Total 618 words used.
Ooredoo FinTech International (OFTI) is building a digital wallet application, walletii (inspired by the Arabic for “my wallet”). OFTI would highlight two ways of working that ensure an innovative product is engineered in an effective manner.
Product thinking the mindset and approach of building and improving products that are valuable, useful, and enjoyable for customers. It involves considering the needs, wants, and pain points of customers, as well as the competitive landscape, market trends, and business goals.
To achieve this, OFTI uses the following rhythm:
- Monthly - Product strategy pulse check – to synchronise and check on current topics
- Quarterly – Product ideation workshop - shape and collect ideas from product owners
- Semiannually – Product strategy workshop
The workshop:
Figure 1
The workshops present an early decision point as to where to focus energies and importantly which strategies to pursue and which ones to hold off on. Brian Halligan said, “Strategy is about knowing when to say No”. When everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority. So, there are choices to be made.
The product team prepared a set of initiatives, and for each there is a set of slides that present
- Background: What is the overview? What are the opportunities? What are the obstacles?
- Target users: What are the pain points and needs?
- User journey: What would the user experience?
- Benefits: What kind of revenue and benefits would there be?
- Requirements: What skills and resources are required?
- Scalability: How could it scale
There is a round of pitches where different teams present their ideas and bid for investment from the participants of the workshop.
Following Q&A after every pitch, menti.com (an online voting system is used to enable both physically present and remote participants to invest virtual money in the idea. Each participant has an imaginary $100,000 to invest and at the end the results are totted up and the prioritisation for new features or strategies becomes clear.
Using such a voting mechanism drives home that there is a cost to each of the strategies and that it is important for the business to focus and presents an element of fun when the winners are revealed.
Figure 2
Once priorities are set, the implementation starts. To effectively work on ideas, OFTI has organised the Product/Tech department into cross-functional domain squads:
Each squad is cross-functional, meaning there are members from the following functions:
- Tech Partnerships and Operations
- Engineering (frontend, backend and QA)
Note, not every function is represented by a full team member in every squad. The average squad size is about 8-9 people. Currently there are 3 application development squads that are organised around domains:
Organising around domains has the benefit that the members of the squad specialise in work that is related to the domains, and while work comes and goes in the domains, it is never finished. This means that there is real flexibility in delivery. If the amount of work scales up, it is possible to split squads. For example, a separate Payments and Remittances squad. But when the work becomes less and certain areas enter “maintenance mode”, it is possible to merge squads.
The upshot is that the knowledge and skills around a specific domain are not suddenly lost if the work was organised around projects. At the same time, there are fewer hand-offs required if the squads were separated by architecture, frontend team, backend team, etc.
This way of working enabled OFTI to maintain a flexible approach to managing complex workstreams by promoting a level of autonomy in teams whilst retaining control over the objectives and desired outcomes.
Nomination Title: Product Thinking and Domain Squads
