Enabling Verizon customers to make digital purchases by charging them to their Verizon bill.
(2022 - Present) - Product Manager / Technical Product Lead
Direct Carrier Billing is a secure payment method popular in countries outside of the United States. Why?
Access. It enables virtually anyone with a phone to make a purchase that can be charged to their mobile bill using just their phone number and a one time passcode sent to their phone. Mobile carrier customers automatically have access, no signup needed. This allows the unbanked to access digital purchases and everyone can remember their phone number unlike credit card details. So why was Verizon the only carrier allowing this in the United States?
Unlike other countries, the US has a very high credit card penetration (77% of consumers older than 18). On top of that, a Consent Decree from the FCC decimated the service in the US in 2014 for all carriers. It found that carrier customers were being charged for things that they were unaware of i.e. Premium SMS a service charging customers on behalf of merchants when they respond in a certain way via SMS. Carriers were handed a $90M dollar fine and strict regulations that ultimately led to all carriers except Verizon leaving the business.
While Verizon continued operating Direct Carrier Billing, it was clearly severely crippled. It relied on app stores like Google Play Store and Microsoft Store to keep it afloat. Prior to when I joined the project, it was announced that Google was ending it's Direct Carrier Billing relationship with Verizon due both parties being unable to come to an agreement on which entity should be the Merchant of Record (the legal entity that collects sales tax, ensuring Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance, and honoring refunds and chargebacks). Despite these major setbacks, the product was organically growing without marketing.
The challenge was: How do we grow this crippled product into a popular payment option for consumers that gives Verizon a competitive edge?
In 2022, I took over DCB (Direct Carrier Billing) to grow it by increasing Product Revenue and Monthly Active Users, while reducing DCB customer support calls, which were the highest cost.
The first thing I did was conduct customer research. I found that our core customers are younger audiences aged 18 - 35 that used DCB primarily to pay for gaming subscriptions and in-game currencies. This segment was growing organically 5% Month over Month. This informed me and my commercial counterpart's strategy to onboard what we called Big Fish, big brand merchants that resonated with our customer base that would help market and legitimize the service while generating significant revenue. We were able to sign on merchants in gaming, streaming, and online dating worth $7M a year in Contract Value.
I was responsible for onboarding these merchants and realized it was an extremely inefficient process - taking 3 months to essentially add a few SKUs to a catalog. To address this, I began by tracking the lead times of all the deliverables. The longest lead times was our Legal and Compliance teams signing off on the merchants purchase experience. Remember, the Consent Decree? We had to make sure it was crystal clear that the customer knew they were making a purchase that would show up on their Verizon Bill. I addressed this by creating a templated purchase flow approved by our Legal and Compliance teams that I shared with new merchants to expedite the process. I even brought together a cross-functional team to specifically focus on onboarding merchants and made a process flow to keep us aligned. As a result, we reduced the overall time to onboard a merchant from 3 months down to only 1 month.
A significant amount of customers were unable to make purchases due to downtime caused by system maintenance of archaic tech, boy were there a lot of outages. On top of that, account owners would forget about charges or would be unaware of purchases that their children made, leading to increased support calls and carrier churn. It was clear that we needed to revamp the product from the ground up if we wanted to make this work. To get this project off the ground I worked closely with a designer to design a new UX that had gone through many reviews with teams from services that DCB relied on. To address the service reliability, transaction speed, and onboarding experience, my engineers and I decided it would be best to rearchitect the entire product. After months of gathering stakeholder feedback and getting buy in, we presented the project to leadership and finally got almost a $1M in funding to tackle this giant project.
The past couple months I've been working directly with a software architect to define the new DCB architecture. All the while I worked with our engineering teams to address speed and reliability in the medium term by launching a new set of APIs for our merchants that reduced transaction speed by 27%.
What I did well:
I did a good job identifying opportunities and areas of improvements as well as prioritizing the work needed to improve the product. I was also able to guide my designer to design a quite compelling and beautify UX. The other major part of this role was stakeholder management. I was able to coordinate merchants, partners, legal, compliance, accounting, internal services teams, and leadership for the successful launch of several large merchants and API changes. Even when the product wasn't performing well (outages) I was able to maintain a positive relationship with large merchants like Microsoft which kept the partnership alive.
What I could have done better:
I admit the product's legacy architecture really holds the product back but we had a service reliability team who's job was to avoid outages. We had too many outages. I could have influenced that team to take larger steps earlier to better improve maintenance processes and partner communication. We eventually took the right steps to almost completely eliminate outages but if I had done it sooner we would have saved us a lot of headache.
What I learned:
As the Product Lead there is a lot more more scope in this role than others that I've held. I learned to manage up, down, and across the organization. And through the system architecture design process, I'm learning a great deal about APIs, databases, and networks. The biggest takeaway though, so far, is that a team can move mountains when they're motivated and coordinated. I was able to get the team to launch a new set of APIs and revamp their service maintenance processes quickly once I shared how critical these steps were for a big brand merchant that they all knew and respected.
Old Purchase Flow Template Draft for Merchants
Onboarding Work Flow Draft
UX Brainstorming
Wireframe Drafts
