Unsolicited Product Management: Venmo ™
Third times the charm! Welcome to the third edition of Unsolicited Product Management. It has been a great experience delivering these product management case studies to you. These weekly publications have also given me a great opportunity to train and display my product management muscles. Today, I want to add the factor of customer data to the product roadmap decision making process. Product Managers are not hired for their ideas. Successful product managers can synthesize data about their customers and their customer’s interactions with their product to arrive at decisions.
This week’s product: Venmo Payment
Launched in 2009, Venmo has been a godsend for a new generation of consumers that rely less on physical cash. “Venmo request me” or “I’ll just Venmo request you” are phrases that you are likely to hear anytime you partake in activities such as living with a roommate, going out to get dinner or drinks with a friend, or fronting a larger purchase such as a hotel reservation. Venmo relies on its ease of use to keep you going in most purchasing situations.
The problem this product aims to solve:
Users need an easy way to send and receive money to and from people they know without relying on the exchange of physical cash.
How does this product address the problem:
Venmo aims to make user’s lives more convenient as they use money to keep themselves moving. “Venmoing” someone greatly reduces the overhead of participating in a transaction event that involves an exchange of money between two or more individuals. Essentially everyone is given a transaction endpoint to send and receive cash from people they know. While “settling-up” with physical cash is possible and has been done for many years. Physical cash transactions require everyone to have enough money physically on hand and right kind of bills.
Venmo, also provides users with a log of their previous transactions for quick reference at any time.
Finally, Venmo sets out to create a community between the people we transact with by showing a live feed of what your contacts have been purchasing (if they choose to disclose).
Sample User Data:
Hypothetically, the Venmo product team sent out voluntary survey and received the following metrics below:
- Average user age: 29
- Most popular spending categories: Rent, utilities, dinning, entertainment, gas
- How many people are involved in the transaction: 3.2
- Transactions per day: 1.1
- Easy of use rating: 4.2 / 5
- Top complaints: group payment, recurring payments, proof of purchase, sending money to the wrong person.
Analysis of the data:
Most users are in the millennial age demographic. These users demand technology to be usable and convenient. Two of the top spend categories are usually paid on a recurring basis. Most transactions involve more than 2 individuals requiring more than a single transaction to be processed. Finally, feedback received indicates that customers are interested in adding the ability to enter a receipt as a proof of purchase.
The enhancements ranked by priority:
1. Improve flow for payments that involve more than two users.
Currently, if you are involved in a spending event that requires one person (the requester) to send a request to more than one recipient, a user will have to request each recipient individually. To improve this experience, I suggest making a group payment processing flow that allows you to add every recipient to a transaction along with how much they owe and then request the amount owed by each person all in one screen.
2. Introduce recurring payment scheduling
Currently, there is no way to set payments on a recurring schedule. I am proposing to add this as an optional feature to transactions where you can set the frequency and timeframe of the recurring payment. This further enhances the ease of use for users.
3. Users want a way to audit their friend’s requests.
Ever question the logic behind the amount you are requested from a friend? Giving the user the ability to tag a receipt to a transaction request gives the request recipient insight into why they are being charged a certain amount. This eliminates uncertainty to a Venmo transaction and prevents any additional back and forth. For future feature enhancement, Venmo can train a machine learning algorithm to study the correlation between the amount requested and the receipt attached indicates to suggest payment amounts in the future based on the receipt attached to a transaction. This makes it more efficient to get a payment out the door.
This content is meant to be educational information only and should not be considered professional advise. All rights reserved.