“It’s not the journey, path or challenges that defeat effort, but the direction. If you have clarity and guidance on the direction, success or failure, each step brings with it a new paradigm. A lesson for life.”
Not everything is about the New look and feel of the shiny new Mobile Application. There is significant work that needs to be done to develop cadence and quality of delivery that Wows! the customer. The building blocks have to be cast with strong foundations. It should be substance and not semantics. Though semantics matter but the degree varies.
The most notorious challenge with technology implementation is keeping people together focused on the path. While Enterprises have used vision and strategy as a guiding principle, more work has to be done at the ground level to ensure that every act or change aligns.
In an very innovative environment you cannot create a roadmap that does not have twists and bends and diversions and rollbacks. These should come a part of the ecosystem and guiding principles. We were able to create some,
- Prioritize
- Simplify
- Customer Acquisition
- Ecosystem expansion to retain customer
- Delivery and change consistently
- Fast and better than competition
We had a few factors working in our favor, the business growth and business differentials were adding the ability of the teams to design new elements. Premium and Standard offering were being considered. All of this information started to seep into the Design for the new Mobile Application.
From Business view
- -????????? Failure was anticipated, recovery procedures were pre-built into release process
- -????????? Third party integration technology changes were time blocked into 2 week activity
- -????????? Feature release and Business release were decoupled – A switch to turn on / off a feature was available
- -????????? Flexibility was offered and made available
- -????????? All changes were predictable
- -????????? Beta test data was made available before full release, allowing evaluation
- -????????? Legacy issues were being addressed and limitations were being addressed with solutions
From Technology View
- -????????? Infrastructure capacity addition for next level in pipeline
- -????????? Stack rebuild and addition of platform capability for unique features, scalability and maintainability
- -????????? API’s were being built for reuse
- -????????? Standards were being developed to be shared with 3rd party to speed up the integration process
- -????????? Code clean-up (Which was long overdue) was taking place module wise, improving performance
- -????????? Bugs were identified and fixed early, Observability additions were supporting investigation
- -????????? Direct access to customers that were having challenges allowed to fix
Overall View
- We were nimble in delivering change, with a change every week
- We are able to respond to market dynamics faster
- Customer feedback is positive and it is being displayed in volumes
- We had a long term strategy
The new mobile app building blocks,
- -????????? Strategy for backend in place and rollout in progress
- -????????? Technology elements required to build next level of innovation and growth in design and a few elements are in experimentation
- -????????? New mock ups of user interface being discussed, the look and feel being deliberated
- -????????? Experimental features being released in the existing mobile application so collect usage and interaction data
- An document that had a list of all the changes, requests, requirements and complaints on the mobile application in one place
- Weekly, every Monday
- Adhoc for bugs or promotions. Yes, we were now releasing changes for promotions and new feature additions competing with the market
- Priority – Once a week
- Release team – Their cadence, generally 30 minute sessions of the technology and operations teams discussing a feature
- Demo – Twice a week
- Strategy – Once a month, review the priority and recalibrate
- Fixed downtime for changes and maintenance
- Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Payroll days – Off limits for changes as they were heavy usage periods.
- Month end and Year Ends – Heightened awareness
- Constant evaluation of top 3 banks and their feature list
- Response time was measured and we maintained a target to be quickest in the market
- We were not the first in market for many features, but we had the best uptake for many
Tech-stack for Nerds
Programming Language
- Android: Java, with Kotlin adoption
- iOS: Swift
- Web: NodeJS
- Backend: Java
Software Stack
- Middleware: Proprietary and Spring boot
- Core: Flexcube
- Database: Oracle
- Infrastructure: Exadata
- Mobile App Insights: Firebase
- Mobile App Control Plane: Proprietary
- Metrics and Observability: Custom inhouse development, Grafana
On a side note, we had some beautiful and simple designs of the Mobile Application, Features, MVP and Documentation. If you need to have a discussion, Do reach out.
#buildvsbuy #bank #mobileapp #customerexperience #chaos #engineering #hiring #process #people #simple
