Create an invoice from the Dashboard – customise the logo and colour settings, add product details, discounts, tax rates and more.
Pomelo
Launched Jan 2022
Product design
Product management
Web
Pomelo allows businesses to accept over 25 payment methods including digital wallets, cryptocurrencies and bank transfers from major credit cards such as MasterCard to localised payment methods such as iDEAL, Pomelo offers a whole range of ways to pay.
Many merchants struggle to track and manage payments efficiently, leading to delays in receiving payment and the need to chase customers for payment.
Allow merchants to send professional invoices to their customers clients easily.
Collaborated with internal and external stakeholders to lead the design process from requirements gathering to delivery.
In early 2021, we conducted user interviews with new and existing merchants, specifically targeting the construction industry. We found that many merchants require an invoicing solution as their core payment need.
In addition, our key whitelabel client, the Bank of Maldives, also requested this feature for their top three merchants who were processing large volumes of payments monthly through our payment link solution.
Invoices move through different statuses from the time they’re created in the draft to when they’re paid. These statuses include Draft, Unpaid, Overdue, Paid, and Archived.
Based on our research findings, we identified several requirements for the invoicing solution.
These included the following themes, allowing merchants to easily understand where an invoice is in the workflow, enabling merchants to encourage customers to pay invoices without needing to chase them by email, and providing merchants with the ability to customise their invoices with their own invoice ID, payment terms, products, and taxes.
I identified the following goals based on the requirements gathering and understanding of the payment process.
How might be design a solutions that highlights the status of an invoice to ensure merchants can easily understand where the invoice is in the workflow?
How might we help merchants encourage customers to pay an invoice without them having to chase by email?
How might we allow merchants to customise their invoices with their own invoice ID, payments terms, products and taxes?
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You can store important invoice information in the Customer directory. Here you can add the personal details, invoice IDs, and tax information that is required to bill a customer for one-off invoices
Create an invoice and collect payment from the Dashboard. Here you can create an invoice that includes: An itemised list, cost, quantity, taxes for each item, discounts, customer details, invoice ID and payment terms.
Add company details, invoice branding, invoice pre-fix, reminder frequency and set up your payment terms.
During my time working on this product, I experienced the following:
Jumped into the project too fast and caused a disconnect
I dove headfirst into the project without taking the time to engage other stakeholders, which ultimately led to a significant disconnect. Initially, three crucial clients expressed a strong interest in a particular feature and were willing to participate in interviews to convey their requirements, which I took advantage of. However, in hindsight, it would have been advantageous to pause and involve additional stakeholders internally. While I did engage key stakeholders at the project's outset and conclusion, this approach resulted in a substantial disconnect among the business, product, and engineering teams. Recognising this disconnect, I had to invest a significant amount of time to realign all parties involved.
Lack of ownership from the business/commercial team
There was an apparent reason to create this product based on user interviews and requests from existing merchants. However, once I began the product design work, no stakeholder wanted to take any ownership of this product from a business and commercial aspect.
The build took longer than expected
We had been building out the tech team for the last six months and finally had a team size that could handle building a few products at once. As the tech team was new, they relied on the CTO and head of engineering to create a clear implementation plan for the dev team to work on the invoicing solution; this meant the team was always waiting on a clear implementation plan before they could begin working.
No go-to-market plan
As there was no clear business stakeholder, no one within the business was willing to help create a go-to-market plan for this product.
No alignment between the CTO and CEO
The CTO had me initiate the conversations with the clients on what they would be in an invoicing solution which was great as we gathered essential insights. However, the CEO was not aligned on if this solution was the correct path for Pomelo, so there was constant pushback and no buy-in across the company as the CEO and CTO were not aligned. Based on the above, this product was a massive failure for Pomelo.
Ensure a business owner/stakeholder is on board from the start
I needed a clear business owner who could sell this product to the rest of the company, existing and new merchants.
Define the problem, use case and why we are doing this
Although I created competitor analysis, user flows, full design specs for the development team and user guides for the account management team. Internally what was needed was the problem, use case and why we are doing this in a clear format for people to understand before they dove deeper into the product.
Encouraged more transparency with the scrum team
The CTO and head of engineering had insisted on them creating clear implementation plans. However, I could have also stressed the importance of the refinement and grooming sessions with the whole scrum team to ensure they had a chance to ask me questions about the designs and flows.
