Yoco · 2017 to 2019

The Cold Start

~50,000phones and tablets the app launched to
One continuous line rises from a flat baseline into a seedling with two leaves

The problem

A payments company with no product function. No OKRs, no discovery practice, no product hires.

What I did

As the first product hire, I set the first OKRs and started a discovery practice. Made the first product hires across QA, product and scrum.

Then I got out of the building. I built a data dashboard to focus customer visits, ran those visits myself, and personally identified 30+ merchants whose needs steered the roadmap.

The result

The Yoco app (version 2, iOS and Android) launched to ~50,000 phones and tablets. The onboarding dashboard rebuild cut time-to-value by 10% in a quarter. The roadmap was steered by merchants I had met myself, not by assumption.

Why it matters

I do not need a function to already exist. Give me a blank page and real customers, and the practice gets built around them.