Identifying Systemic Operational Gaps in a Scaling Fintech PlatformApiture is a fintech platform serving regional and community banks, operating in a highly regulated environment where product reliability, adoption, and trust are critical to customer success.
Overview
Role: Strategy Director
Client: Apiture
Industry: Fintech / Banking Infrastructure
Engagement Type: Product Strategy & Organizational Diagnosis
Focus: Systems thinking, operational readiness, cross-functional alignment
Initial Request
The stated request was to define a Product North Star that would guide roadmap decisions and align teams around a shared vision.
However, early signals suggested the challenge was not a lack of vision, but a deeper execution risk rooted in how the organization operated day to day.
Diagnostic Approach
Rather than moving directly into vision-setting, I took a systems-level diagnostic approach, combining:
One-on-one interviews across Product, Engineering, Support, CX, and Customer Success
Review of historical research and prior strategy work
Mapping of end-to-end product delivery and support workflows
Analysis of how success was measured across teams
This allowed me to evaluate not just what the organization was building, but whether the system was designed to absorb change safely and sustainably.
System-Level Diagnosis
A consistent pattern emerged across teams:
Product velocity was prioritized over adoption readiness
Teams operated with misaligned success metrics
Knowledge transfer between teams was informal and inconsistent
Customer-facing teams absorbed the cost of misalignment through escalations, workarounds, and reactive support
In effect, new features increased operational load faster than the organization could support them.
This reframed the core problem:
"Any Product North Star would fail unless the operating system of the organization was redesigned to support it."
Proposed Lifecycle Loop framework for cross-functional coordination
Operational Gaps Identified
The primary gaps were systemic, not tactical:
No shared definition of "done"
Across Product, Support, and CX
No operational readiness checkpoint
Before feature release
No closed feedback loop
Connecting post-release issues back to prioritization
No single source of truth
For customer-impact tradeoffs
As a result, the organization optimized for speed while externalizing cost to downstream teams and customers.
System Interventions Proposed
The proposed Product North Star was intentionally designed as a coordination mechanism, not a vision statement.
Supporting system interventions included:
Outcome-based OKRs shared across Product, Support, and CX
Explicit release readiness criteria tied to adoption and support capacity
Cross-functional rituals to surface operational risk early
Transparency artifacts to make tradeoffs visible and discussable
Together, these interventions were designed to:
Reduce rework and escalation
Improve adoption and trust
Protect long-term velocity by addressing operational debt
Organizational Constraints and Decision Context
While the diagnosis and proposed interventions were directionally aligned with long-term success, the organization ultimately prioritized short-term delivery velocity over the cross-functional changes required to implement them.
Without sustained executive sponsorship across both Product and customer-facing functions, the organization was not positioned to operationalize system-level change at that time.
This was a conscious tradeoff, not a misunderstanding.
Risks Identified and Communicated
I explicitly documented the risks of continuing without addressing the operational gaps, including:
Increasing support burden
Slower feature adoption
Erosion of customer trust
Long-term velocity loss due to rework and reactive fixes
These risks were communicated clearly so leadership could make an informed decision about priorities.
What I Did in Response
Recognizing the constraint, I focused on ensuring the work still delivered value by:
Translating findings into reusable alignment frameworks
Documenting system risks and dependencies for future reference
Socializing insights with adjacent teams to support incremental adoption
Preserving the diagnostic artifacts as a baseline for future strategy work
This ensured the engagement produced durable insight, even without immediate implementation.
