Hardi Jain is a product manager. This portfolio is drawn in the browser and needs JavaScript to play. You can find him on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Hardi Jain · AI and SaaS product manager

B2C · STORY 03

The fee was due. The full payment wasn’t always possible.

Partial payments for education payment links

Educational institutions were using Payment Links to collect fees from parents. The challenge was that a single link typically asked the parent to pay the entire amount upfront.

01 · THE OPENING

One link. One amount. Pay it all now.

Educational institutions were using Payment Links to collect fees from parents.

The challenge was that a single link typically asked the parent to pay the entire amount upfront.

02 · THE PROBLEM

The Payment Link was simple. The payment wasn’t.

Funnel analysis showed that parent drop-off was concentrated at the payment stage when annual or term fees had to be paid as a single lump sum.

03 · LISTEN TO THE CUSTOMER

The data showed where the problem was. Feedback explained why.

Both sides of the transaction described the same constraint in different words.

04 · THE INSIGHT

The problem wasn’t the Payment Link. It was the payment structure.

If schools could decide how much needed to be collected upfront, the same Payment Link infrastructure could support a more flexible fee-collection model.

05 · THE PRODUCT QUESTION

What if the school could decide how much to collect first?

That single change moved the decision from the parent, who had no options, to the institution, which understood its own collection cycle.

06 · BEFORE VS AFTER

From “pay everything now” to “pay what is required now”.

The balance could then be collected through subsequent Payment Links, on the school’s own schedule.

07 · HOW THE PRODUCT WORKED

The school controlled the payment structure.

The institution set the total fee, enabled partial payment, defined the minimum, and shared the link.

The parent paid the minimum the school had defined, and the balance stayed tracked against the fee.

08 · TWO SIDES

A B2B2C product has two users.

The school needed control over collection. The parent needed a payment they could actually complete. The product had to serve both in one flow.

09 · THE SYSTEM

Simple for the parent. Structured for the platform.

The product needed to maintain the relationship between the total fee, the minimum amount collected and the outstanding balance, so subsequent Payment Links could collect the remaining amount.

10 · THE EDGE CASE

What happens when the next payment doesn’t happen?

A balance that is tracked but never collected is still an unpaid fee. The follow-up path is the part of the model that decides whether it closes.

11 · PRODUCT OWNERSHIP

From signal to measurement.

I worked across product discovery, payment-flow definition, merchant requirements, UX, engineering coordination and measurement to extend Payment Links into a partial-payment collection model.

12 · THE OUTCOME

More completed payments.

Target EdTech payment links saw a 12% lift in segment conversion, and participating fee-collection flows saw an 8% lift in overall transaction completion.

Sometimes conversion isn’t a UI problem

I learned that improving a payment product isn’t always about making the checkout faster. Sometimes the bigger opportunity is changing the rules of how the transaction can happen.

Contact me

Connecting the dots

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

— Steve Jobs

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