Product Manager assignment

Product Manager assignment

Expense policies and approval workflows

Background

Kodos customers (companies) can pay their vendors through a connected bank account. Some customers may also have a line of credit approved by Kodo and can use that for the payouts. The line of credit can also be used through credit cards that can be issued to employees.

Problem Statement

At scale, one person approving all expenses can be very cumbersome and may also slow down things a lot. At the same time, its important to have appropriate controls in place.

Through our product, we want to empower our customers to achieve the right balance between efficiency and control, in a way that fits their unique needs.

Ideation

Here are some ideas that have emerged so far from internal brainstorming and some customer interviews:

Feedback from a unicorn startup: We should be able to delegate spending power to managers of different teams with clear limits and expense policies making it easy for teams to do the right thing for the business

Some larger companies with multiple offices want to be able to define rules specific to office locations too.

We think that often there would be an upper limit for the amount that a manager can approve. It would be useful to define whether there should be additional approval(s) in certain cases.

From a company with many field employees: It would be great to have a pre-approved budget for fuel and light car maintenance expenses for our field employees. As a result, their managers would only have to review expenses by exception, which should save a lot of their time.

Another example: Our marketing team is working with an external agency. We have been working with them for a long time. If the monthly invoice is up to a certain amount, I dont want the finance team to be involved because they already have a lot on their plate.

Limitations

A card transaction is initiated from the merchants site and has to be completed immediately (via OTP) so it cannot be approved after its initiated, unlike a payout request that can go through necessary approvals before the bank transfer gets initiated.

Assignment Tasks

Prepare a Product Requirements Document based on the problem statement and ideation.

If you decide not to pick a point from ideation, or tweak it significantly, then do explain the rationale behind that decision.

The PRD should be authored such that it can serve as a shared understanding between the Product Owner and the development team consisting of UI/UX designer, software engineers, and QA engineers.

Identify epics and stories for the product backlog covering functional and non-functional requirements and acceptance criteria to be implemented iteratively, preferably with an MVP approach.