What happens when a product is built not from metrics, but from an idea? The Spheres story (Category Product Management)
What happens when a product is built not from metrics, but from an idea? The Spheres story (Rubric #ProductManagement)
This one report My colleague, Ivan Turlaev, who is already more 8 He has been developing mobile applications in T-Bank for years. The report was devoted to the creation and implementation of a new concept of the banking application – “Sphere”. The premise is simple: modern banking applications are designed the same way. Accounts, cards, payments, loans – all are laid out in the usual categories. Banks, focusing on metrics and copying each other, produce similar solutions. But we decided to look at the application not from the company’s side, but from the client’s side and think, what if we group services not by banking products, but by human needs? So the idea of the Spheres came about. This concept was not born on the basis of numbers or business plans – it arose from the desire to make the service understandable and useful for the person.
To come up with a bold idea is not enough, it needs to be implemented. The development of the Spheres required combining the efforts of many disparate teams. T-Bank has different directions (cards, loans, payments, insurance, travel, etc.) They had goals and metrics. Uniting them around a new concept was not easy. It was necessary to convince managers and developers to accept a common idea and find a common language with them. At the same time, it was impossible to abandon current projects.
The project was helped by a single vision, which was prepared by the team as a visual concept of the new interface. Seeing the whole image of the future product, developers and managers were able to interact more effectively. Discussions have shifted from narrow metrics to user experience: a focus on how to make people more comfortable. A single design concept acted as a “glue” that unites the teams. It was important to regularly check with the original plan and be persistent.
It was based on a design concept. The team deliberately moved away from the banking interface templates. The goal is to make the interface speak the language of life situations, not banking products. Designers experimented with navigation and visual style, moving away from overloaded lists and menus. On the main screen, the user immediately sees the key areas of his life instead of a long list of services. As a result, at the first stage, the first four Spheres appeared in the T-Bank application: Shopping, Home, Auto and Travel. Each became a single center for its theme, combining all related services of the bank and partners. For example, “House” collected in one place utility bills, housing insurance and home purchases. And "Auto" combined everything for car owners: from fines and refueling to insurance and maintenance. This approach differed sharply from the traditional one: before these operations were scattered in different sections, and now the client solves the whole problem without switching between tabs.
For engineers, the project “Sphere” was also a test. It was necessary to integrate many different systems – internal and external – into a single whole. In fact, the team created a super-appament platform where heterogeneous modules work in concert for the sake of the overall scenario. The architecture required flexibility: unified APIs, shared navigation, a single notification system – all for a seamless UX. Backend and frontend solutions were made with an eye on the intended user experience, so that the technical implementation did not spoil the UX.
As for the lessons learned, I would like to note the following: Big changes are born from bold hypotheses and here metrics do not always solve, but it will not be possible to optimize the idea without them. User scenarios are more important than company structure. Applications of some companies reflect their internal structure (Each department has its own section). In the spheres, we went from user scenarios, and then came to the reorganization of the structure of departments within the company. (I'm talking about it. wrote) For big changes, a single vision and communication around it are important. Without a single goal, many teams cannot work together.
#Management #Design #Engineering #Leadership #Project #Metrics #Philosophy