Product Life Cycle Management at Rupeek — The Team, Process, and Tools

Rupeek is a Fintech company on a mission to unlock the power of India’s physical assets by monetising them in the form of credit and investment products. India has one of the highest percentage share of wealth in physical assets in the world, while the percentage share of credit borrowed against these assets is one of the lowest. For the next few decades, it is critical for India to monetise these assets and bring them into the mainstream economy.

To achieve this mission, Rupeek is working on multiple fronts to provide a seamless solution to customers -

1. Simplify the financial instruments that can help monetise physical assets

2. Create a marketplace to enable easy access to credit and investment products

3. Provide the best-in-class experience to a wide variety of customer segments.

Solving each of these pillars has been a daunting challenge. However, the exponentially increasing adoption of digital channels in India has made it possible to solve them now. And of course, the answer to all these challenges lies in technological and financial innovations. This is where Rupeek’s product team comes in.

The product team at Rupeek has quickly become the backbone of our business growth, scalability, and innovation. Product managers (PMs) stitch end-to-end solutions, encompassing multiple functional stakeholders, multiple technologies, and varied customer needs, resulting in non-linear business outcomes. However, the journey for the product team has not been a walk in the park. As is true with any other product team, they faced a myriad of challenges, including balancing and prioritising short-term wins vs. long-term investments, stakeholder management across various functions with multiple objectives, educating the organisation on the benefits of capability building, etc.

In this blog, I will talk about the practices that PMs follow in the product life cycle process at Rupeek, the tools they use daily, and the cultural values that the product leadership team strives to inculcate.

Product Life Cycle at Rupeek

At Rupeek, the product life cycle starts with ‘problem definition’. It is imperative for PMs to resist jumping into problem-solving right away. We encourage them to spend some time on defining the problem — Why are you trying to solve the problem? Why is this a pain point to the customer? What is the broader “job to be done” for the customer? What are your success metrics? What are the constraints you need to keep in mind? etc.

Following is a typical product life cycle at Rupeek post problem definition (illustrative example in Figure 1):

1. Planning and prioritisation: The PMs at Rupeek drive the annual and quarterly planning of product backlog with all the business and engineering stakeholders. They ensure that all the themes of product ideas are captured in the backlog along with their potential business impact in terms of increase in revenue, increase in margins, improvement in customer experience, and reduction in cost. The backlog always contains smaller incremental wins where the impact is more tangibly quantifiable and longer-term platform capabilities, which are more strategic in nature. The team ensures to strike a balance between the two. The annual plans are refreshed every quarter to incorporate market conditions, regulatory changes, or new ideas.
2. Pod Alignment: Post prioritisation, the team quickly aligns in pod structures for the quarter. Relevant business, product, UX, and engineering team members are aligned to a pod with common objectives. The pod lead (usually a PM, but can be from any function) ensures the accountability of the pod towards the larger business goals while ensuring that the needle also moves incrementally month over month.
3. Product Metrics: Product and data analysts in each pod ensure that the relevant metrics are tracked and pressure tests the goals set by the pod. The team usually tracks metrics at different levels — L0 metrics: metrics that a CEO would care about and impact the high-level business.L1 metrics: metrics that help go deeper into L0 metrics, e.g., data cuts by the city, customer cohorts, etc., and L2 metrics: metrics that help determine the immediate success/failure of the feature, e.g., the number of clicks on the feature, any bugs on the feature, etc. The UX research team ensures that research efforts are kicked off on granular points to fine-tune the customer understanding and solution.
4. Backlog Refinement: The PM refines the backlog by detailing out the PRDs (product requirement documents) for features, ensuring that they tie together the customer insights, data insights, UX research, business guardrails, regulatory constraints, etc. The most crucial part of backlog refinement is to define the right MVP (minimal viable product). Sometimes relatively less experienced PMs can fall into the trap of building the best possible feature in one shot. This approach has many disadvantages. You will increase the time to market by 2–3X, resulting in a delayed impact. You will not be able to gather early feedback from your users about the feature’s overall utility, limiting your ability to experiment and pivot fast. Lastly, the entire team’s morale is much higher when they ship their features incrementally and see them in action more frequently instead of waiting for one big bang release after months. Rupeek, being one of the fastest-growing startups in India, has tons of features in the pipeline. PMs at Rupeek breathe the MVP culture day in and day out. Version 2 and version 3 of products are always launched after incorporating learnings from MVP
5. Sprint execution: PMs regularly participate in the spring ceremonies, including planning, estimation, retros, and demos to ensure the smooth development of features. The sprint cadence ensures regular alignment of the entire team and preempts any surprises from coming up in later stages of development.
6. Telemetry: Post the launch of features, PMs and Product Analysts at Rupeek rigorously measure the success of their features, analyze trends in usage and customer behaviour, and course-correct as needed. Metrics and trend analyses then become a part of the day-to-day operations that help refine business processes at the ground level, the conception of new ideas for future backlog items, and modification of subsequent versions of features as needed.
7. Product reviews: At Rupeek, we regularly conduct product reviews with the leadership team to showcase the features delivered, discuss the metrics moved, and keep the leadership team updated about any blockers/conflicts in prioritisation. These reviews are essential in brewing a product-led culture and keeping the team on track.

Product Management Tools used at Rupeek

Across the product life cycle, there are several tools and frameworks that PMs at Rupeek leverage to bring in new insights, enhance their productivity, and ensure smooth delivery of features. Some of the prominent ones are:

1. Planning and prioritisation: For planning and prioritisation of backlog, PMs at Rupeek use a framework that takes effort and impact into account. However, instead of computing a scientific score of impact and effort, PMs prepare an artefact with all the relevant information in a single view and then determine the sequence based on different dimensions. An example of the framework is as follows:

This kind of framework has several advantages over a scoring-based methodology. It ensures that deeper dimensions of impact assessment are pressure tested at all stages of planning. It helps bring all stakeholders on the same page regarding impact for the overall organisation. It helps make strategic trade-offs easily.

2. Product specifications: For writing clear specifications, PMs at Rupeek follow the Product Requirement template on Confluence (please refer to figure 2). The template clearly lays out the overall objective, success criteria, and detailed requirements. In the same template, PMs add another section to summarise user stories and the version of the release they will be shipped in. This helps the engineering team internalise the granular user stories and clearly understand the scope of each version of the feature. In certain pods, acceptance criteria come in as a handy tool to align the “definition of done” in user stories.

3. User research: There are many tools available in the industry for understanding user behaviour. Some of the notable ones that PMs at Rupeek use are: Hotjar (to understand customer behaviour on the web), UXcam (to observe the user’s journey on the app), Clevertap (to track events and conversion funnels in different parts of journeys), customer interviews, surveys, usability testing with a small group of customers, etc.

4. Data analytics: Tableau, Metabase, and direct SQL querying on data warehouses are the most commonly used tools by Rupeek PMs for general data analysis and going deeper into the L0, L1, and L2 product metrics (explained in the Product Life Cycle section).

5. Sprint execution: Rupeek pods usually use JIRA for tracking their user stories, task management, and product delivery.

6. UI wireframes: While UX teams are the ones who work primarily on wireframes and designs, sometimes PMs can pitch in with high-level wireframes to discuss their idea with the UX team or design smaller UI themselves. Zeppelin, Google slides, and sometimes the good old excel sheets are the most commonly used tools at Rupeek.

Stay tuned for more blogs and articles as we go deeper into documenting case studies, examples, templates, and other practices.