Product People helped with improving the payment experience and ways of working for the Finance Squad

The Client: Virtuo

Virtuo is a scale-up headquartered in Paris, France, providing an innovative car rental service that allows you to book a car and unlock it with your phone. You can choose from a fleet of premium, fully equipped cars in different categories, from hatchbacks to SUVs. You can also get your car delivered to your home or work, or pick it up from one of the 100 stations in Europe and the UK. Virtuo also offers a solution for business trips, with a dedicated and personalized tool to manage and access your company bookings.

The Mission: Interim Product Managers

We joined the Finance Squad after the departure of the previous PM.

Our main goals initially as interim product managers were:

  • To establish proper ways of working for the team. This included putting the rituals/ceremonies in place and making sure that the product initiatives are clearly scoped out and the team is aligned with those.
  • To establish OKRs and KPIs for the Finance Squad

Our Main Quest: Setting up Ways of Working and KPIs for Finance Squad

Setting up Ways of Working: As the team was operating without a Product Manager for quite some time now, our first objective was to set up proper ways of working to deliver product initiatives for the squad.

We kicked off this initiative by observing the current processes and setting up 1:1s with the team to understand their ways of working and the challenges they were facing. We jumped in to quickly do an audit of the team rituals and helped with:

  • Identifying current problems by observing the team
  • Defining roles and responsibilities of the team members
  • Providing recommendations on setting up clearly structured processes
  • Implemented improved sprint rituals (Refinements, Discovery Sessions, OKR Review Sessions with the team, Weekly/Biweekly with Tech Lead, QA Lead, UX Lead, and Analytics Leads)
  • Improving communication among Product, Tech, QA, and UX teams

Setting up Quarterly OKRs and KPIs

The team was working with somewhat vague OKRs and did not have any KPIs to track the work they were doing and also didn’t track the impact their work was having.

After understanding the company and product objectives we collaborated with Tech and defined OKRs for the Finance Squad. We also gathered inputs from internal stakeholders, analyzed data from various dashboards, and collected feedback from Customer Support and Customer Retention that helped with defining the product initiatives for the squad which were aligned with the set OKRs.

The team also did not have KPIs to enable them to track the impact of the features the developers were implementing. We helped with setting up KPIs for the team which included KPIs for payment experience, invoicing and billing, etc.

We also made sure the team was aligned with the OKRs and KPIs and we also set up regular check-ins with the team to track the work the team was doing and made sure the impact was also being tracked.

KPI Tree

Improving Payment Experience

As we were analyzing data, we found multiple opportunities to improve the payment experience and help with further improving the booking conversion.

Some of the initiatives that we worked on included:

  • We improved the payment messaging for customers by implementing specific error messaging for failures in payment. This helped the customers to understand the reason for payment failure. This further helped with improving booking conversion as customers took necessary actions for failed payments.
  • Virtuo holds a deposit for their rental bookings as caution money for any post-rental charges/damages. Analysing the data for deposit acceptance we found there was an opportunity there. We worked on thus improving the deposit authorization experience which helped reduce the number of canceled bookings per week.

Discovered Ways to Reduce Unpaid Invoices

Finance Squad was given the objective to reduce unpaid invoices. To kickstart this initiative, we first looked at data from various dashboards to analyze what kind of invoices are unpaid and what the amount ranges for different kinds of unpaid invoices.

We also organized discovery sessions with multiple internal teams/stakeholders to understand the invoice creation and deposit capture process. After analyzing data and gathering the inputs from different stakeholders we were able to identify various opportunities that would help reduce the unpaid invoices. These included increasing the deposit authorization timeline to enable Virtuo to keep deposit money for a longer duration and hence capture money for unpaid invoices from this deposit. Along with the tech team, we also identified solutions to ensure deposit money is being optimally captured, thus ensuring maximum unpaid invoices get closed.

Discovery Mini-Missions: Our Side Quests

Improved Damage Reporting Experience

Damage Reporting experience was also part of the scope for the Finance squad. We identified that there was a need to improve this experience as we saw damage reporting and claims-related issues as one of the top topics for customer conversations with support. After analyzing the customer feedback and inputs from the customer support team we were able to identify some areas of improvement in the user experience in-app that helped with reducing such customer complaints.

Mapping of Booking, Damage Reporting, and Payment Flow

We also helped with mapping the pre-rental experience (including booking flow, payment flow, and damage reporting flow) and post-rental experience (including invoicing experience) to help identify areas of improvement for in-app user experience.

App User Flow

Market Analysis of Third-Party Billing Tools

As Virtuo operates in different countries like France, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and Spain, each country has different regulations when it comes to e-invoicing, VAT, etc. Currently, Virtuo is using different solutions in different countries to manage e-invoicing. As e-invoicing would soon become mandatory for other European companies, we started looking into a single holistic application that could be integrated with Virtuo invoicing systems.We did a market analysis of such billing/e-invoicing solution providers and came up with recommendations for such a solution for the Finance team.

Billing Tool Analysis

Mission Achievements: Delivered Outcomes

💡 Prepared and Delivered Quarterly OKRs for Finance Squad.
💡 Defined KPIs for the team and followed through to create dashboards for the same.
💡 Improved booking conversion by improving the payment experience.
💡 Identified opportunities to help reduce unpaid invoices for Virtuo.

The mission was initially supposed to be 3 months long and got extended to 7 months.

In the Client's Own Words

Space Crew of this Mission

VP/Director/Head of Product
Associate Management Consultant
Senior Product Management Consultant

For Clients: When to Hire Us

You can hire us as an Interim/Freelance Product Manager or Product Owner

It takes, on average, three to nine months to find the right Product Manager to hire as a full-time employee. In the meantime, someone needs to fill in the void: drive cross-functional initiatives, decide what is worth building, and help the development team deliver the best outcomes.
If you're looking for a great Product Manager / Product Owner to join your team ASAP, Product People is a good plug-and-play solution to bridge the gap.