From idea to impact: how we crafted the product that opened new routes into Qonto

A personal journey into Qonto’s blueprint for product excellence — creating a next-generation flow for company creators.

In the beginning

When I joined Qonto two years ago, it was a brand-new start for me: new job, new industry, new rules. I’d decided to become a Product Manager during a sabbatical from my previous company. The role seemed to involve many of the things I love doing at work: collaborating with a team full of people from different backgrounds, coordinating projects, and really having an impact.

The cherry on top was that it could also feed my appetite for tech — using math and logic had always been a huge part of my role as a former Propulsion Engineer in the space industry. So, I took Noé’s Product Manager training course and learned the basics of this new role. Then, I discovered Qonto’s Product Manager job offer.

During the recruitment process, two things caught my attention and made me want to learn and grow at Qonto:

1. The Qonto Way: the company’s robust product framework and culture. I was intrigued and curious about the continuous learning culture and pull-system framework.
2. The good energy, kindness, and engaging attitude I got from everyone I spoke to.

Life in the Onboarding CFT

So, I joined Qonto. I remember saying to myself, “wow, everyone here’s so nice, and talented.” I was in awe of the team and extremely motivated to start working with them. (I still think the same today.)

I get to meet lots of people all the time — that’s part and parcel of the job as Product Manager. And I love it!

Surrounded by such amazing people, not least my managers and mentor, I started learning fast. Any initial apprehensions quickly gave way to a sense of recognition and belonging among this group of impressive people.

While this article will take a deep dive into our recent creation of a new registration flow for Italian company creators, over the past two years, our team has come together to make successes of plenty of other projects, too:

• A new fast-track registration flow for French company creators. We built a new flow with a dedicated API, where our legaltech partners can send us leads together with prospects’ data and documents. This has created great value for users, who now only have to finalize their registration with Qonto by signing the contract, without having to provide their information all over again. Our conversion rate and lead time have grown thanks to this flow.
• The migration of Penta’s customer base to Qonto platforms. When we joined forces with Penta, we had to migrate all the customers to Qonto’s platforms as smoothly as possible. We took the opportunity to adapt the brand-new fast track register flow to this particular use case to transfer all relevant data and documents and lighten the load as much as possible for users.

The role of our CFT (cross-functional team), “CFT Onboarding”, is to make the account opening experience as smooth and painless as possible for our customers, from sign-up to getting to grips with their new Qonto account.

One of our main focuses is opening new routes into Qonto. This means providing different types of companies — those in different countries, at different stages of their lifecycle, with varying legal forms — the ability to open a Qonto account.

Creating a bespoke “onboarding” process for Italian company creators

Over the past few years, Qonto has already built industry-leading company creation flows in France and Germany — they’re in no small part the reason so many new accounts are opened at Qonto every month. They provide a fast, digital solution for depositing company creation capital, with full integration with the professionals who take care of the paperwork.

So, when recent evolutions in Italian law allowed company creation there to be done 100% online, we decided to seize the opportunity. Italy would become the next chapter in our company creation adventure.

We went through an in-depth product discovery phase where we focused on understanding what value we could bring to our new users. And guess what? It turns out the Italian company creation process is very different from the German or French ones!

First, we met with all relevant internal stakeholders: the Customer Success Team (the people on the ground talking to our customers, day in day out), the Country Team (the ones who know the market and its specificities best), and Legal, Risk & Compliance (the ones who decode the laws and regulations we have to follow).

Next, we started mapping the user journey with all the pain points and potential opportunities. That brought up a lot of questions. So, we talked to customers, accountants, notaries (accountants and notaries play a major role in the company creation experience), and built our convictions and established clear assumptions.

With this new knowledge — and our experience in other markets — we were convinced this was a direction we wanted to go in.

We knew what our target was and what we wanted to offer, but the market is notoriously hesitant to move away from its long-established ways of working. So, we had to prove ourselves. We took an experimental approach, breaking the target down into small parts and refining them iteratively.

Experimental approach for refining a product

For the first iteration, based on the insights we gathered during user interviews, we focused on offering a fast online capital deposit feature.

In Italy, a large majority of company creators reach out to accountants for support with the process. Therefore, we first had to win over accountants.

We anticipated a slow adoption at first, but we focused on quality to ensure we were meeting customers’ expectations. And we reached our success target! The first customers to use the flow were satisfied — and their accountants, too.

We also discovered that a lot of unexpected users entered the flow, which we put down to a lack of clarity in the flow selection screens. The resulting frustration from users and busy Customer Support told us that we’d underestimated the complexity for users to select the right flow. After all, this proposition is new in Italy. So, we set about investigating user behaviors and relied on their insight to understand how to improve.

Here came our second iteration, with better guidance for optimal use of the flow.

During this iteration, we found out that a portion of the users we had to refuse were, in fact, on the right flow, however, they wanted to deposit their capital in a different way to what we were offering. After further investigations and interviews, we were able to define the list of options we needed to offer for all company creators to be able to use the flow.

Finally, our third and current iteration has brought us exciting results: flow adoption is on a rapid upward trend and our customers are making full use of the different types of capital deposit.

Hidden complexities

As with any cross-functional project, this new onboarding flow brought about some design, content, and tech challenges:

• How can we customize the flow to each market’s specificities while ensuring consistency?
• How can we optimize the code architecture for shared services and domains across markets while releasing at a fast pace?
• How can we get ready to launch in future markets while still iterating on existing ones?

The key to overcoming all these challenges was first and foremost to think “global” and then adapt to “local”.

There were already two different flows for France and Germany, which was a good start. We listed what all markets needed to have in common, providing the skeleton structure of the flow: design and web required a unique flow structure, backend needed shared services, and customer support had to establish parallel processes.

Then, we added in the specificities of each market: variations in on-screen copy, differing rules on backend services, and dedicated procedures for customer support.

With this, we’re now confident we can effectively build upon our strong yet fully customizable structure for any new market.

Next steps

We updated all aspects of the company creation flow, challenged every word of the content, adapted backend services, and crafted a dedicated back-office process.

Our success target for the first iteration was qualitative, as we first wanted to test this new flow and validate our hypotheses. We collected an average CES (customer effort score) of 6.6/7. A promising start! Then, after two iterations opening the flow to more customers, we started seeing an impressive increase in adoption of the flow. 🎉

We’re still in the iteration loop, learning and improving, and building expertise to provide the best onboarding experience to our users. This is our North Star.

So, now you know. This is how we do Product at Qonto: building knowledge and improving the product and our craft every day.

Lastly, huge thanks go to all the great teams involved in the new Italy company creation flow: the Country Team, Partnership Team, Growth Team, Risk & Compliance Team, Legal Team, Customer Support Team, Tech Team, and Product Team. Hands and minds from all these teams came together to make a success of this flow.

About Qonto

Qonto makes it easy for SMEs and freelancers to manage day-to-day banking, thanks to an online business account that’s stacked with invoicing, bookkeeping and spend management tools.

Created in 2016 by Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi, Qonto now operates in 4 European markets (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) serving 450,000 customers, and employs more than 1,400 people. Since its creation, Qonto has raised €622 million from well-established investors.

Qonto is one of France’s most highly valued scale-ups and has been listed in the Next40 index, bringing together future global tech leaders, since 2021.

Interested in joining a challenging and game-changing company? Consult our job offers!