How we used the holy trinity of product management (frameworks) to build a feature that will help millions of people improve their credit score

pranav khanna
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

IMHO, there are three major movements that have defined product management over the last decade — design thinking, lean start-up and agile software development. I call this the holy trinity of product development.

  • Design thinking: Famously born out of IDEO and Stanford D School — has massively revolutionized and transformed how we think about product at my company
  • Lean Start-up: Formalized by Eric Reis — aims to shorten product development cycles by adopting of hypothesis driven experimentation, iterative product releases and validated learnings (per Wikipedia)
  • Agile: Do I even need to explain this? At my organization — we practice SAFe (think agile for enterprise!).

I have always wondered how these frameworks fit together — others have written about this here and here. This was till I realized that we had implicitly developed an approach that combined all three of these methodologies. Thought I would use this space to illustrate this with a diagram and example.

(don’t email me about this, I know my handwriting / drawing is terrible)

In a nutshell, Design Thinking helps us come up with a variety of user backed hypotheses that solve for a real human need; The Lean Start-up methodology then helps us take those hypotheses, turn them into products and helps to validate those hypotheses as quickly as possible. If a hypothesis is invalidated — we pivot to new ideas using the deep customer understanding developed during the design thinking phases. Agile is the HOW — it greases the wheels and puts working software in the hands of real users as efficiently as possible.

Let’s take a real example of a product we launched recently as part of CreditWise(which is Capital One’s credit monitoring product) — our feature on prioritized score improvement suggestions. This has just come out of pilot — and is available on our iOS / Android mobile apps today, coming to our website and the Capital One mobile app soon (I know — this is a shameless plug, but in my defense — this is also the freshest example on my mind)

Design thinking phase

  • The original hypothesis for this was born out of our empathy research — that suggested that users who were motivated to improve their credit, were still getting confused by the wide range of (often conflicting) advice they were getting from informal sources — there are a large number of potential actions with varying degrees of impacts on credit.
  • We hypothesized that something that takes the guesswork out of credit improvement by giving users a very specific set of recommendations which are prioritized by impact on their score could help to alleviate this problem
  • We tested various low fidelity prototypes with users.

The winning prototype became our first idea that we fed into the lean / agile loop to build real working software to test with real users in the wild

Lean / Agile Loop

  • To measure / validate this hypothesis — we did the simplest / fastest version we could build as our MVP
  • To measure progress — we asked users for feedback (was this helpful — yes / no?) — and went through a few rounds of interactions on content, design before we got to a level of “helpfulness” that honestly blew our socks off!
  • These iterations were developed using the agile approach to software development

Caveat: This process looks neat and linear — but in reality was more messy (experienced PMs will know what I’m talking about). Simplified for the purposes of this article

This feature still doesn’t have a bunch of things we want — more visualization, more data from the credit report for context, more personalized recommendations — but we will get there. (My favorite quote on this — “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late” — I’m not embarrassed by our product and in fact am proud of what we’ve built for our users, but in my mind this quote by Reid Hoffman perfectly captured the ethos of lean / iterative product development)

All views, opinions and statements are my own

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