Teen banking debit card and app designed for the family.
(2022) - Product Manager, Consumer / Growth
Verizon Family Money was a promising debit card and app for kids with financial education included that allowed parents to supervise their spending. Isn't Verizon a telecom company? Why would Verizon want to be in this business in the first place?
For some background, Verizon has been trying hard to evolve the business from a telecom company to be a tech company. That's why it acquired Yahoo! back in 2016. Around the same time, a product innovation group, that later became an internal startup, was formed called Verizon Fintech. It focused on incubating finance related products that aligned with Verizon's strengths as a business. They successfully launched the Verizon Visa Card in 2020 that quickly became a hit with Verizon customers which in turn became a great retention mechanism to keep Verizon customers. How does this relate to Family Money?
The Verizon Visa Card became popular with the account owners or account managers but there were a lot of Verizon's customers who couldn't use it. A significant portion of those customers are children. Market research also found that there was a growing need for kids to make cashless payments. Armed with the experience from the Verizon Visa Card, a large addressable customer base, and validation from the market research insights, the team incepted Verizon Family Money and launched it in 2021 after 4 years of incubation. This time, both Verizon and Non-Verizon customers could use this app and card. All they needed to do was download the app, sign up for a debit card, and pay a $5.99 per month fee for up to 5 kids.
The challenge was: How do we get customers? (this was difficult despite Verizon's large customer base)
I joined the Family Money team in January of 2022 to improve user growth. I focused on driving KPIs like customer signups and retention.
When I first talked with my colleagues and looked at the data it was clear the product was struggling with growth so my first project was to find out why. These were the challenges I identified:
1) The Verizon branding and positioning was confusing, especially non-Verizon customers
2) Product offering lacked incentives to attract Verizon customers to use it over competitors
3) We lacked feature parity among competitors like Greenlight, GoHenry, Step, and Current
4) Strict KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements added friction to the signup process
To address these issues I worked with Product Marketing to change the app category and messaging on App stores from "Education" to "Finance". I also ideated several solutions with Product Marketing and Product team to provide discounts for Verizon customers via phone number verification during signup though this was never implemented. I identified features like allowing friends and family gifting, a feature that competitors had that Family Money didn't by testing out competing products. Lastly, I helped redesign the onboarding process by removing steps, reducing clutter on pages, and adding progress bars. With some of these suggestions implemented, we increased downloads and reduced drop off in the signup process over the course of 3 months. This resulted in net new paying customers doubling week over week when compared to before.
Soon I took ownership of the Family Money website where I led a team of engineers, designers, and copywriters to improve download conversion and help center UX. To drive downloads, we A/B tested CTA (call to action) language and tested download button features based on device. We landed on a feature that sent download links to users via SMS when they input their phone numbers using the desktop site. That contributed to a 17% jump in downloads. On the support side, I reduced the number of clicks needed to find support articles from 5 to 3 by flattening the folder structure. I also worked with designers to prototype a new Help Center that would further improve the user experience.
I helped launch the Refer a Friend program by defining the web experience which included creating a landing page, banners, and support documentation. Once this program was launched it felt like we were at the cusp of something big and the numbers were starting to reflect those thoughts. But just as we gained momentum to change the charts into a hockey stick, leadership decided to shut it down to cut costs... Along with many other products at Verizon we were cut because we did not hit a revenue threshold. This was against the backdrop of the post pandemic recession that caused mass layoffs in 2022. I was fortunate to not be affected but that was not the case for some of my amazing colleagues. Myself and other leads of key areas of the product were to stay and sunset the product. Not a fun thing to do but it was a learning experience for sure.
What I did well:
Despite being a new Product Manager on the team I was able to get buy in and support for my ideas from the start. Looking back, I was able to achieve that by having well research and reasoned points of view that was communicated clearly. The market research I did and the data analysis I conducted gave validity to my points of view. From there I also developed and articulated a clear product vision which helped motivate the cross functional team I led to execute on features like the SMS download feature and the successful launch of the Refer a Friend program.
What I could have done better:
Product Velocity was a challenge. I worked with an offshore development team as well as our partner bank, which had to approve every change in messaging and feature we wanted to launch. If we moved faster to start the hockey stick growth earlier, the story may have been different for leadership and I wonder if the product would have survived. Another critique I have for myself is not connecting with users directly and using the product personally. I didn't use the app on a regular basis since I wasn't a parent but I should have talked to real users despite the internal process of doing this was surprisingly difficult.
What I learned:
This was my first FinTech experience so I learned a lot about the compliance and legal work required to being in the FinTech space. I learned a great deal about establishing and tracking metrics specifically growth metrics when I worked with data engineers to automate the reporting using ThoughtSpot. The biggest takeaway from this experience though was a quote I got from my manager and mentor, Nicholas Robinson. I'm paraphrasing here but it went like this: "new products, especially those that aren't core products to the business, must move quickly to show progress otherwise they will get killed off".
Positioning Research
Onboarding Flow Research
Help Center Prototypes
Family Money Home Page
Refer a Friend Page
Phone Number to Download Feature
