Context

• Zippi is an early-stage startup, having graduated from YCombinator in the summer of 2019
• They reached out to me while they were pivoting from a personal loan product to a savings app
• The CEO of Zippi asked me to come to Brazil for 3 months to help them figure out if the savings product would work or not

Challenges

• New culture. Designing for Brazilian users required me to design for a language I didn't speak and I culture I didn't understand.
• Team anxiety. The product pivot the team went through left team-members and cofounders feeling stressed and uncertain.
• Radically new way of working. Most of the team had never worked with rapid prototyping or been through a successful product pivot

Key moments

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1. Hit the ground running.

It took a lot of trust for Zippi to ask me to travel to Brazil, where I don't know the language or the culture, and help the decide if this new savings product was going to work for them or not. While we did a remote trial before I arrived, there was still a lot of uncertainty. To make them feel good about hiring me, I pushed hard to establish quick wins: In the first 2 weeks, I ran new research efforts, helped the team find new customers, taught them how to run customer interviews, and cleaned up the design of the sign up flow and core product. These improvements established my credibility with the team.

2. (Re)start with why

A few weeks into working together, the CEO told me they'd switched to working on savings without asking what else they could build. Neither he nor his cofounders felt deep conviction that this new product was the right one. Had they prematurely optimized? When he shared that with me, I sprang into action: I hired my favorite prototyping coach to help me put together a plan to test multiple ideas. At the same time, to generate the ideas worth testing, I led the founders through a half-day offsite to tease out what the vision meant to each of them and what felt most exiting to them to build.

3. Rapidly prototype other solutions.

After getting a few ideas from the founders, I met with the CEO and built out a plan to have the whole team--8 people, founders and engineers and a data scientist--suspend thier normal work to focus on learning what we should build next. We pared back all of everyone's work to just the minimum required to keeping the lights on for the savings product. Then we jumped into 2 weeks of rapid prototyping. We would make changes to what we were showing users every day and ask. Everyone in the company participated. The energy in the office was palpable. It was scary for me and for the CEO to have everyone stop their normal work and focus on defining product direction, but it paid off in total alignment among the team and the strongest sense of shared ownership I've ever seen at a startup.

4. Scale what works and kill what doesn't.

After two weeks of work, we had two ideas that got a lot of love from users and we were ready to build MVPs: a credit card made just for gig-economy workers, and a loan tailored to getting out of debt. While both got early love, the credit card had easy and immediate adoption, while the loan was hard to explain and sell. We tried a variety of things with the loan product, but ultimately felt that the credit card was a no brainer and the loan would take a lot more work to get right. We shut the loan product down, the savings product down, and for the first time since I'd joined, the whole company was building one and only one product.

5. Crisis response

We were coming up on the end of my engagement. The credit card MVP was performing really well and the team was finally ready to invest in a credit card app design. Despite the craziness of Covid-19, which resulted in me returning to the US 3 weeks early, I shipped a high-quality MVP app design that was deceptively simple, organized for the unique needs of gig-economy workers. We shifted our whole process to remote work, going from ideation to testing with users, spending half our time on validating concepts with very tight feedback cycles. It was tough, but we shipped something I—and the whole team—is very proud of and which sets a strong foundation for the company going forward.

Outcomes

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The biggest result that Zippi got out of working with me is this: they know they are working on the right thing now. When I joined, they were really nervous about their direction. Now, they have a high degree of confidence. I asked each of the founders how strongly they believe they are on a path to product market fit. I got two 9/10s and a 9.5/10. Andre said "the confidence I feel in the product has never been higher" and Bruno said "this was as impactful as YC for us."

I'm really proud of the MVP we launched, but it's so much more than that. The team is much better positioned to handle uncertainty. Everyone on the team has now run user interviews and user interview debriefs. It is embedded in the culture now to talk to customers when we have questions.  IT would be weird not to.

I'm proud to have led the team through shutting down 2 products and converging on what to build. On both the process front and the outcomes of that process, Zippi is well positioned to continue growing both today and for the years ahead.