TenX Q1 2019 Product Update
Hi everyone!
I was recently asked to put together a list of Q1 achievements for our board meeting. I thought I’d share some of the relevant product-related achievements with the community as well.
This isn’t solely my achievement; in fact Product is a responsibility that Paul and I share in the leadership team supported by many people across various teams and, as you’ll see here, covers many areas from our tokens to the physical cards; the apps you interact with, to internal products that our customers benefit from but never use first-hand.
We’ll focus first on the more visible achievements.
TENX Tokens — A major Q1 delivery milestone was for the TENX Tokens. As a product, this was primarily the token itself (smart contract), the claim interface and various backend tools for distribution and maintenance. As you can imagine, writing a smart contract is not trivial and it has to go through multiple stages of audit internally and externally. Some work for the claim interface was also on our current app to enable Account Verification (AV) for token claims.
Multiple people made significant contribution on this project but I particularly want to call out Qinxiang, Yos and Boa for stepping out of their comfort zones.
Wallet App — Since the re-launch of our app in React Native we’ve been able to make many incremental changes which should have improved the overall experience. Some of the latest are an unlimited transaction history (you can now scroll all the way to your first transaction), better account verification guides and of course the acceptance of national ID cards for account verification.
A lot of work on the app in this quarter went into making the account verification process smoother; not only does this improve your experience (not having to re-submit documents multiple times), it also saves us time and money as we don’t have to keep reviewing submissions taken in poor light or with an obstructing thumb.
Though this achievement is “Wallet App” and our star front-end team did excellent work on the app (sometimes at an airport!), product development crosses functions and in making Account Verification simple for our Compliance team I want to call out Wesley and Angel for great work in backend support and administrative tools.
Data as a product — I’ve mentioned before that we have internal products for our team members and solutions for managing our crypto. Since Q4 2018 Data has taken greater prominence with our roll-out of the cards. In Q1 2019 we established a simple framework as an MVP for a full-scale internal data pipeline.
This is extremely difficult to integrate as we replatform, because we have data that has seen several migrations and increasingly may be found in either the monolithic database or smaller data stores within each service. As a result, some members of the engineering team have spent parts of Q1 digging through our data structures, cleaning and normalising data while respecting controls I’ve put in place to ensure that sensitive payment information is kept secure and personal information stays private.
We expect to have more progress on this area in the upcoming quarters. In the meantime Leonardo (our risk analyst appointed Data Tsar) has been making sure that every request for data comes with a problem attached and a person willing to learn how to work with our data.
Lastly, Cards — Card availability has been my key focus this past quarter. After all, what’s the use of having a great product if no one has access to it? For each of you this milestone is pretty binary; either you get to apply for a card or you don’t. I’ll describe it from our point of view which is making the card available to as many people as are eligible: we’re now able to address more than 80% of the demand from our waitlists in this region.
Please put yourself on a waitlist if you’re still not able to order a card. We’re continuing the rollout effort in Q2 and will be focussing efforts where we can serve the most people.
In leading the roll-out charge I’m extremely grateful for the support of our product marketing teams that Paul leads, who have been organising events, supporting the community and making us look good in public (thanks Anj!). If this sounds trivial it is only because I am unskilled in these areas and trust the experts who make it look easy; it takes a lot of skill and hard work to interface with all of you!
Alvin — 15th April 2019
If you have any further questions please…
- Join our community chat on Rocket.Chat
- Subscribe to the TenX subreddit
- Follow TenX on Twitter
- Subscribe to us on YouTube
- Follow TenX on Facebook
- Follow our blog on Medium
- Subscribe to our newsletter
