Every digital product needs continuous improvement. In a B2B SaaS product, we should be quick enough to build for customers' needs, take their feedback, and iterate for continuous improvement.

Hello, I’m Pradyumna, Product Manager at Fyle, working for three years in B2C and B2B products. Here, I’ll share my learnings on applying the principles of lean startup methodology by taking an example of our latest feature: Automatic Expense Report Submission.

We’ll first understand the Lean Startup methodology and how we applied these principles in our product.

The Lean Startup methodology is a business approach that emphasizes speed, experimentation, and customer feedback. It emphasizes validated learning, a build-measure-learn feedback loop, customer development, and agile development. Its goal is to help businesses avoid wasting time and resources on products that may not meet customer needs or be viable in the market.

Simply put, it states to Build, Measure, Learn, and apply those learnings in product development.

With that context, let’s look at how we worked towards solving the problem.

The Problem

Expense reporting sucks, to be honest. Employees need to deal with these expenses to report the spend and get reimbursed, outside their work.

They should attach the receipts, fill in all the required details mentioning the purpose of spend, merchant, etc., add these expenses to a report, and submit those expense reports.

Ufff, too much to do to report the spend properly!

And mind you, not all organizations have employees using the latest technologies and aren’t tech savvy. Providing the best user experience is not an option but a must for us.

Eliminating manual work on expenses is our goal, and we work towards reducing manual effort in every initiative (we call each roadmap item an initiative).

During our customer interactions, they mentioned that the “expense report submission is not intuitive.”

This is the same time I was getting started at Fyle when our CEO, Yash, directed me towards building for the problems of customers, and the market, aligning with the business goals.

When we were planning for the roadmap for Q3 2022, he came up with a comprehensive document mentioning the problem, the market, and the solution approach.

Our Approach

We started with the ideation and thought, “How can we help the users by taking the burden off them, even if it reduces as little as 10 minutes of their time on Fyle?”

We started by deciding two things:

Make the process of creating and submitting expense reports automatic, and give the admins (administrators) the control to create automatic expense report submission schedules.
Build for monthly schedules, i.e., expense reports will be submitted monthly.

We discussed with our design and engineering teams to evaluate the timelines to ship it quickly without making the customers wait longer.

Our designer, Harsh, completed the designs in no time, and we started implementing them. Since we knew what we were doing, we didn’t wait for the design feedback from the customers to begin implementation.

Our Engineering team, managed by Gokul, implemented the feature. They were shipping the smaller frontend features to the test environment so that we could test it first hand, and review each component and page, instead of waiting for the whole feature to test once.

Release and Feedback

We released this feature to our customers in November 2022. What’s the use of any feature in a product if the users aren’t aware of it?

We did these two things to announce the release of this feature:

Sent emails to all the admins of all organizations mentioning the benefits of this feature
Added an in-product announcement card on the admins’ landing page.

While this is done, we can’t ensure that all the admins use this feature by looking at the product announcements. We have amazing Sales and Customer Success Teams who helped us show this feature to the customers.

Usage trend of creating automatic submission schedules

Our Sales team showed the benefits of this feature to the prospects during demo calls. Our Customer Success team highlighted this feature during the onboarding and training calls, thus helping with the feature adoption.

Once the users started using the feature, we started reaching out to them for feedback to gauge their happiness. We asked straightforward questions in the email to get the pin-pointed responses.

We asked them to rate it on a scale of 10 and provide the reasoning for their rating, and asked them to mention anything that could further help them out. Here are the sample responses:

While the admins mentioned that they are happy with this feature, they look forward to improvements.

Next thing…

We got recurring requests around “Creating weekly schedules” along with the monthly schedules, and we took it up this quarter (Q1 2023).

We needed to be careful here because the customers using Monthly schedules shouldn’t be affected, whereas those awaiting the weekly schedules shouldn’t wait long!

We followed our speed of execution and delivered it before the committed deadline. Our designer, Aditi, helped with the designs that, included creating weekly schedules and gave the admins the flexibility to change a monthly schedule to weekly and vice versa.

A sample screenshot of one of the screens in the process

Our Backend Engineer, Prakash, with Kartikey’s help, completed the backend changes. Our Frontend Engineer, Saraswat, with Gokul’s help, completed the implementation. Both Saraswat and Prakash came up with a list of test cases for us to ensure everything is working as expected.

With a deadline of March 31st, we released the initiative a month in advance, towards the end of February, and are currently taking the customers' feedback.

This entire process of ideation, execution, validation, feedback collection and improvement results from the Lean Startup principles we have applied while building our products.

I’m grateful to the team members who owned this initiative and delivered it on time.

Design team: Harsh, Aditi, Swapna

Engineering team: Saraswat, Prakash, Arjun, Kartikey, Chethan, Yash, Shishira and Gokul

This feature wouldn’t get this usage if not for the efforts of our Customer Success team and Sales team, who actively highlighted the benefits of this feature during demo and training calls.

Our colleague, Timothy, shared his experience while showing the feature to the customers.

Our vision at Fyle is to ensure that “Not a second is spent on expenses, " so we continue to work on solving our customers' problems and making their lives easier.

Until next time, with another interesting story about how we build things at Fyle…

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