Tips on building a product faster

Here are some tips on how to design and build a product faster based on my working experience with a financial services client.

Involve the tech team early

During one of our initial brainstorming sessions, we had an idea for an enhanced receipt feature where users could get detailed information on their payments. For example, I could pay with Apple Card at a merchant and get a legal tax invoice with itemised purchase information and store details.

Working with engineers to determine which data points we could retrieve from our secure back-end servers (Image blurred for privacy reasons)

However, the development team raised concerns over the difficulty of fetching data points such as an accurate merchant address or the specific card issuer. This prevented the unnecessary exploration of ideas that weren’t technically feasible.

Prototype fast

Building working prototypes was really useful in surfacing previously unknown issues. During a sprint where we were building an expense tracker, we wanted to add transaction amounts over a period of time to calculate the average spend of a user.

Early concepts of the expense tracker with the “Average Spend” feature

It seemed really simple at first but the data calculation was complex on the back-end, increasing load times and affecting the user experience. This feature was then reprioritised and added to the backlog, freeing up resources for the team to work on other user stories.

Originally published on my website at melvinlim.design