Product Development · Financial software
Before adding another feature, make the core journey work.
Help customers connect their data, resolve import issues, and reach a usable financial output with less manual support.
Discuss a similar challenge01 / The challenge
Where the work began.
A financial software startup had an expanding roadmap, but its onboarding journey regularly required intervention. Customers created accounts, then encountered an unpredictable path through connecting a data source and completing the first import.
Support staff often had to explain whether an import was still processing, had failed or needed customer action. Before adding more features, the team needed to make that core journey easier to understand.
02 / The approach
What we did.
RFA’s product lead, designer and engineer worked with customer support to map the journey from connection setup to the first usable output. They separated connection authorization, data retrieval, schema validation, field mapping, normalization and import completion.
Each stage received a visible processing state and an actionable error message. The design distinguished an expired connection from an unsupported file structure or a missing required field, with recovery guidance tied to the problem.
The engineering work included background jobs with bounded retries for temporary failures and idempotency controls to prevent repeated submissions from creating duplicate records. Validation checked transaction dates, currency codes, account references and numeric formats before data was committed to the application.
The team worked through small releases, using system behavior and support feedback to refine the journey. Instrumentation recorded where users stopped, which errors recurred and whether recovery actions succeeded.
03 / The scope
What the work covered.
- Connection to output journey map
- Processing states and recovery guidance
- Import validation and retry controls
- Release feedback and measurement plan
04 / The outcome
What the work established
The work delivered a clearer path from connection setup to the first usable financial output, with visible processing states, recovery guidance, import validation and controls for safe retries. It focused product development on the first import before adding more features.
The evaluation plan covered onboarding completion, time to first usable output, import failure rates and manual support effort.
A failed import used to become a support conversation because the customer couldn’t tell what had happened. Making the processing states and recovery steps clear was less glamorous than another feature, but it addressed a much more immediate problem.