I was grateful to intern with Visa’s Digital Payments Product Commercialization Team over the summer. My team—and the overarching digital payments product platform—offered incredible mentorship. Interacting with various product managers in Visa was essential in learning how to be a successful product manager.
I was tasked with developing Go to Market Strategies and supporting our e-commerce partners to accelerate adoption of Visa Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) .
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I cannot share all of my final presentation here - this is a general overview of my project, but please don’t hesitate to contact me to learn more!
Being a new team member- in some ways – had its advantages. It forced me to ask more questions and learn about the product from the ground up. What is the unique value proposition? Do merchants and acquirers resonate with it? Is there a demand for something like this in the market and how can I show it? At its core, SRC is designed to eliminate guest check out, create a frictionless shopping experience, and lower cart abandonment rates.
The first few weeks I met with stakeholders to learn about SRC from a technical and commercial standpoint. Most importantly, I learned about the challenges it may face.
Problem Statement:
“The lack of partner tools and acceptance materials hinders Visa’s ability to drive fast pace adoption of SRC. ”
This is a general overview of my entire project at Visa. I have omitted certain numbers and examples, but this highlights my thought process, conclusions, and takeaways.
Market Planning & Analytics
Competitive Landscape
Familiarizing myself with current trends in the e-commerce market, I pinpointed high growth distribution channels. Mobile commerce, for example, is projected to represent a significant amount of online sales.
Identify Partners
I identified potential partners and compared them by completing a SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) analysis of each. Based on my own research and participation in client meetings, I was then able to determine their pain points.
Merchant Segments
This is where my analytical skills (and excel skills) became handy. I obtained a list of the top e-commerce merchants and the region-wide contributions to the overall payment volume. Then, I positioned merchants into 3 tiers: mobile app functionality, e-commerce payment volume, and trends in the e-commerce market.
Use Cases
Based on my target merchant list and segmentation analysis, I identified 4 central use cases.
Partner Support
Pain Points
I really had to embody the voice of the customer - why SRC is an important alternative to guest checkout? I also learned about client perspectives from product managers leading the Visa Ready Portal: Visa’s central CRM service.
List Solutions
I spent most of my time at the white board during this process, brainstorming solutions to the pain points I came up with. This was interesting. Some problems could be solved with small changes while others had much bolder solutions.
Build Features
Entice, Enter, Engage, Extend. My customer journey map demonstrated how the user would interact with an SRC partnership portal. This helped me draft sub-components to best suit their needs.
Prioritize Features
I grouped features by product roadmap themes in order to avoid “choice paralysis”. What features align best with the product vision? What features address our most pressing customer pain point? I concluded that the inability to articulate SRC’s value proposition to merchants is the greatest problem our partners will face.
Takeaways
At the end of my internship, I presented my project to my team and key stakeholders within the entire global and NA digital products teams. My analytical work and partner portal framework was even adapted by Visa product teams.
Understand the Value Proposition of a Product First. My initial unfamiliarity with SRC, actually helped me in the long run. I learned about the product from various people representing different sectors of the company. Through my eagerness to fully understand the product, I was able to find ways to enhance SRC’s value proposition.
Customer Understanding and Awareness is key.
Embrace different perspectives. My internship overall taught me the value of cross functional collaboration. I had to reach out to people for both data pertaining to the product, and general feedback. I spoke to people about their journey to Visa (and everyone's was different) and their current goals. In doing so I was able to learn more about the company and the products themselves.