What product leadership means when the customer is a small shop

Rimbunara's customers in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore issue invoices under four different sets of rules. Malaysia's tax authority has been phasing in e-invoicing by business size since 2024, with each invoice validated through its MyInvois system. Indonesian businesses registered for VAT have issued electronic tax invoices through the tax directorate's systems for years. In the Philippines, the tax bureau sets requirements for how invoices are numbered and registered, and its electronic invoicing programme began with the largest taxpayers. I organise the product so that these rules live in a country compliance layer with its own owners, tests and release calendar, separate from the shared invoicing core. Each country has a compliance product manager who reads the authority's published guidance, works with our external tax advisers and can stop a release. Language is the easier half: our screens run in English, Malay, Indonesian and Filipino, with accounting terms reviewed by accountants in each market rather than translated from English.

A sari-sari store and a twelve-person engineering contractor need different products, but both want to know what they will pay before the month starts. I own pricing and packaging jointly with our chief revenue officer and chief financial officer. Since 2023 our plans in Indonesia and the Philippines have been priced per business, in local currency, in bands based on invoices issued rather than on users, and staff logins are free. The Mikro plan costs Rp 49,000 a month in Indonesia and ₱199 in the Philippines and can be paid weekly or monthly from an e-wallet or in cash at a convenience-store counter, because many owners hold no card. In Malaysia the free plan includes e-invoice submission for up to twenty invoices a month. We test any price change in one region of one country for at least a quarter, read downgrades and churn beside revenue, and give existing customers twelve months' notice of an increase.

About two in five of our Indonesian and Philippine customers work outside the main metropolitan areas, often on entry-level Android phones with little storage and patchy mobile data. In 2022 and 2023 we rebuilt invoicing, receipt capture and stock counts so that they work without a connection and synchronise when one returns. That required decisions most product teams never face: how two staff counting the same shelf offline should be reconciled, how invoice numbers stay in sequence when three phones issue invoices without seeing one another, and what a customer should see while a payment is still unconfirmed. We now reserve blocks of invoice numbers for each device, show a plain pending state with the time of the last sync and keep the Android download under 20 MB. Every release is tried on a shelf of low-cost phones over a throttled connection before it ships, and my product directors sign off on the results personally.

We use machine learning in two places that matter to customers: reading receipts and supplier bills photographed on a phone, and suggesting how each transaction should be categorised in the books. Since 2024 we have also offered an assistant that answers questions about a business's own figures in four languages. In each case my rule is that the product shows how sure it is. Categorisations above a confidence threshold are posted automatically; the rest, currently 29 per cent, wait for a one-tap confirmation. Accountants in our partner network audit a monthly sample, and the error rate on automatically posted items is 1.2 per cent. The assistant explains the customer's figures and declines to give tax advice, passing those questions to the customer's accountant instead. Our practice is documented against Singapore's Model AI Governance Framework and reviewed twice a year by the board's Audit and Risk Committee.

A platform that issues invoices and collects money for 412,000 businesses attracts people who want to issue false invoices and collect money that is not theirs. The risks I manage with our head of trust and safety are account takeover, payment links used to cheat consumers, fictitious invoices used to draw financing from partner lenders, and businesses opened only to move small sums for someone else. We verify identity and bank-account ownership before a business can collect payments, match account names against the registered business, hold first payouts for new accounts and require a buyer's confirmation before an invoice can be financed. Each control costs honest customers some convenience, so inside the company we publish its effect on onboarding time and approval rates beside the fraud it stops. I report fraud losses, account-takeover incidents and data-protection matters to the Audit and Risk Committee twice a year, and sooner when something goes wrong.