Can we Sell What we Use?

Early in my journey at my current company, I heard complaints about the lack of robust testing and validation options.

Considering my company sits at the junction between fintech applications and financial institutions, this type of testing is critical.

If we get something wrong in our development, then both sides of the client experience are negatively impacted.

My background is in platforms, systems, and internal tooling. So initially, my goal was to alleviate the pain for folks at my company trying to validate our own development.

However, as I was researching employee workflows and defining a replacement validation tool, I was also asked by leadership if we could sell the product. The assumption was that there was a demand from one set of clients to self serve their validation.

I wasn’t sure, but I wanted to find out.

To accomplish this, I needed a set of users who had an interest in the proposed solution.

I approached the customer success managers to identify some potential participants. After discussing each client’s concerns, I finalized a list of customers from which to gather feedback.

I partnered with design and UX to create a research study. The goal of my research effort was to identify common pitfalls and user pain points when integrating with our product. I wanted to identify how participants validated payloads and get their reaction to a newly proposed solution.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again. Prototypes are always cheaper than going back on a development deliverable. Prototypes are lower risk and can easily be modified to fit a participant’s needs.

Typically it is recommended during a product research exercise to get insights from at least 5 participants, but there were some constraints that didn’t allow for the last participant to join. So I cautiously took these results with a grain of salt.

Some more insights are below:

75% of participants mentioned having to rely on the company for validating their own development

100% of participants reacted positively to the prototype and were excited to have a real version of it.

Product Manager Pontifications

The reception from the participants was difficult to analyze. This was because each client’s persona was slightly different. We service very large core banks, small institutions, and businesses in-between.

Some of these clients are very technically proficient while others have unsophisticated development teams. Working with a company such as ours was unknown territory for some participants while one of the participants hadn’t gone through the full integration process.

However, there were consistent patterns across the pooled feedback. One being that the target audience was developers, QA engineers, product managers, and product support staff. The expected user base remained very consistent across all interviews.

The sentiment seemed promising, so we took the next step to modify the designed prototype and conduct some usability tests.

So the answer to, “Can we sell what we use?” Is in general, yes. The research seems to show that we can!