Relaunching dopay
Product Manager 2017-2018
Launched dopay for business payments platform
launched dopay for business app android and ios
service design and operational design
managed delivery of salesforce instance
Dopay is a payroll payments service which delivers secure payments for corporate customers and prepaid cards for their employees. Employers can pay securely to the cards, and employees can keep their money safely, instead of in an envelope under their bed. Dopay’s mission is one of financial inclusion, security, and transformation of cash-only markets.
During my time at dopay, I spent a lot of time doing team leadership, stakeholder management and flexing my product strategy muscles. When I made the crossover to pure product management, I wasn't sure if I'd miss doing design outputs and I haven't missed it—because I constantly use design methods in a startup environment—delivering userflows, doing user research, and working within the team in a very hands-on way.
Revamping the service
In 2018, it became clear that we were not going to be able to hit series A investment without totally revamping the way we did payments and the way we onboarded customers. The regulatory landscape in Egypt is one of the more antiquated and complex in the EMEA regions, and their regulations are not well suited to a first-to-market product like dopay. It was important that we had a risk-based approach to compliance processes, and yet fulfilled the requirements our team set out to follow together. Ambiguity needed to become reality - all the way down to a brand new operational process design and an entirely new service design blueprint.
requirements: Processes, legal & regulatory, technical, business and product requirements
Service Blueprint
A single-touch-point meeting flow was key to onboard customers faster; what sometimes took 2-3 months needed to take 2-3 days.
I gathered three to four of us for hours days and eventually a few weeks, locking ourselves in—war-room style—for concepting sessions. A head of card operations, a sharp quality assurance business analyst, a tech lead and myself — our team was the perfect minimum combination of skills and knowledge. The output: 15-20 nearly finished service and operational decision flows, matched with a long list of our assumptions, aimed at better user experience and operational compliance.
Next, we had to go to Cairo, where the real business happens.
Once in Cairo, I gathered our brightest people in every part of the business and we role-played the entire end-to-end service experience. Each person from every department understood every step of the process, and could ask questions and feedback as we went.
We made, luckily, only a few big adjustments, and many small ones - our assumptions were not too far off! In the meantime, by emphasizing a transparent, inclusive process, there was team excitement around the launch of our new business model. I also spent a significant amount of time evangelizing the value of the new business model and platform throughout each of the teams.
Going forward, the Cairo team were highly involved, felt ownership, began to write procedures for us, and asked many questions. By starting the dialogue with them in person, we were able to foster a remarkable cross-continent collaboration between dopayers.
My very first object-oriented DB schema…
Around the same time, our first looks at Salesforce started to come through. We were excited that we could have full auditable tracking of every action in the system, there was so much built in!
But salesforce out-of-the-box was clunky and it was soon very clear that to create custom saleforce components, we would need to hire someone more full-time.
I started speaking to the leadership team about hiring a full-time contractor for that work, it would be better to have them embedded in the team and working alongside our devs, delivering value as part of larger streams of work inside our new internal system. I interviewed and vetted candidates for this position.
Real delivery means the product and service actually function end-to-end And improvE on our current customer experience.
It ain’t easy to design and deliver a full service experience. And if you’re delivering a minimum viable experience, what definition do you forego in favor of flexibility? We didn’t want to forget communication details like emails and help content — the real delight that was currently missing in our onboarding experience. The Cairo team tended to be less creative and consistent on this side so I wanted to give them a bit more structure. At the same time, we kept the team, processes and procedures as flexible as possible at the beginning so we could see problems arise, solve them and iterate at all levels: operations, design, product and sales/marketing.
I led a workshop with the head of product and the head of sales development to design a new sales process for large corporate customers. I put together IVR flows for setting a PIN as a cardholder. I had a team in Cairo test a concept for cardholder handouts that could be passed out prior to receiving cards, helping educate and connect with retail cardholders earlier in their service experience.
Sales process for large corporates
IVR flow for setting your ePIN as a cardholder
in a couple months, My team delivered comms plans, operational process designs, procedures, training in Cairo, AND a new instance of SalesForce.
Most importantly, we have roadmap of improvements we will be making as we watch, learn and sell to our first few customers.
