Talking product with Amanda Ralph
Amanda Ralph is the founder of the Product Women Community. She's worked in senior roles at places like Comm Bank, Aware Super, Medibank and Qantas. She’s just finished a spell at Canva, where she was leading Accessibility Design.
Impala founder, Cam McKay, enjoyed a wide ranging conversation about all things product with Amanda on our Leaps & Bounds podcast. You can listen to the full chat on your preferred podcast platform, but here’s just a small taste of what Amanda had to say about one of her first product initiatives.
Beginning to develop a product mindset
“I actually started my career in marketing. I was asked by the company I was working for to rationalise and optimize a legacy portfolio that had been acquired as part of a major acquisition. This got me into thinking about product.
At that time, the internet was just coming into play. Technologies were becoming more ubiquitous and people were starting to access their products and services from different devices.
Product mindset wasn’t really a term back then, but I'm naturally curious, so I started exploring thought leaders that I was a fan of. People like Clayton Christensen, who had really good thinking around exploring a problem space to find a need, was really the start of my product journey.”
User testing and research
“One of the things I did at NAB was a first of its kind mobile payments pilot with Telstra and Visa. From there we took the core tech platforms of that mobile payments capability and commercialised PayWave. It was a really great learning experience.
We did a lot of user testing, a lot of ethnographic research. It was my first foray into deep customer discovery, just watching how people went about their day. How they used their card when they were shopping and what the opportunities might be in terms of the value of the PayWave proposition.
We launched it in, I think, 2008. It was really challenging and we also had the GFC thrown in. So it was right at the crux of when that was happening and there was a lot of contraction of the market.”
Customer first thinking
“PayWave was really interesting because we had a customer problem, in terms of customers wanting to make micropayments, quick transactions where they could just tap their card. We saw people, a cup of coffee in one hand, or holding a child with bags of shopping on their arm. The ability to just tap and go was something that really did deliver them value.
On the other side of course, we had the merchants, who were understandably concerned about the cost drivers of processing micropayments, and for their staff in terms of managing fraud and all the things that they have to consider.
So in the process of discovery, we realised we had to not just manage the customer side of things when using the card, but also manage for the merchant in terms of the experience that we would deliver to them, both in terms of pricing of those micropayments and also the experience at the payment terminal or eftpos machine.”
Building out the product roadmap
“I like to be doing discovery continuously, so I tend to run it in parallel with a delivery roadmap for greater continuity. That way you’re receiving those insights and feeding them into your product strategy.
You really need to make sure your proposition is getting to market, that you can test the value, test the customer demand if you like, or feature that you're trying to release.
I'm a fan of identifying the slice of value rather than the breadth of value. And from a discovery perspective, running that in parallel as you go through the delivery process. Otherwise you can over-engineer it and get a little stuck in the analysis.”
You can listen to Cam McKay’s conversation with Amanda Ralph in full on the Leaps & Bounds podcast. You’ll find it on your preferred podcast platform. Here’s a direct link to Amanda's episode on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/msc5mm6x
