TTB Touch · via aamzng · Research-led product strategy
Research-led product strategy through a bank merger.
Context
When TMB and Thanachart merged to form TTB, the combined bank needed a single retail banking app — TTB Touch — that could serve two merging customer bases and eight business units without fracturing the experience. The work happened in 2020, mid-merger, while the two organisations were still becoming one.
The challenge
A merger is the hardest possible context for product direction: two organisations, two customer bases, two ways of working, and eight business units each with a claim on the app. The bank's team was newer to digital product delivery, and the business-unit heads came from finance rather than product — so feature decisions risked being driven by internal politics rather than customer need. Getting to one coherent product meant getting to one evidence base — and one objective way to decide — first.
What I did
I partnered with a design agency — they owned the UI; I owned the research, the decision framework, and building the bank's own capability to run both. As a player-coach, I trained TTB's UX team and developed the research protocols and discussion guides with them. Because different banking products target different market segments — from mass market and mass affluent through to high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth individuals — I defined which segments to test feature by feature, so the evidence matched each product's real users. And I built two frameworks the bank could keep using: an objective scoring framework to decide which strategic features to approve, and a leaner, faster product-level testing framework so teams could validate quickly without heavyweight studies.
How I led
The scoring framework was the unlock. By making feature prioritisation objective and evidence-based, it let eight business units — and their politically weighted leaders — bypass the turf battles a merger generates and focus on what was right for the customer. The value was as much organisational as user-facing: giving a fragmented set of senior stakeholders, most from a banking rather than product background, a shared and defensible way to agree. I taught the team not just what the research said, but how to run it and decide from it themselves.
Outcome
TTB Touch launched and is live in the app stores as the merged bank's flagship retail app — its feature set shaped by customer evidence and an objective prioritisation framework rather than merger politics. (Adoption and internal impact figures under NDA.) The bank's own team came away able to run research and make evidence-based product decisions without me.
What it proves
Research-led product strategy under real organisational complexity — using evidence, and a framework for deciding with it, to cut through the ambiguity of a bank merger, align a fragmented set of stakeholders on one direction, and leave the client more capable than I found them. The operator's version of research leadership: not just insight, but the system and the people to keep acting on it.