Confidential
2022
Building product validation infrastructure from PowerPoint slides
Highlights
Advocating for systematic validation before engineering investment
When handed PowerPoint slides containing a new lending product concept with a 6-month phased engagement, I built a complete validation framework that proved product viability without writing code—orchestrating real loan transactions through people and paper to meet compliance standards while validating actual user adoption.
Retrospective
Proving products work before building them
The challenge: validate whether users would actually take out loans—in 3 months, without building technology, and without direct access to end users.
I led the validation work — building the framework that structured how the team would learn, running user research orchestration, and aligning cross-functional partners on what to validate at each stage. The team included client product leadership, two embedded lending subject matter experts from a partner firm, a client customer care lead who conducted user research we structured, and a FinTech UX consultant brought in as the work scaled.
Users received actual loan approvals and funding—we just orchestrated it manually instead of digitally. What made the validation succeed wasn't the manual orchestration itself — it was the structure we built first, naming what we needed to learn at each stage so the team could align on what to validate against. By proving demand before building, we helped the company de-risk a significant investment in a new financial services division.
Marcelle has an incredible ability to align people on the knowns and unknowns surrounding a new initiative which makes it easy for the team around her to align on what they need to tackle to move forward. If we know the unknowns, it's easier to have something to validate against—I truly wish more people worked like Marcelle in this way!
