When I joined mewt they were an early-stage FinTech startup with a core backend tech in place and they had a MVP version of the product out. The product's essential offering was to help small and medium sized businesses have more control over different aspects of their operations by simplifying a variety of money-related problems. They were in the process of hiring a design team and I was there as a interim designer to help study the field, make sense of possible product directions and value propositions for different user types and to help with ad-hoc design requirements.

I first studied the product and back-end tech to make sense of the core user actions in terms of user stories, and I then mapped them to the app's core features. Based on the user stories, I expanded the core features into prototypes of a few possible features that could hypothetically make the product more useful and then conducted in-depth contextual inquiries and interviews with 6 small businesses and shopkeepers in the field to identify how they could find value from this product differently. This revealed some fundamental holes in our offering as well as a variety of key variables that we could use to qualify different users in terms of what they need from this product, which I then shared with product managers and business development stakeholders. Finally, I conducted 5 more contextual inquiries using a pre-test design to first typify them with the help of these variables and then validate different product directions that were more viable for each user type.