Five Key Requirements To Building Your Fintech Product. (Part 1)
When building products, you are in a perpetual state of change. This mostly means that each time a change is required, you have to rebuild it all over again. This is especially true if the product was not designed to be updated from the get-go. This fact has been one of the things that have defined the type of engineer that I am today.
When I build, I am very modular minded and I am thinking-
- Okay, how does this expand?
- How would this expand?
- How will this affect the next layer of things?
So let me share my top five (5) engineering requirements for building products, particularly in a Fintech niche. Below is the list:
1. Know the basic structure of what you want to build.
The knowledge of the basic structure means that you can easily guess or imagine what could be possible from that point on. That way, you set the minimum foundation to build forward or build on. If you don’t do this right, you will need to change the product's basic structure further down the line. But if done right, the need to change it becomes lesser, and in no time at all, you might not need to make a change at the foundational level and your foundation gets to be solid.
2. Look for the minimum functionality you need to make the product work.
Rather than build a million things that you could need, look for the smallest things you actually need to build. Typically, you would want to look critically at your product and look for the Minimum Viable Product(MVP). The MVP as most people understand is the simplest version of your app that you can get people to use. In my experience, I have realized that the MVP is actually the smallest version of the app that does what you intend the app to do. Basically, the smallest version of the app shows the core functionality of your application.
To give a few examples, the MVP of the digital wallet would be a simple app to send and receive money. The MVP for an exchange platform could be a moderated chat application for peer-to-peer trading or a simple send and receive money application for a centralized exchange platform
So once you have the smallest portion of the product, you can start building from that point, get your customers to see it, and start determining how it grows. This, in the design world, is called a ‘Lean design.’
3. Think about it from the perspective of ‘If not this, then what?’.
Most times while building the product you get carried away and get attached to the product. This despite being a good thing results in bad situations more often than would be expected. The reason is that people end up being attached to the work they have put into the products and not just the solution and as a result, might make wrong decisions due to sentiments. It’s better to be attached to the solution and not the product. Even when the product might not have market fit, the solution still has the potential to generate a product that would.
What do I mean?
If you do not detach yourself from these feelings, you might end up embarking on a wild goose chase; Which if not contained on time, might lead down a wrong path, and one might find it hard to get back on the right track.
Here’s the link to the next piece, part 2. Enjoy!
