Achievements
Established the product’s front-end architecture.
Design 20+ features E2E30+ features and functionalities designed end to end.
Created the Design Strategy that grew the product from a low-cost acquisition tool to a millon-dollar revenue generator.
Evangelised a user-centric approach in the product development process.
Shifted user behaviour from manual, tactical tasks to automated, strategic processes.
Help clients reduce significant cost on manual workflows and compliance risks
Contributed to making Lookup the top product in its category (per client feedback).
Manual Processes
Without automation, the validation process was slow and prone to errors.
Frequent Validation Errors
Errors due to minor formatting issues led to frustration and inefficiencies.
Lack of Strategic Insights
Tax managers expressed a need for high-level insights to support compliance monitoring.
Initial Vision
To test Product-Market fit, initially Lookup was designed to be a low-cost offering to drive acquisition for other Fonoa products. The Design Strategy was therefore to focus on:
Aiding manual processes
Streamlining TINs upload, TIN format verification, etc. to showcase an intuitive tool, simplifying the technical aspect of an API-first product in sales demos.
Provide guidance and feedback
To minimise errors, enhance Tax Managers’ self-serve capability and operational efficiency.
Notable Solutions and Impacts
Offer a clear guide with a downloadable CSV template, enabling users to input data accurately and minimise formatting errors.
Impact on User Workflow
Enable Tax Managers to understand data requirements and upload TINs manually with minimal efforts and errors
Strategic Impact
Clarifies data requirements, reduced client's effort to understand data required, improving client's satisfaction (NPS to be calculated)
Increased product's MAU by 25% one month after launch
Boost product appeal in demos, opening up commercial opportunities.
Leverage data visualisation to present insights clearly, minimising the effort required to interpret data.
Impact on User Workflow
The added strategic layer and actionable data empower Tax Managers to allocate resources efficiently, resolve recurring issues, and take a proactive compliance approach.
Strategic Impact
With enterprise-grade analytics, Lookup evolved into a comprehensive compliance management solution, attracting large clients and boosting retention. This positioned the product as a premium offering, significantly contributing to its growth into a million-dollar revenue generator.
Craft clear, helpful error messages.
Present error analytics in an insightful format, transforming error management from a guessing game into a structured, preventable process.
Strategic Impact
Standardised and improved errors messages across different Tax authorities and languages (+20).
Creates a unified troubleshooting framework share by clients, Fonoa CX, Sales Engineers, Engineering, and Product. This closed-loop approach minimises reporting disruptions and empowers users to resolve issues autonomously.
Error rates decreased by 8.5% one month after launch.
Reduced CX tickets by 12%.
Balancing Feature Expansion without Feature Creep
As client interest grew, alongside rising feature requests and the addition of more robust product capabilities, I refined the product’s front-end architecture to centre around core user JTBDs—validating and extracting insights from TIN validations. This approach ensured essential features remained prominent while integrating complementary enhancements to improve workflow efficiency, avoiding feature creep and minimising cognitive overload.
Restructuring product architecture to improve workflow efficiency and shape new behaviours
Initially, the Validation page presented Single and Batch validators separately to align with existing workflows. However, user insights revealed that this mental model stemmed from limitations in legacy government databases or competitor systems based on data ingestion modes (single or batch of TINs).
I realised that users’ primary goal was to understand the TIN status and gather insights from the validation, rather than the act of validation itself. To address this, I iterated on the design by regrouping the Single and Batch Validator with their respective results into two pages: Validate (Single & Batch) and Records (Single & Batch). This restructuring aimed to streamline workflows and provide faster access to results.
A user-centric design strategy should always be adaptable and ready to evolve with the product.
By uncovering and addressing users’ Jobs To Be Done (JTBDs), you ensure the product meets essential user needs while leaving space for growth and innovation.
An adaptable design strategy starts by envisioning the ideal state or achieving product-market fit, then scales back to an MVP. This approach balances meeting current user needs and business goals with maintaining innovation and scalability for the future.