Product Management; Banking for Small Business With TD

My Role: Product manager

Project Goal: To create a product to help increase TD's small business banking clientele.

Background:

In November 2018 I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in a hackathon hosted by the University of Waterloo's Stratford campus, sponsored by TD and Deloitte Digital. At this event, I worked with a group of my fellow 2nd year Global Business and Digital Arts students to try and creatively solve the challenge presented by TD.

Out of over 100 students, my team was able to place in the top 3 teams and won the opportunity to present our solution at TD's head office in downtown Toronto. To get started, teams at the event were given this prompt;

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TD's Small Business Banking is interested in identifying opportunities to deepen and strengthen the relationships they have with small businesses.

How might we reward small business banking customers for their ongoing business and relationship so that they are incentivized to motivate them to centralize financial-related tasks with TD.

- uXperience Design Camp

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Research:

As we only had about 12 hours in a one day period to start from scratch and work to create a polished final product with an accompanying pitch, we started right away. After receiving this prompt, our team quickly began researching the needs of our target market though both interviews and secondary research. I led our team in assigning roles to team members based on their background and skills in order to divide and conquer this project. As soon as we finished our research as a team, we split our team in half with some team members working on visual design and others on the business plan/presentation.

Our solution built on an extension of on of TD's products at the time. We found through our research, that TD already had the resources to help small businesses and didn't need to build something new. This helped our team to focus our solution in a new how might we statement;

"How might we, make big data [collected by TD] useful and easily accessible for small business owners, allowing them to get insights to help make decisions and have access to tools/products they need from TD"

Final Solution:

Our project focused on a feasible solution that could be quick to implement. We called it the Know My Business widget, and it's implementation would be to the already existing TD website and small business account portal. This widget would give the small business owner a visual breakdown of their spending into different categories like 'Marketing, Supplies, Rent' and other areas that would see regular spending. Along with this breakdown, there would also be recommendations on what kinds of TD products might help them reach their financial business goals in each category. In this product both the small business owners and TD would see benefits. TD's customers would find more opportunities to organize their finances and be presented with products that can help them grow while; TD could see a higher number of their customers find products that meet their needs.

Final Thoughts and Reflections:

At the end of the event, I represented my team in the pitching segment of the competition. I wrote and presented our pitch in-front of both the panel of judges and the over 100 participants in attendance. Afterwards, I also led our group in addressing questions and comments from the judging panel. Our team placed in the top three projects, and had the opportunity to bring our presentation to a group of professionals at the TD office, where I had the amazing experience of pitching our product again to this new audience. Below I have included just a few of the slides from our presentation.