Teampay | fintech

Driving UX Value when resources are low

How do we get five designers on a shared product language?

A small engineering team was stuck on a big, scope-creeped project

Following a series of layoffs, the engineering team’s capacity was sharply reduced.

But a major project was still considered the highest priority from a company strategy perspective (re: funding). So all resources were put to that project.

This was happening at a time when a number of customers were potentially churning, in part due to a perception that Teampay wasn't delivering on their smaller issues.

Highest Impact Business Problems

Churn Risk

With customers threatening to churn, our product team was worried we’d miss out on providing incremental value to customers while caught up in this expansive, nearly year long project.

Churn Risk

With customers threatening to churn, our product team was worried we’d miss out on providing incremental value to customers while caught up in this expansive, nearly year long project.

Churn Risk

With customers threatening to churn, our product team was worried we’d miss out on providing incremental value to customers while caught up in this expansive, nearly year long project.

Flight Risk = Even Fewer Resources

Low team morale following layoffs meant people were even more likely to find new opportunities. Paired with limited engagement on this big singular project, the risk that we’d end up with even fewer engineering resources was a big concern.

Flight Risk = Even Fewer Resources

Sunk Cost Mentality meets Low Morale

Churn Analysis

The focus on one big project meant other pieces of customer feedback were being deprioritized. As renewals were coming up, many customers were frustrated that pains they’d had years ago were still not fixed.

I worked closely with our Support and Customer Success teams to analyze support tickets and previous feedback from upcoming renewal customers to attempt to prioritize quick wins.

Low Team Morale

Following the layoffs, the engineering teams’ morale was at its lowest. Their engagement was reduced and they had concerns as to the value of what they were doing, particularly as the company kept the focus on one increasingly expansive project.

I partnered closely with our Directors of Engineering to understand how we could keep a pulse on morale and influence it during these difficult times.

Sunk Cost Mentality

While necessary for a new funding round, the decision to not pivot off the “big project” simply because “we’d already started” meant we were committed regardless of our changing customer sentiment situation.

Despite working closely with CS & Support to identify & present the most pressing issues, the Executive team didn’t want to change the priority. So we had to focus on the smallest, least resource-heavy solves.

Enter the Pebble Queue

See something off? Make a Pebble.

Product QA & CS Partnership

For each release, I began smoke testing the entire product. This provided an opportunity to regularly review our entire application and note “small annoyances” and “UI tweaks” that we could improve. Paired with regular feedback from CS, we could identify the tiny wins.

More Tiny Tickets

Taking a holistic view of support & feedback, I started creating “pebble tickets” for every tiny piece of feedback we received. With a focus on things that were discrete solutions with minimal work or broader impact, we could rapidly solution and keep the scope small.

Team Engagement as Focus

Need a Break? Have a … Pebble?

I worked with Engineering leads to revamp Sprint Planning to include pebbles as a “breather” for folks who were burnt out. While never prioritized against the major project tickets, these pebbles gave an option for engineers to take a break and temporary pivot to something they could release to users more rapidly.

Need a Break? Have a … Pebble?

Design as an Engagement Tool

As most feature-focused UI design for the “big project” was already finalized, I pivoted our regular Design Share to be more conceptual to improve company-wide engagement. Sometimes focused on pebbles, othertimes on broader feedback trends, this was a way to get people excited around ideas (even while knowing they weren’t going to be prioritized for a while).

Design as an Engagement Tool

Addressing the "death by many [UX] cuts"

Updated our receipt icon to be more glanceable and clearly display states beyond Yes/No

Created a consolidated receipt reminder Slack notification (as opposed to multiple separate notifications) to help with receipt collection

Added new empty states across various parts of the application to help with new user onboarding

Created a clearer empty state for unknown file types for receipts & invoices

Results: Happier team + positive customer feedback

Maintained a User-Centric View

Despite direct impact on churn, the practice of the pebble queue kept engineers and stakeholders in a customer/user mindset in spite. This focus even helped the big project as having user-based conversations in one small area then translated to the main feature.

Directional Impact to Churn

Frankly, it’s hard to say if these small pebbles had a definite impact on churn. Most customers who churned did so because of much larger issues, so these small things would not have changed that. However, we did receive positive feedback on the incremental fixes as a sign of our own engagement when listening to their feedback.

Improved Morale & Engagement

By creating space for creativity and actionable problem ideation, both the engineering team and my broader company teammates were more engaged in meetings. Coming off the morale shock of layoffs, to see folks having fun while trying to help customers kept the team feeling connected, with many commenting on the value of these “breaks” to feel inspired again.