For some background, Plaude is a cross border payments platform that provides global accounts to facilitate high volume payments/transactions in lots of different currencies. I started off as an intern on the Product team in the summer of 2025, and now work part-time throughout the year as a Product Associate. Throughout my time at Plaude, I've worked on a broad range of things, from the CSO dashboard, API doc breakdowns, vendor tracking databases, and obviously product roadmapping.
CSO DASHBOARD
Problem: Our original dashboard was built with Django. While it served its function while needed, it was hard to read and caused major issues for our CSOs, who were using it to manually input transactions for some of our less tech-savvy customers.
🚀 Big takeaway: this was a testament to the importance of a good frontend.
IDEATION
While discussing some ideas across teams (customer success officers, engineering, product, and compliance) we realized just how many priorities we had to balance. Compliance wanted heavier automation to take away their grunt work, CSO's needed a system that helped them flag certain delays and slowdowns, and engineering felt that the intial dashboard was fine and thought we should focus on more pressing topics. In order to ease some of the tensions, we held some cross-team meetings, so that everyone was able to understand the other team's perspectives.
ENGINEERING
Our current dashboard gets the job done, and we are already working on higher priority things. I don't see the value add for this.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
Customers are getting mad at us for not showing them missing documents and other issues, which is making our transaction settlement slower. I spend too much time navigating and manually inputting things, it's impossible for us to work more efficiently with this system.
COMPLIANCE
This system doesn't automate or notify us of anything, and with us being backlogged with other things it's too much of a hassle to navigate to it and check for documents daily.
PRODUCT MVP
While we had threw a lot of nice-to-haves out there, our North-Star metric was mainly to speed up transaction processing. To accomplish this, we put together a product requirements list to touch on all of these bases without going overboard.
We decided on five essential features to add to the dashboard, other than just cleaning up for visibility:
- Tables for transactions with ID, customer, amount, status, and settlement ETA
- Filter by date, customer, status
- Highlight stuck or delayed transactions
- Call out missing documents, determine necessary pages, and flag things for compliance
- Overview of volume, frequency
- View uploaded documents
- History of messages per transaction
- Internal notes and message previews
- Ability to mark as resolved, assign owner, request documents from customers
- Ability for authorization and permissions hierarchy to be set by admins
RESULTS
Unfortunately I'm not able to share images of the final internal dashboard due to compliance issues, but it was a success! We were able to push through and get it out in one sprint, and safe to say our CSOs and Compliance team was happy 😊
