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

B2B · STORY 05

Self-serve payment links

One payment link. Many merchant needs.

The Payment Link worked. The problem was that every merchant wanted it to work differently.

01 · THE STARTING POINT

One payment link. Many merchant needs.

The creation flow was generic: item description, total amount, expiry, partial payment, customer targeting.

But different merchants needed different information to appear in the payment request.

02 · THE FRICTION

Customization became the bottleneck.

A simple merchant request, can I show the policy number, could turn into a product and engineering dependency.

The same chain ran again for the next merchant, and the one after that.

03 · THE PRODUCT INSIGHT

The payment infrastructure was reusable. The configuration layer wasn’t.

The problem was never the Payment Link. It was that the information around the payment could not vary without a build.

04 · THE REFRAME

From custom builds to a configurable product.

Turn recurring customization requests into configurable product capabilities.

That is a different problem from building faster.

05 · THE NEW JOURNEY

Configure, preview, create, share.

The merchant chose the fields their payment request needed, set the payment rules, previewed what the customer would see, and shared it.

06 · THE TRANSFORMATION

Move customization from the engineering queue into the merchant’s hands.

The same requirement, met in a different place in the system.

07 · WHAT I BUILT

A configuration layer on top of reusable infrastructure.

Don’t rebuild the payment infrastructure for every merchant. Build a configurable layer above it.

That decision is what made the capability scale to merchants nobody had spoken to yet.

08 · THE PM WORK

I wasn’t solving one customization request. I was looking for the pattern behind hundreds.

Mapping the recurring requests was what turned an operations problem into a product one.

09 · THE RESULT

From “I need this customized” to “I can configure this myself”.

Merchant onboarding time fell by 20%, and engineering dependency by 15%.

The metrics are the consequence of the product decision, not the story itself.

Operational problems often contain product opportunities

When the same customization request keeps appearing, the answer isn’t necessarily to process those requests faster. It may be to make the customer capable of solving them themselves.

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Connecting the dots

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

— Steve Jobs

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