Questioning the Status-Quo

A real success story of improving the status-quo that has all kinds of ingredients: questioning answers that are the enemy of progress; bringing down myths and imaginary walls; doing inverse engineering; empathizing with the customer’s needs; reaching KPIs targets. Focus on the value and you will find the way.

I was the leader of the App payments team. We had just delivered the last release of the trunk functionality which involved basic services payments. We finally were in the stage of taking the next challenge. We always knew that after the service payment feature, the very next highest value and most requested by the customers was the loan payment feature. However, we had been told several times before by different stakeholders, both in the technical and business sides, that it couldn’t be done. Every time I asked “why not” I obtained all answers that are the enemy of progress: “that is the way it works since I’m here”, “that’s how it’s always been”, “others have tried and failed”, “there just are legacy systems that will take a long time and money to replace”, “it’s a historic known issue never resolved”, and the list continues…?

I’m a person whose personal brand consists in making an impact on people’s mindset to become better professionals and not to settle, always challenging the status-quo for improvement. You can say I’m not the kind of person that likes to take a “no” for an answer, that will only fuel me to go after the “yes”. Therefore it’s safe to say I do my due diligence in order to get to the bottom of things and I do not stay put with what other people say or think. None of those phrases really had fundamentals or actual data to keep me from digging and see if it really wasn’t achievable or if it wasn't even worth the shot. If after I had done my research, it turned out the effort was much greater than the value, of course it wouldn’t have gone through with it, but that is why discovery exists, to assess an opportunity before even writing a code line.?

So as my team was in the final sprints of the previous digital product, I embarked upon this journey of investigation. I discovered most of the people’s appreciations of the truth were simply myths or what other people -no longer in the company- had said at some point and that they didn’t bother to question or even doubt. It turned out this functionality did exist, which for us in technology meant the business logic was already developed -a huge advantage-, but it only was a functionality for internal users and not final clients. In other words, customer support could pay the loan for the client on their behalf when they called, but clients couldn’t self-serve online. When I asked if we could look into this solution whether we would be able to reutilize most of the work already built, it turns out the history everyone talked about involved a third party that had an ownership contract so we weren’t really owners of the business logic and it was a black box. It wouldn't have been easy nor quick or cheap to take a look at that black box, imagine if we would have wanted to modify it.?

My motto is: focus on the value and you will find the way. We weren’t willing to continue feeding a “bad past deal” with a vendor, and we didn’t want to mess with a working business logic, we just needed to make available a long overdue functionality for the customers to self-serve. So what did I do? I asked my team to help me out with some spikes by doing inverse engineering. Since we couldn’t access directly to the backend of the current functionality -built on a different platform as well-, we asked for a dummy user in order to run some loan payment tests and see how the system responded each time.? Long story short, taking security precautions encapsulating the services and using good development practices, we were able to replicate the functionality for customers. It turned out that not only was it achievable but it was a huge quick win. In less than three months we delivered this client-facing feature in the mobile application, reaching a top 95,3% conversion rate, a 95% customer satisfaction with the product experience and a 48,6% efficiency in the call center on the loan payments over a period of 6 months. Resounding success. I was even awarded in the company’s recognition ceremony.?

When recruiters ask me for a story of a time I found an issue and made it better, I like to tell this story because it’s the perfect fairytale example. I admit there were several upsides that helped with our success delivering faster than we imagined. However, it’s a successful story that shows the personification of my personal brand and the importance of bringing down imaginary walls that people build over time, keeping in mind the true value and purpose that moves us every day: empathize with the customer’s needs. Besides, clients don’t understand technical difficulties, dependencies, legacy systems or even bad decisions, for them they are all excuses that get in the way of doing what we should really be doing which is make their life easier.?

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