Asto

I joined Asto to head up the small design team including a researcher. My role focused on improving the UX across the product and enhancing the experience for users. The company was focused on small and micro-businesses, e.g. plumbers, hairdressers etc. This formed the largest segment in the B2B market with one-person businesses making up the biggest majority of businesses, over 95% fall into this category.

I further focused on product-market fit and found key flaws with some of the companies business lines. My proposal was to sunset the failing products and focus more on winners.

For the invoice financing product the uptake was low, looking at the customer base through research it became clear to me there was a mismatch. Firstly the typical users were likely low in financial literacy, meaning invoice finance was a foreign concept, much more suited to a CFO or accountant. This was proven in research, not a single customer correctly guessed what "invoice finance" was about.

Initially the hypothesis was to rename the product into a more descriptive wording. However on further digging into research it was shown that over 80% of customers were paid either on completion of the project or within 7 days. This immediacy of payment makes invoice financing irrelevant. i.e. no product-market fit in this case.

Ultimately the business was wound down by Santander as the strategy changed.