Ford Credit China - WeChat

Project Summary

China has a different mentality when it comes to loans, they aren’t a common aspect of daily life. People save up to buy houses and cars outright, so when Ford decided to offer cars in China on “credit” it was an emerging enterprise. 

Ford needed a customer facing mobile application to go along with this new service, and they wanted it fast. Ford partnered with Pivotal Labs to build and deploy a lean MVP, and train their in-house team in modern agile software delivery.

The Challenge

To achieve near term business goals, this project had some important criteria. First, a way for people to manage their car payments and submit claims when accidents occur. Second, the app would be integrated with WeCha, a common practice of websites and services in China. And lastly, Ford needed a permanent team equipped to handle maintenance, growth and additional feature development. 

My  Role

During my time on this project, I served a dual role as product manager and product designer. My key responsibilities were stakeholder communication, backlog management, and working directly with the design agency to develop necessary assets. I also was responsible for training the Ford India product manager in Agile product management, and the Ford India UX designer in agile product design.

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The Global team 

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During this project, we worked with Stakeholders located in China and a software development team located in Chennai India. The difference in time zones meant we had to be flexible with our schedules. Meeting early in the morning was the only time to sync up as a full group, so we set up crack-of-dawn weekly syncs to communicate progress and our current roadmap to the stakeholders in China. 

We worked with the product team in India daily. Our “learn by doing” approach enabled them in agile development, design and product management skills as we built the application together. 

It was an incredible learning experience to work out how to communicate effectively to two different cultures at the same time. In both cases I found that people will often communicate understanding and alignment out of politeness, and while that may not cause a problem in the short term, it will always come back to bite you later. 

My stakeholder communication strategies morphed into extreme over communication as the product moved along. From a coaching perspective, I often asked my India colleagues to explain to me not only what we were doing, but why.

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Integrating with WeChat

Another highlight of this project was our integration with the WeChat platform. It drove me to work closely with the engineers and dig deep into technical specifications. 

To de-risk both design and technical feasibility, it was critical to write full slice (front-end to back-end) stories. The lead engineer and I worked hand in hand to write cohesive stories meeting technical specifications for both integrating with WeChat, as well as Ford systems. 

From a design perspective, it was really interesting to explore the WeChat mindset of engaging with the internet. The established patterns and best practices were crucial to learn and follow.

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User experience and interaction design 

For the baseline user experience, Ford hired a design agency they commonly used for web design in China. The agency provided our team with mockups that we used to define the roadmap for building and releasing the application. I was responsible for interpreting the static mockups for the expected user flows, and breaking those down to identify the lean subset of features and order of operations. 

With a heuristic evaluation approach, I determined priority improvements to the provided design. Priority improvements to user experience were mainly interaction design, especially in regards to errors handling from both a user and technical perspective. The IxD states that provide user affordances and feedback when navigating the application were also a priority. 

I worked with the design agency for updates and revisions, and worked with the provided design files to provide relevant assets for the developers.

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Product management

Using a story mapping technique, we outlined the potential features and organized them by priority. We needed to focus first on an MVP, leaving the nice to haves for down the line. Our lean startup strategy would allow the business to release quicker and validate their solutions with actual Chinese customers.

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After validating the user flows, incorporating interaction design, and pairing down feature sets to the minimum viable product, I focused my PM training on story writing. Together we broke down identified features into cohesive user stories to support multiple workstreams. 

I worked one on one with my product manager pair to teach story writing from a user perspective and how to write valid acceptance criteria. I also worked with her to identify when to pull in engineering for their feedback and when to collaborate with engineering on technical stories.

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Onsite at Ford India

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Our Pivotal Labs team traveled to India and worked out of the Ford India offices to build relationships and foster better communication. The experience greatly excelled the learning and enablement of the India team. We were able to establish trust and comradery, and work in-person on specific skills. 

We worked together to identify gaps in skill sets that we could focus on during our working time together. Once the MVP feature set was built and pushed to production, the Ford India team felt confident in carrying on with feature development to continue to enhance the WeChat app.

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Result

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The most challenging aspect of this project was not delivery, it was establishing a competent team with effective stakeholder support. 

Ford knew exactly what they wanted to build, but the stakeholders and the team were new to Agile. They weren’t used to dealing with concerns regarding platform, stability, or security for sensitive customer data. Communicating consistently with stakeholders allowed us to run into misalignment in expectations quickly. Being direct and honest about the scope and the capabilities of the team was the driving force in coming to alignment.

Through our engagement with Ford Credit China we delivered a stable MVP, enabled an agile software team and began the shift of their organization from waterfall to agile on a global scale.