by Kanika Agarwal

The Product Management team is the back bone of any company. Without an efficient and strong Product team, no company can run the long haul.

After all, if it wasn’t for the product team, there would be no one to take care of processes that directly affect the consumer like find and fix errors in the app, make search easier by including filter options etc.

This becomes even more imperative in the peer-to-peer lending space – a new and mostly unexplored terrain. The emphasis is on creating easy and smooth processes that provide unparalleled experience to users. A P2P market place helps borrowers (users seeking loan) and lenders (users seeking investments) connect for the funds and initiate the loan disbursement and monthly repayment process.

The fun begins with “This feature looks interesting” – a simple line that drives the product team to hours of ideation and conceptualization. After all, the devil lies in the detail.

The team equipped with a whiteboard, multi-colored markers and endless cups of coffee and green-tea starts brainstorming. Data crunching and prediction, comprehensive research and analysis – fill the long days and nights.

There are innumerable questions to be answered. The team puts on various hats.

They think like the sales team - How will this feature impact sales? Will it attract customers or discourage them?

They think like the Tech team – Will the transaction become faster and more efficient? Is the system capable of driving it?

They think like the management - Will the internal teams be at ease with this feature? What if top management does not approve the flow?

After the process flow is finalized, due diligence is undertaken and each stakeholder is consulted for approval.

Then comes the time to put the thoughts into some action. Our ideas need to be presented to the customer in such a way that they can immediately relate and understand. The customer needs to interact with our platform, which means the screens need to be designed in such a manner that the customers can take action. Thus, start the numerous and lengthy meetings with Visual Designing team. Designing includes two aspects – User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). Initially, the UI team enters into the picture who look after – how the information has to be displayed for the customers to interact through screen, keyboard, mouse, appearance of desktop, messages and other applications. The sketch book is filled with the initial ideas. These designs are fed into the system and the first version of User Interface is created. Brainstorming and process flows are discussed at this stage as well. Meetings and Iterations with the designers ensure that the folder has files saved from Version 1.0 to Version 1.34678. Then comes the UX team who enhances the customer satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility and interaction between the customers and the product. Various versions are created and after the final version is selected, it is locked and handed over to the team next in the value chain.

For customer to interact with the website and the application, the workflow now moves to “Front-end development” stage – here the pages designed on the sketchbook and then on the system are finally coded into HTML and CSS pages compatible with internet and other apps. And iterations, as the word implies, follow us here too.

Alongside, a document is created which explains why the requirement cropped up, what the solution is, how the process flow would be, what are the validations (or checks) required at every step. In brief, Software Requirement Specification (SRS) Document is created explaining how and what of the process and its journey to the customer.

On final approval, the Front-end development pages with SRS Document (because paperwork follows you everywhere) are handed over to the technology team to implement it. This is not a one-time process; Handover sessions are repeated over the course of time till it is finally implemented. The implementation then goes through two broad levels of testing – First level is Quality Assurance and Second level is User Acceptance Testing. In Quality Assurance testing makes sure that the product/feature implemented should be devoid of mistakes and there wouldn’t be any problem with other applications and backend database by implementing it. Then User Acceptance testing is done to make sure that the product/feature implemented can withstand the real-world scenarios and the actions could be performed as per the requirements specified. After the testing is done okay from all the internal stakeholders, the sign-offs are provided.

Finally, the D-day arrives and all the efforts of the product management team fructify. The new feature or process thus developed goes live on the website for all visitors to view and experience!