Anna Albert is a product manager at Riverty, a leading consumer touchpoint products used by 12 million people yearly. Anna is also the organizer of the ProductTank Tallinn meetup that brings together 700 professionals from Estonian product community. Having over six years of experience in software development management, Anna started her career as a project manager and transformed into a product manager role, successfully practicing it in growing startups and large international enterprises.
We talked about how the ProductTank community in Estonia got started, how to navigate regulatory requirements, what methods can be used to gather insights into user behavior and preferences, the main difference between regular B2B/B2C and B2B2C product management, and what metrics Anna uses to evaluate the success of a B2B2C product.
You organize ProductTank Community meetups in Tallinn, Estonia. Could you please tell us more about the ProductTank community and its benefits for product professionals?
It started because there was no place for product people to gather, share ideas, and learn from each other. From that, ProductTank meetups spread all over the world. At one point, they were scaled across 200 cities.
When you open a ProductTank in your city, it’s called a Chapter. Certain guidelines dictated by MindProduct require you to follow a specific structure format and have at least four events per year to comply with their guidelines.
I’m an advocate of human-centricity, and Riverty is also positioning itself as one of the most human-centric FinTech companies. We’re not a B2C business; instead, we focus on B2B2C, so customers of our clients use our products. That’s why human-centricity is divided into client and consumer perspectives. I’m on the consumer side and focus on how to make sure the customer is in the middle of our products and how we ensure that their needs and values are covered.
Regarding the insights, I don’t have direct control over consumers and people who actually use our ‘Buy now, Pay Later’ product, and I only see transactional information—whether they pay in time or not, whether they end up in debt collection, etc. Here, it’s a bit challenging, but one of the first things I took into consideration is inbound customer support, as we’re also offering customer support service at Riverty. Inbound customer support insights are one of the main places to learn what problems consumers face when using the product. So, we have the data about it to start making assumptions or research on how to improve certain things and measure whether something has improved.
Secondly, we’re conducting research. It can be direct. We’re, for example, buying off claims, meaning we own that consumer relationship and can reach out to those consumers. With the help of a user research partner, we also conduct studies to understand the customer better. We’re doing user testing before launching any bigger initiatives, showing our prototypes, and asking questions to understand what is clear and what is not to ensure everything makes sense for the end consumer.
Last but not least, the key thing is company strategy. Usually, there are main KPIs that we want to achieve - for example, we want fewer consumers ending up in debt collection or fewer consumers who receive payment reminders. Out of those KPIs, I also have dashboards to look at within my product and see how different KPIs impact results, and sometimes, it’s really important to dig deeper to understand what caused those results.
Of course, some still want to provide a unified product offering, but I’ve seen that in B2B, a lot of different customization and meeting specific customer needs are normal.
In B2C, the company is focused on the customer/consumer who uses the product. Here, the purpose is to scale this product to a wider audience. So challenges are also different - you want to go out to market as fast as possible, you want to start acquiring users as fast as possible, you also have direct control over customers' preferences, and you can ask for feedback to conduct research. The landscape is much more vibrant and dynamic, but there are also different challenges based on your business model.From the consumer side, metrics may vary depending on the company's strategy and core focus, as some companies might be more white-labeled and they don’t really handle and take ownership of the whole consumer journey. But if they do, for example, in our case, then there are certain metrics that we care about - payment acceptance rate (how many consumers are accepted by the risk check before they’re allowed to use the Buy Now, Pay Later product), the ratio of users who paid on time or paying reminders. For example, in the Netherlands, the timeline between the moment the user orders something until they might end up in debt collection is 72 days, and during this time period, they receive five different reminders. So we do our best to ensure they don’t end up in debt collection, but some people still do. We’re tracking each of these steps/touchpoints. We also provide different payment options - so people can pay with a card, manual bank transfer, or direct debit. It’s interesting to see the perspectives towards the share on different payment methods because there are ones we’d prefer because their maintenance costs the company less money, etc.
We also send a lot of communication (email, physical letters, SMS) to the users because of all these reminders, and we’re curious about the deliverability of those messages. There might be different reasons—people’s inboxes are full, and the email didn’t reach them, or, for example, there was some update to the message provider we used, and something went wrong. So, along with this email-sending journey, we also track deliverability rates and how many people marked us as spam to ensure that as many consumers as possible receive our digital communication, as this is the most preferred method of communication, but we also send out physical communication.