Building a fintech feature is like solving a five-part puzzle in a sequence. Each piece must be completed in the right order. When all five pieces come together, the customer problem is solved.
In this series, I’ll show how that puzzle plays out in practice, using a real-world problem from the high-net-worth (HNW) banking space.
Let’s start by looking at the puzzle itself.
Imagine you are a product manager working in the high-net-worth (HNW) division of a Canadian bank.
The bank serves one million HNW clients. These clients hold significant assets and pay for premium banking and advisory services. They typically use multiple products: mutual funds, credit cards, and lending.
Each client is assigned a Relationship Manager (RM) who acts as the primary point of contact. Clients may work with specialists for estate planning, real estate financing, tax matters, or investment advice. But they don’t have to manage those relationships on their own.
The RM brings in the right specialists, stays accountable for outcomes and maintains continuity across the client’s financial affairs.
As a result, clients experience the bank through their relationship manager. Trust and confidence are shaped by how well the RM understands the client’s situation and takes responsibility for outcomes over time.
Now, leadership notices a serious problem.
Churn in the high-net-worth business has increased by 10% quarter-over-quarter.
For a bank with one million HNW clients, that means 100,000 clients leaving in just 90 days.
That’s the puzzle we need to solve.
The Five-Piece Puzzle
To solve this puzzle, five pieces must be put together in the right order:
- The Target Audience
- The Customer Problem
- The Solution Design
- The Solution Build
- The Launch and Iteration
Each piece depends on the one before it.
Before we dive deep into each piece in the upcoming articles, let’s briefly look at what each one covers and why the sequence matters.
Piece 1: The Target Audience
You first need to understand which customers are experiencing the problem.
In this case, which clients are leaving.
If you don’t know who is churning, you can’t know why they’re leaving.
You’ll learn how to segment churned clients step by step and identify the audience most affected.
We won’t just stop there.
You’ll also assess the business impact of this churn and quantify the revenue at risk.
Piece 2: The Customer Problem
Once you know who is churning, the next question is why?
The only way to answer that is to interview your clients. Both the ones who left and the ones who stayed.
Identify the right clients to interview and figure out how to reach them.
Run these conversations like a therapist would. Build trust first. Understand their context next. Then create space for deep sharing where clients open up without feeling judged. This approach helps you understand what caused clients to leave in their own words.
Once the interviews are complete, debrief each one.
Then step back and look for patterns across all conversations. Prioritize the problems that led to churn. Decide which one to tackle first, which comes next, and which can wait.
Document these findings in the Product Blueprint. This becomes your single source of truth.
Finally, build alignment with leadership by presenting the Product Blueprint.
Piece 3: The Solution Design
Now you know the problem. The next step is designing a solution.
But you can’t design without understanding your constraints, such as regulatory requirements, technology and card network rules (like Visa and Mastercard). Ignore them, and you waste your designer’s time.
Here’s what happens when constraints are ignored.
Design creates detailed screens. Leadership approves them. Engineering starts building. Then compliance steps in and says, “This violates XYZ compliance rules.” The feature gets scrapped and months of work disappear.
That’s why constraints come first.
In this phase, you’ll identify constraints and design within them.
You’ll guide the design team step by step through early mockups, leadership reviews, and final designs that won’t be rejected later.
Piece 4: The Solution Build
With the final design in hand, it’s time to build.
Before your engineers write any code, gather key documents. This includes architecture diagrams, API contracts, and test data. These artifacts are essential to start development.
You’ll learn how to gather these materials, break work into sprints, and share clear timelines with leadership.
Piece 5: The Launch and Iteration
Once the feature is built, you launch it.
But not to everyone at once.
You release it to a small group first and gather feedback, both quantitative and qualitative.
You track specific metrics to confirm whether the feature addresses the root cause of churn.
Only then do you roll it out to the broader HNW client base.
What’s Next?
Building a fintech feature is like solving a five-part puzzle in sequence.
Each piece must be completed in the right order. First, The Target Audience. Then, The Customer Problem. Next, The Solution Design. After that, The Solution Build. Finally, The Launch and Iteration.
In the upcoming articles, we’ll dive deep into each piece of this puzzle.
We’ll start with the first piece: The Target Audience.
When all five pieces are in place, the customer problem is solved.
Let’s begin.