For over 2-years, I contracted (via, via) to one of South Africa’s largest banks. Not having worked in banking before, I met the start of my new fintech opportunity with bursting enthusiasm. Luckily, this particular bank and its people were already pushing forward. Some of the hierarchical-induced red tape that stunts growth in product development and product teams was slowly being etched out. They assisted the move forward by educating as many whenever/wherever possible through workshops (of varying lengths) and practical examples, this is where I come in.

Since I started working for the bank I have learned an incredible amount about the Credit space - Credit Origination and Credit Analysis for large and medium-sized deals impacting Corporate & Institutional sized businesses. I spent 3+ months in the Discovery Phase learning as much (and as quickly) as I could about my users, the clients they serve, the technology they use, its shortcomings, and the impact that has on them both personally (life-career) as well as from a business perspective (the bottom line). By studying already defined personas, then spending real-time getting to understand the people behind those, understanding their environment and the pressures unaccounted for in the systems they use, I unpacked everything from how they get started, to why churn is so high amongst team members.

Through extensive interviews, I was able to unpack the as-is, for convoluted user journeys that are a massive cause of frustration right now, and by understanding the JTBD it slowly started to paint a clearer picture.

Hours spent on NNGroup also helped me better understand my environment and this mantra kept me focused — We are building complex systems for specialized users.

Here’s some of what I did during the 8 months I was on the project:

• Project scoping

• Requirement gathering

• Stakeholder analysis

• Task analysis

• User interviews

• User journey mapping

• Service blueprinting

• JTBD workshops with PO’s or SME’s

• Group Ideation sessions

• Information Architecture sessions

• Usability tests

• Design Crit & Review sessions (wireframes, hi-def, and prototypes)

• Created extensive handoff documentation

• Spent hours working alongside developers, translating design into code

• Lots more…

Different to other projects in the bank, we got Angular Material approved as a front-end framework of choice (a decision made before my time). I ideated in Miro and on MS Teams, designed everything in Figma, and created a Design System from a mix of vanilla angular material components (found in multiple libraries in the Figma community and across other Material based resources) and custom components (built up from core angular material elements) where needed and applicable.

I have much more to say about this, so consider this a conversation starter…

Other important details:

Project: Credit Platform for FirstRand

Bank: RMB

Hiring consultancy: Webtonic