Lantum payment cycles transformation
Product Design LeadERSHIP Oct 2016 - Feb 2017
research, discovery, design, and delivery
Lantum is a medical staffing platform designed for the a more modern approach - a freelancing, competitive medical staffing market. Lantum was already doing pretty well staffing GPs to the NHS in the UK, but we weren’t making money. We needed to shift the payment model and we needed to sell those changes to both doctors and GP surgeries alike.
Doctors were churning off the platform because they weren’t getting paid quickly enough. Practices were paying directly and Network Locum had no control or eyes on the payment process and experience. Practices of every shape and size had different payment needs. How could we get them to pay us faster, more often, and more reliably? How could we guarantee a better experience to our GP user-base?
We needed to market a new way to “pay through us” that was attractive to practices, and we needed it to sound fast and reliable for our GPs as well. Then we needed to move as many practices as possible onto that cycle, as quickly as possible, without hemorrhaging customers.
After gathering requirements from all parts of the business, I documented documented our team’s hypotheses and mapped out proposed payment cycles for both internal and user-facing audiences. Proper user and product research ahead of the project would have sped up our squad even more, but there is nothing more important than getting the very most basic version of your idea in front of users as quickly as possible. Sometimes it’s more important to test an idea a few times than it is to do it right the first time.
Together with the team, I mapped out the basics of the payment model and user flows for how they would pay, we began to think about the product marketing of this change, and how we would do migration.
How would it feel to be migrated to these new payment cycles and how could we keep our main customer base happy during the transition?
User flows for migration
We had to come up with a name to brand the changes to the way payments worked. This name had to sound good to both doctors and practices. So I planned and ran a naming focus group with doctors and practice managers to name the new payment cycles.
A photo from the naming focus group
I planned, wrote, designed and built all the transactional and product marketing communications to work together to help users understand and buy into how to use the product seamlessly.
In the end, one of the main things I learned while at Lantum was that squads (pioneered by Spotify, etc.) really work. Working together in small x-functional teams throughout the product lifecycle allows for fast definition, development and seamless iteration. If the business is willing to trust a cross-functional team to solve a problem and lets the squad decide how to solve, it is a quick way to get amazing results.