A product career judged by its worst afternoon

The most useful product review I have received took place on a plastic stool in Cirebon in 2008. A kiosk owner who sold mobile airtime had sent our system the same SMS command four times. Each attempt had failed on a weak signal, and each had taken a deposit from her float before it failed. She was not angry about the software. She wanted to know who would return her 40,000 rupiah before her children's school fees were due. I had designed that command syntax. Since that afternoon I have judged a product by its worst afternoon, not its best demonstration.

I grew up in Ipoh, where my mother sold kuih and took orders for weddings in a school exercise book, crossing out each line when it was paid. I studied computer science at Tasikmas University of Technology and graduated in 2003. My first job was as a software engineer at Damarlis Systems, a Kuala Lumpur company whose point-of-sale software ran in about 1,900 minimarkets and pharmacies. Within a year I was spending as much time in shops as at my desk, because I had volunteered for field support. I learnt to queue receipts when a store's line to head office dropped, and I learnt that shopkeepers trusted a till that printed what they expected more than one that offered them reports.

In 2007 I moved to Jakarta to join PT Kiosnusa Digital, which supplied airtime, electricity tokens and bill payments to small kiosks. The kiosks used basic phones, and the product was a set of SMS commands and, later, a small application for feature phones. By 2011 the network had about 38,000 active kiosks. Rewriting the commands so that a repeated message could not charge twice, and showing each kiosk its float balance after every sale, cut failed transactions from 11 per cent to 3 per cent. Nothing I have shipped since has mattered more to the people who used it.

Singapore came next. From 2011 to 2015 I worked at Quilmara Payments, an online payment gateway for merchants in six Southeast Asian markets, first as a senior product manager and then as director of product for merchant onboarding and risk. Shoppers in the region paid by bank transfer, in cash at convenience-store counters and through early e-wallets as often as by card, and each method had its own ways of failing and its own fraud. I added fourteen local methods and cut merchant onboarding from nine days to two. I also completed an MBA part-time at the Selatara School of Management, which taught me to write a pricing paper that a finance director would read to the end.

Quilmara showed me that most payment fraud begins at onboarding, with an identity that should never have been accepted. In 2015 I returned to Kuala Lumpur as vice president of product at Veritrau Identity, which sold identity verification to banks, insurers, telecommunications companies and a state government's business-licensing portal. I spent a year on one unglamorous problem: older identity cards whose photographs had faded, which made our system reject genuine people far more often than it caught impostors. A regional telecommunications group acquired Veritrau in 2018, and as our roadmap turned towards the parent's needs I wanted to build for small businesses directly.

I joined Rimbunara in December 2019 as senior vice president of product, three months before the pandemic closed shops across the region. Payment links that a seller could send through a chat app became our fastest-growing product almost overnight. In July 2021 our co-founder, who had run product until then, became chief technology officer, and I became chief product officer. The company had grown in four countries by building a separate product for each. My first task was to merge them into one platform with a clearly bounded layer for each country's rules.

I lead through country product directors who hold real authority over their markets' roadmaps, a research team that spends at least one week in four outside our offices, and a fortnightly review of what went wrong for customers rather than what we launched. Every board meeting receives a product paper from me, and I try to put the uncomfortable number on its first page. Inside the industry I am probably known for three positions: that compliance belongs in the free plan, that a small business should be priced by its month rather than by its seats, and that a machine-learning feature should show its confidence. I am now preparing for a second role alongside my executive one, as an independent director of a listed company whose business depends on small enterprises.

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