unnecessary inquiries.

💡 Third-Party Provider Selection and Partner Management Automation: Defined requirements, conducted proof-of-concept tests to choose a provider, and integrated HubSpot workflows. Onboarded high-performing partners and automated referral management and commission payments, reducing management time while ensuring 100% accuracy in payouts.