íon Itaú
íon website: ion.itau
Project Details
Role: Product Owner
Company: Itaú Unibanco
Year: 2020
About Itaú Unibanco
Itaú Unibanco is one of the biggest banks in Latin America, it offers financial services ranging from bank accounts and credit cards, to complex brokerage investments. It was one of the first traditional banks in Brazil to go digital and is widely recognized for its digital experience.
About íon
íon is an investment platform of Itaú Unibanco, created to better support their investors, featuring: all customer's investment information gathered in one place; different ways for them to check and analyze their investments; list of available investments, including 3rd-parties's; news page with the latest about the market and the best recommendations for their profile.
THE CHALLENGE
íon had more than 7 squads working on the apps and solutions for investments, and I was responsible to lead the "Foundations Squad", which main goals were:
- To create the best technical structure to support the application and other squads, for example: the A/B test structure with firebase, AWS, the design system components, the Connection with the CRM, etc.
- To design and build cross-teams functionalities, such as: user stories, a CMS platform from the scratch, a navigation bar, etc.
- To align features with the "Customers Service Squad", such as: NPS and CSAT evaluation, customer's feedback, all the technical improvements and service design flows.
Since I was the product designer responsible for the investment recommendation's intelligence, named Advisory Robot, that influenced the creation of this new product, and was already familiar with the investment experiences and technologies, I was selected to lead this squad that would work on different kinds of specialities. Besides the fact that I was also the Squad Lead of the Communication team in the Investment department.
The biggest challenge, of course, was to prioritize so many different demands and integrate the backlog from multiple squads in a way that would build a consistent MLP (minimum lovable product).
METODOLOGIES
Since we already had a lot of researches made on the Investment Advisory Robot Project, in order to full release íon as soon as possible, the team decided to make a partnership with a design company and work with them on a Lean UX process, where the interfaces and user tests where conduced in parallel with the sprints of the development squads. We mixed the previous qualitative data, the new discoveries and the quantitative data from Itaú Unibanco's main app, and the CRM information to guide us on our decision making.
Some of the methodologies used:
- Benchmark
- Exploratory Research
- Usability Testing
- Focus Groups
- Data analysis
BACKLOG MAIN STRATEGIES
Content Management
Since one of the main goals of the app was to inform the clients about the market and link this information to their investments, it was important to create a feature that would allow updates in the app content without the need of new releases in the app stores. With that in mind, I designed an independent CMS solution that would be used by the content team to customize some areas of the apps, such as: stories, recommendations, notifications and news; all organized by tags that supported the same content to be used in different contexts with the proper layout.
A/B Tests and CRM Integration
One of the pillars of íon was its content customization for each user. To give this ability to our app, we needed to create some integration with our CRM. This integration allowed us to contact users by characteristics, category of investments they were more familiar, life moment and topics of interest. It also became a feature in the CMS solution we created that allowed the content team to work without an IT team. Adding Firebase to this equation, the teams were able to make A/B tests to support the qualitative data we already had from the user research tests.
Design System and Mentoring
Since the íon's design system was being created while the features were being built, all the squads were allowed to create new components, but the Foundation squad was the responsible to guarantee the quality and reusability of those components, besides teaching the other teams how to build a valuable design system.
Cross Navigation
Since there were several squads working on features in parallel, our squad was responsible to unify all the experiences. For that, I led an workshop with all the POs (product owners) and tech leads to connect the releases, technology loose points and roadmaps to better plan our MLP's release date. In addition to adjusting some experiences and creating synergy between the squads to support a cross-teams prioritization and organize the teams to focus on the customer's journey, not only on the squads subjects.
APP INTERFACES
FINAL THOUGHTS
Being a PO on the íon project was one of the greatest experiences on my career. Being capable of leading a multidisciplinary team focused on creating a project that was an output of a previous project that I had built and also being responsible for connecting the squads to achieve the best experience for our clients was amazing. My background as a product designer, in contrast with the others POs that were specialized in investments advisors, created many different insights that made íons experience so unique and full of learnings. It was also my first time leading designers from a partner company that helped us to create the full solution.