Create Product, Deliver Value
At the end of 2019, I got the amazing opportunity to experience an internship in Product Management at CICIL. When I received the offer letter, I was so excited yet I felt nervous because CICIL is the first financial technology company in Indonesia that focuses on fulfilling college student’s needs by giving them installments, I’ve always dreamed to contribute to the people in my age range and fortunately, this came true. Despite my excitement, with the growing number of employees, I was afraid that I might be overwhelmed by the size and complexity of this company.
But I was totally wrong because even with a large number of employee and team, CICIL still offers me a place to learn and explore.
On the first day, my mentor, Gohan Parningotan told me that I will be part of the Ender squad, it is the new squad in CICIL that focuses on the initiative product. I got more excited because it involved trial and error, which was my initial intention. I will be focusing on CICIL Jobs that has various partners and aim to help students to pay their monthly installments using the commission they got after working at their partner’s job.
I was asked to look at the overview of both CICIL and CICIL Jobs website and admin panel then write down the improvement ideas based on problem or opportunity in website content or the user flow that I found but that was all my assumptions and point of view. As a Product Manager, we must validate our idea, to know whether it’s really what the users need. Then I create a list of questions to ask. It wasn’t easy for me to do the phone interview with CICIL Jobs users because of the various user behavior and my limited skills in doing user interviews.
I spent my days doing phone interviews with CICIL Jobs existing users, it was a challenge for me because even though I already took a Human-Computer Interaction in my college, I still find it hard to ask good questions, not the leading ones and how to adapt various unexpected answers. My mistake is that I’m too focused on my questions template. But I also enjoy the time I spent talking with CICIL Jobs users. I remembered what my mentor said,
Whenever you feel confused about what can you do with the product, go ask the user because they always have problems that need to be answered .
Talking with them made me further understand their problems and as a Product Manager, it is our job to represent them even when they are not around in the product meeting and stuff.
So based on my phone interview and some prioritization with my mentor, we found that there is still an inconvenience regarding transparency because our users couldn’t track their commission history anytime, we still periodically sent them via e-mail about their commission.
That’s why I wanted to develop a Commission History in both CICIL and CICIL Jobs to create transparency in commission for students as they need it to calculate how many jobs needed to fulfill their installments and to know how many commissions they already get from their own job.
By using this feature, CICIL will prevent unsent commission information emails to the student, more transparency about the commission, and can increase the number of jobs done as students know their current commission thus drives them to apply for more jobs.
Even though this seems important, I’m still facing a problem because this feature will affect the core CICIL transactions table and there are some constraints, so I need to communicate to other Product Manager and Backend Engineers about this. After having a discussion we came to the final solution and moving on to the design phase. It was fun to discuss with the product designer, Kak Chafidz, whenever I’m not so sure about the design guideline or idea.
Due to my limited internship period in CICIL, I can’t be there when this feature is built but I really enjoy the process of finding the problem, validate the idea, communicate with the user and others that are affected, to design phase. I made a lot of mistakes there but I think it's a good thing.
the sooner we fail, the more we will learn.
By knowing our faults earlier we have more time to fix them. We can be a better version of ourselves from learning from our past mistakes and experiences.
I also wanted to say thank you to Kak Gohan, my mentor who allowed me to make mistakes, pointed out my mistakes and other insights about startup and product management, and of course for the opportunity in CICIL.
To Ender Squad: Kak Eric, Kak Chafidz, Kak Edo, Kak Agung. It was really fun to talk with you guys.
Other interns, Rae, Raihan, Sandi for gabut time to family mart lol
and other people in CICIL who always smile and ask me to go home sooner HAHHA.
Indeed CICIL is a great place to learn.
