Involvement

Role(s)

Product Designer

Duration

9 months

Industry

FinTech

Project Snapshot

Context

To expand its offering, Moni, a leading European fintech corporate group aimed to broaden its market reach by entering North America with a mobile version of one of its core products. They aligned their existing and planned capabilities with opportunities in the target market, conducting a few internal PoCs to test the concept. After failing to gain enough traction to push it through the C-suite, they sought external assistance.

Challenge(s)

The group was undergoing major restructuring efforts, simultaneously striving to align all its subsidiaries with the parent company’s recent rebranding. To top it off, the parent company had never developed a mobile solution before.

Goal(s)

Design a winning PoC in 8-10 weeks to secure executive buy-in for a 6-month MVP build.

Design Process

I like to present my case studies using the three milestones that we can find if we squint our eyes and take a look at the Double Diamond (UK Design Council, 2003). I borrowed the methodology’s terminology to facilitate understanding, calling them Discover, Define and Deliver.

Discover

Working at an agency meant adapting our workflow to meet both client needs and tight deadlines. We started by diagnosing the situation and finding the projects main challenges:

  1. Venturing into the unknown: this project required navigating through a lot of uncharted territory. Within the company’s context, we were tasked with creating a new product for a new market, on an unexplored device type, while implementing a rebranding that had yet to be fully adopted and no design system to back us up. This demanded a great deal of flexibility, which we exercised with caution, mindful of its blind spots.
  2. Limited, mandatory research: although we had the rare luxury of being required to test the PoC with potential end-users, we had to do so in the leanest and most resource-effective way possible. Our research timeframe: 2 weeks.
  3. Time constraints: we had less than 3 months to present the PoC and, if things went right, no more than 6 months to turn it into an MVP.