Building Lasting Financial Products: From MVP to Core Value
The Allure and Peril of Feature Hoarding
Over years of building financial products, I've witnessed countless promising ideas skyrocket to success in weeks, only to crash and burn months later. The financial sector is especially unforgiving: users entrust their hard-earned money, expectations are sky-high, and the market is crowded. It's tempting to pile on features like toppings on a pizza, hoping something will stick. But this scattergun approach is a recipe for disaster.
Why More Features Don't Equal More Love
When starting a new financial product or migrating legacy processes to digital channels, the excitement of adding features can be overwhelming. You might think, 'If I just solve this one more user problem, they'll adore me!' But then reality hits: your security team (the 'narcs') objects, the feature isn't as popular as expected, or complexity breaks everything. This is the classic feature-first trap, where internal excitement overrides user needs.
The MVP Mindset: Doing Less, Better
This is where the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept shines. As Jason Fried discusses in Getting Real and his Rework podcast, an MVP delivers just enough value to engage users without overwhelming them or the development team. It sounds simple, but it demands razor-sharp focus and the courage to say no—especially against the Columbo Effect, where there's always 'just one more thing' someone wants to add.
Learning from Jason Fried's Philosophy
Fried's approach emphasizes ruthlessness: prioritize what users truly need, not what internal teams dream up. In practice, this means defining a clear value proposition and sticking to it, resisting the seduction of extra features that drain resources and complicate the experience.
The Internal Politics Trap
Many financial apps become a reflection of the company's internal politics rather than a customer-centric experience. Different departments compete to have their pet features included, resulting in a feature salad—a confusing mix of unrelated functionalities that confuse users and dilute the core value. Instead of solving real problems, the product serves as a political compromise, making it hard for users to love or even understand.
Finding Your Product's Bedrock
So how can we build products that are stable, user-friendly, and stick? The answer lies in identifying your product's bedrock—the core element that delivers lasting value to users. Bedrock is the fundamental building block that remains relevant over time, cutting through the noise of transient features.
The Retail Banking Example
In retail banking, the bedrock is the regular servicing journey. Users open a current account infrequently, but they check it daily. They sign up for a mortgage maybe twice in a lifetime, but they interact with their account constantly. By obsessing over these frequent, high-value touchpoints—like balance checks, transfers, and notifications—you create a sticky product that users rely on every day. This core focus prevents bloat and ensures every feature serves a clear purpose.
Building for Stickiness: Practical Steps
- Identify your bedrock: Analyze user behavior to discover the single most valuable action they repeat. That's your foundation.
- Resist the feature avalanche: Use MVP principles to launch with only the essentials. Add features only if they directly support the bedrock experience.
- Break internal silos: Align teams around the customer journey, not departmental goals. Use data to arbitrate feature requests.
- Iterate, don't invent: Improve the bedrock continuously rather than chasing new shiny objects. Small, consistent enhancements build loyalty.
- Measure stickiness: Track daily active usage, retention, and frequency of core actions. If those drop, your bedrock may be eroding.
By shifting from a feature-first to a bedrock-focused approach, you avoid the feature salad trap and create financial products that users genuinely love and rely on. The result? Products that don't just survive—they thrive.