As the head of the product team at Dash Solutions, I’ve had the privilege of witnessing our evolution as a payments organization firsthand—all while continuously formulating and growing our overall product team, roadmaps, and strategy. It continues to be a journey filled with challenges, triumphs, and invaluable lessons along the way. From a product perspective, our journey is characterized by flexibility, momentum, and growth, driven widely by three core pillars – teamwork, measurement, and communication.
Why Flexibility is Important
One of the most profound lessons I’ve learned while being a part of a growth-stage company’s product team is the overall importance of flexibility and the openness to adapt within the ever-changing payments industry. Continuing to be flexible rings especially true as Dash Solutions navigates integrating three recent acquisitions into one streamlined ecosystem. While this presents its own set of challenges—from aligning diverse platforms and cultures to prioritizing integration efforts—it also opens doors to new opportunities for growth through innovation and advancements.
Acquisition = Growth and Innovation
It is important to remember that acquisitions are built on a thesis that incorporates change resulting in value-add for organizations and their overall product offerings. In the thesis for the acquisition deals, there are well-intentioned plans to integrate acquired products and features within current solutions, but often, those plans shift once a product team begins to merge the product roadmaps. This is no different for our team.
Flexibility in building and managing a roadmap is critical for a team to be able to react to the countless new inputs that come from an acquisition and newly acquired companies, including assets, tools, team experiences, client relationships, partners, and much more.
As Dash Solutions continues growing as a payments organization, we, as a product team, set our sights on the road (and roadmaps) ahead. We want to make the most of all the assets we’ve amassed organically as a company, as well as those gained through the valuable acquisitions.
"Successful people never drink from a glass that’s half empty."
Building The Combined Roadmap
Building a product roadmap requires a clear starting point and a keen understanding of the landscape ahead. Beginning with the successful payments products we had already built over the past twenty-five years; we took inventory of our existing assets and identified areas ripe for growth. We looked for ways to measure what was working, and where we could get leverage without further significant investment. This initial exercise proved invaluable, and served as the cornerstone for subsequent strategic initiatives, including the successful integration of three new businesses into our product ecosystem.
The acquisition of new companies has been instrumental in strengthening our product portfolio, strategically filling gaps within existing solutions, and expanding our capacity to deliver value to current and potential clients.
From an overall product roadmap perspective, we approached the integration by leveraging the strengths of each newly acquired business to propel our collective vision forward while focusing on a few key tenets within our department – teamwork, prioritization, and communication.
3 Tips to Scaling a Product Team
1. TEAMWORK
The more growth an organization has, the more voices there are to hear. Having a solid team that works together toward a common goal is extremely important to support that growth.
As our client base expanded and we continued to grow, it became increasingly vital to develop a structured approach for gathering feedback from all parties and utilize that feedback as a team. With the three acquisitions and growing from a twenty to an over 140-person innovation-focused organization, we knew this was not a small undertaking.
Bringing in varied backgrounds and experiences meant we would most assuredly get dissenting voices to balance those that are already embedded. Making sure all voices were heard was key, and the foundation of a collaborative culture at Dash Solutions supported our goals and growth near-seamlessly.
2. MEASUREMENT & PRIORITIZATION
As an evolving product team, it was important for us to align around KPIs and agree on what success looked like. Additionally, we prescribed how quickly we wanted to see those markers before we pivoted to the next big project. Without bringing specific measurements to the table early on, there tend to be wide variations in what team members may deem the end goal. Instead, we needed to focus on the real user (the client or the consumer) and build the objectives from their point of view and figure out what their “job to be done” entailed.
Prioritization for our team is and was shifting to a deeper understanding of the Jobs to Be Done. This specific framework emphasizes understanding our customers’ goals. Having well-defined client goals guides several areas of product development processes and offers a baseline for creating priorities.
We began using the Jobs to Be Done framework to guide and measure our efforts in support of multiple stakeholder groups:
Understanding why our clients valued our solutions, as well as what motivated their purchasing decisions, was paramount. And with that, having an organized way to collect feedback and prioritize was equally important. Throughout the process of measuring and prioritizing, the mindset was: “As long as we keep our eyes and ears on the end user, our next solution will be just as valuable as the first.”
3. COMMUNICATION
The truth is, communication is never going to be easy when you are growing as quickly as we have been at Dash Solutions. We had to build a process where no process existed before – we had new departments and functions, and leadership needed new pathways to deliver information.
If we weren’t focused on constantly delivering product details to all levels of inside (and outside) the organization at each step, we would misfire. We needed that communication to flow in both directions as well. It was not just about how we kept all parties informed on what was prioritized and being worked on, but also determining how that priority list was compiled to begin with.
As we continue to grow, open and fluid communication is critical. Utilizing agile methodologies keeps the team consistently updated on ongoing projects and changing client needs. We stay closely connected with client and prospect activities through our client success and sales teams, assuring we are always aligned and driving efforts toward our shared goals.
Continuing the Evolution
As we evolve and grow as a payments leader, the importance of keeping flexibility, teamwork, measurement, and communication front and center gives the Dash Solutions product team a firm foundation.
Amidst integrating three recent acquisitions, flexibility has been crucial in presenting challenges but also opportunities for learning. Through structured teamwork, clear measurement, prioritization around client goals, and open communication, we successfully continue to navigate growth, ensuring alignment internally, and delivering value to clients each day.