Let me tell you about the time I built an AI-powered game that transformed the spending habits of financially irresponsible young adults. They went from checking on their spending maybe once a month, to opening my app 6.7x per week and greatly reduced their impulse spending.

I led the company’s product development as the head of product and founder of Lila, an AI-powered mobile spending awareness game for young millennials and Gen Z. This cohort is financially and mentally stressed in their lifestyles and they don’t have a sufficient grasp on their spending and they actively avoid budgeting.The high amount of financial stress, fear, anxiety and even despair in some cases that this cohort faced led to poor spending choices without and lots of impulse spending.

My job was to build a product that would fill this gap in the market, and have it ready for launch with the confidence it would find product-market fit.

First, I performed over 40 ethnographic interviews with young millennials and Gen Z to understand their financial stress and spending habits. I also analyzed competitor products and gathered user feedback. Top 3 insights from the research were:

• Users lack motivation to stick to traditional financial tools, which led to poor spending habits. This confirmed the need for a more engaging product.
• Existing budgeting tools were overwhelming and outdated, pushing users away. This validated the decision to create a more intuitive app.
• Existing tools lacked the level of engagement users are used to from today’s best apps.

Second, This set a standard of engagement we needed to reach. Based on the insights, I developed a strategy with three key components:

• A gamified core loop that builds on intrinsic motivations to spend better.
• A cute cat mascot to give emotional spending feedback.
• A simple and intuitive interface to make it incredibly easy to be informed.

Third, instead of rushing into a complex final product, we first built the simplest version of the app that could still engage users and set it up with beta testers. I recruited together a team of engineers, a designer and a product marketer and tailored our sprint grooming to reduce feature size and accelerate our learning cycles. Working together with our beta testers, we continuously iterated to improve our product. Through data-driven cohort analysis, I encountered that our mid-career users were not adopting the product as well as our early-career and student users, after weighing the trade-offs of building for both groups or focusing on one - I decided to zero-in our ICP on our early-career and student users.

Our product improved tremendously through this iteration. I worked with our designer to upgrade our cat mascot to a fully realized and differentiated mascot named Lila the money cat. I led our engineering team to improve the app’s core functionalities and usability.

As a result, our beta testers averaged 6.7x app opens per week over the course of 4 months, a 30x increase in reviewing their spending, and an indicator of potential product market fit. Our testers reported reduced financial stress, more spending awareness and reduced impulse spending. Knowing that we successfully delivered value to our customer put us on track for a market launch.

In building Lila I finally understood what real innovation takes - it’s balancing creativity + execution using iterative learning, team brain power, and progressive delivery.