🗂️ [EN] Juno — Fintech 🗂️
A case from my portfolio: PIX and payment methods
Juno (300–500 people) was a scalable payment method in several verticals and was expanding to other verticals. It had an exponential product culture, and this was always reflected in the user experience. So we had an environment without cultural limitations for innovation.
Opportunity
As a payment method, the solidity of the operation allowed Juno to apply to become an IP (payment institution — with the Brazilian Central Bank — a very bureaucratic process that has to be done in fact) and that opened a sea of possibilities for us in product.
Along with this turn, we also had the PIX (in fact, it all started with PIX, which ended up becoming a great opportunity to renegotiate some business visions that were established) on the horizon of events, which would open up a new market possibility for Juno.
How would PIX and new products relate to the existing product portfolio? Could we amplify what we already had without offending the experience of those who only used a piece of the future Juno?
Internal research
First, we did an extensive self-analysis through internal workshops on the perception of the product portfolio, user experience, and services that we could provide with the limitations we had until then. We took a step back and designed the “as is” of the scaled operation until then, grouped by affinity, and what we had until then was a reasonably efficient “from-to”, with a backlog of improvements. Still, the business was aligned with the purpose until then. So check.
External research
How did the public behave in this new scenario? Would it be more interesting for Juno to become a Digital Bank to add PIX (as many payment institutions did later) to the current portfolio of services? How was the competition doing with this?
Business vision convergence
At this stage, without fear of being happy, conceptually, we disassembled the Lego that we had until then and we observed the most efficient pieces for each other, with very simple exercises, several matrices, and many more diagrams. Our internal thesis is that if we did not understand our ecosystem of possibilities, no one else would understand.
Payment methods integration bath
While this was going on in design and with the PM team, the PMO team brought internal workshops for the whole team, an intensive course on regulatory guidelines, compliances, and endpoints of each provider within the complex, but one of the most modern payment systems in the world, which is the Brazilian one.
Hypotheses
With this in hand, we went home and started to design three feasible hypotheses given the findings and conclusions we had during these immersions:
- Segregate and become different products (maintains the operation's continuous improvement and makes a spinoff)
- Partially adopt PIX but only as a payment/collection method (partially adopt PIX — generating payment codes and QR Code so that the end user can make payments beyond the billing slip)
- Become a digital wallet and make a super app (payment/receivables control + PIX + Digital account + Receivables anticipation), that is, the portfolio of services would triple.
Solution
Juno took a big bet, and turned the key: we redesigned the experience according to the findings, culture aligned with everyone being engaged and on the same page.
In the meantime, it was acquired by another startup — a “unicorn” here in the south of Brazil that operates in Latin America, and I honestly do not know the implications of this operation.
Learnings
This was the largest case to date of integration of squads with common objectives that, guided by business and design, made all the difference in the final deliverables, radically changing in my head the aggregating and connecting role of the Product/Service Designer in an operation.
