About My Experience Flashcards
Conflicts:
What was the hardest decision you had to make? And why?
Nugget:
Once I had to stop everyone from doing whatever they were doing and focus on on delivering something really fast that was needed for legal reasons.
Situation:
When I was working at HOLD, we were doing a Revolut for crypto currencies and we needed to obey a very strict legal framework and apply for several money related licenses.
We were based in Malta and sudently the we legal landscape changed there and we needed another license to operate there. That license would take at least a year to obtain and we could not operate without it. Unless we became operational in a month, then we would have a bigger time to apply for it. Well we were not operational yet and weren’t ready to be.
We would have to be really soon.
Task:
We had to figure out a way to make a meaningful product in the shortest amount of time and that would make at least a few people interested in using it so that we were “operational”. If we did that, we wouldn’t have to wait a full year to be live with our “real” product.
Action:
I found out that very minimum compliant product was a Bitcoin to euro converter, and then we would send the euros to a bank account. Although we were building HOLD to be a mobile App, talking with developers, I understood web would be much faster to develop. I had to take FÉ developers from working in our app to work on a scrappy website. And when done we had to put low conversions rates that would make it our very little product desirable to be used.
Results:
At the end we had users converting using our web app and we were approved as an already operating company. Before an year was passed we had our mobile app operating as well, we killed the web app and migrated the users to mobile. At the end of the year, we had that license to operate with crypto and remained completely legal all the way through.
Conflicts:
Tell me about a time you had trouble earning buy in from colleagues and other stakeholders
Nugget:
I once had a hard rime combing stakeholders of giving up a UI idea they had and were really attached to.
Situation:
At Euronext we were building a CRM managing investors. We had a table of investors and investors could have child investors that we were calling Funds.
Well our contacts at Euronext were pretty attached to an ideia they had which was to have the funds nested inside the investors, they even made a mock up and it looked pretty good on paper. It did not work for sorting and filters and it was a nightmare to have it with pagination and it would decrease the performance of that table hugely.
Task
So I had to explained them that and that we would be better with displaying them separately and having 2 columns, one for identifying the parent and other for the child, if there were any.
Action:
I wrote a list of of pros and cons of both approaches and I though it was pretty obvious that the option they proposed was causing more issues than benefits.
Well it was not for them. Their decision given the problems, was to ignore filtering and sorting on the fund level. Not the decision I was expecting at all since the info on the fund level is genetically even more important than on the parent investor.
I concluded that the problem was not well understood then and I starting thinking about a way to explain it better.
That’s when I build a simple prototype of both version use a spreadsheet and dummy data and gave it to them for them to experience themselves.
Result:
An the ideia was sold, they understood the issues of their idea and bought the alternative idea.
Successes: hold KYC
Nugget:
At hold we had a huge activation process and by breaking it down the improvements here huge.
Situation:
After a user registered, he had to go through a Profile Verification process in order to use the product. And only 20% of users were doing it, the other ones would give up.
Task
We had to increase that percentage, as we were not taking advantage of all the people interested.
Actions
I negotiated with the compliance team and we got to an agreement. I could break down the Profile Verification process into tiers. The users would very easily go to the first tier and be able to transact and activate their account. Then the more they transacted, the more we would ask about them. The more we knew about them, the more they would be able to transact. And it was covered in terms of compliance as the risky users that we didn’t know much about, could not do big operations anyway.
Results
The results were great. The activation rate in a week of newly registered users went up from 20% to 80%.
Successes: hold staking
Nugget:
At Hold we provided lower prices to people that stacked their assets in there.
Situation:
In crypto the savvy users change from platform to platform all the time, according the the best conversion prices, they are always doing conversions. They were leaving Hold as well.
Task:
We had to provide them a reason to stay, more than the usability of it. That was lower prices, but it was not possible to lower them all, it was not sustainable for the business. Our CFO would kill us if we did that.
Action:
So what I did was to create a kind of loyalty program. Users that committed to keep some of their assets of our staking pots, they would get better conversion prices.
Result:
And yeah 15% of our users did that. And those users that had staked also started converting more through Hold. The engagement for those users also increased.
Successes: smartbox availability issue - bedbanks
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Successes: smartbox extra nights
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Successes: smartbox plus
Nugget:
Situation: At smartbox (the gift boxes with a catalog of experiences you can choose from) one of the biggest issues is to assure the availability of the partners. You receive a smartbox, which is great, but then you have a hard time booking an experience. We are trying to do a lot of things to improve that, like integrating with booking third parties. But while doing that we experimented with monetizing
Task:
Leadership
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Mistakes:
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