Building a product that meets the needs and requirements of a specific group of customers can be a challenge, but expanding that product to new markets can be even harder. This is especially true when managing multiple platforms.
But what if we told you that there is a solution to make this process easier?
That solution is FlowKit, and in this blog, we will be discussing how we used it to solve our scalability problem with N26 Instalments.
The Original Product
In the diagram below you can see how it looked like:
Before using FlowKit, our product consisted of a few simple screens connected to each other, with the main focus being the German market. At that time, we did not know if the product would be available in other markets in the future.
The New Requirements
As the product became successful, we wanted to publish it in new European markets, specifically Italy and France.
However, we soon realized that these two markets had specific laws that required additional screens or different content in the existing ones. To reach these new markets, we had to make the product scalable.
The Italian Flow
eSignature
The Bank of Italy required that customers apply for a loan with a digital signature, so we had to add a new step for the eSignature, visible only to Italian customers. This helped us keep the flow as it was for the previous customers.
The French Flow
The legal requirements in France were different. According to the laws, we could not show more than one offer to the client when it came to small loans. Additionally, no message was required prior to the confirmation of the offer. For this reason, we had to make the content of the Offer Selection Screen dynamic to show this new “single offer” mode.
Using FlowKit
So, how did we use FlowKit to solve our scalability problem? FlowKit is a powerful tool that allows us to manage the different flows of our product, making it easier to maintain and scale. We were able to use it to manage the different requirements for each market, without risking breaking the already published product.
The task of customizing the content for the user’s region was the first challenge that needed to be addressed. Initially, we thought of inserting controls in both Android and iOS platforms to control the region and modify the content. However, this solution posed problems as it created two separate points of failure, and required new data to format the content as per the customer’s region.
To resolve this, we introduced the Presentation Gateway – a new tool that centralized the creation of content based on different conditions such as currency, region, and interest rates.
This allowed us to have a single source of truth and remove all the logic from the front-end (FE) platforms. With the Presentation Gateway, we were able to generate navigation to the back-end (BE) for all FE platforms, which allowed FlowKit to show its full potential.
The FE platforms now only had to make minor adjustments to receive the new dynamic navigation flow from the BE via the Presentation Gateway, which was already formatted and ready to use. The existing screens and new region screens were converted into FlowKit Steps, allowing us to present them to the user in the order established by the BE. This resulted in a central source of truth, less code, fewer parts to test, and fewer points where logic could cause problems.
FlowKit allowed us to achieve a win-win situation by making navigation management easier and removing conditions from the code. With a central source of truth in the BE, A/B testing can be easily enabled simultaneously. This also makes the FE applications more “future-proof” and app version agnostic, as the flow can be modified remotely using the BE without releasing a new version of the FE applications.
Conclusion
Scaling up a product can be a difficult task, but with the help of FlowKit, we were able to overcome this challenge and expand our N26 Instalments product to new markets. If you’re facing similar scalability problems, we highly recommend giving FlowKit a try.
