Oliver Chan

Owned delivery of Scotiabank's contribution to Scene+, the bank-wide loyalty rewards program, across hundreds of user stories and dozens of sprints. Shipped on schedule at national scale.

Full write-up (scope, the coordination problem, my specific role) still to come.

Took Scotiabank's electronic FX platform from nothing to full vision in just over a year, with a live MVP in six months. Owned the database schema, all wireframing and hi-fidelity UI, and the internal go-to-market myself. Now serves all Scotiabank retail channels.

Full write-up (zero-to-one process, design decisions, what I'd change) still to come.

The app's install size had been growing steadily, and the concern wasn't disk space in the abstract, it was retention. Users delete large apps to free up space long before they actually run out of it, so size was really a churn risk wearing an engineering metric's clothes.

The open question was what target actually mattered. Rather than aim for "as small as possible," I traced how people actually encounter app size on iOS: in iPhone Storage settings, apps are listed largest first, but the list only shows the top 20 before collapsing the rest behind a "Show More" button. Most users never see an app flagged as a space hog unless it's big enough to clear that cutoff, so the target became staying under that fold.

To turn that into a number, I commissioned a statistical analysis, done with LLM assistance, of installed-app-size distributions to find the threshold a typical device would need to clear to land in that visible top 20 (roughly the 95th percentile, two standard deviations out). That put the target at approximately 440MB.

Full write-up (the size-reduction levers, how the target reconciles with the ~600MB delivered figure, what shipped vs. what's still in flight) still to come.

Owned product for Interac e-Transfer and Add Bill Payee across Scotiabank's full retail digital base. Most of the team's early instinct was to optimize the single transaction: fewer taps, faster confirmation, a higher completion rate on any one transfer or bill payment.

The reframe I pushed for was that a single successful transfer doesn't make a customer sticky, a recurring one does. Once someone sets up a recurring e-Transfer or a scheduled bill payment through their bank, switching banks means rebuilding that setup elsewhere, which is real friction working in the bank's favour. That shifted priority from "make one transfer easier" toward "make setting up a recurring transfer at least as easy as a one-off," on the theory that recurring usage, not transaction count, is what actually drives retention.

Full write-up (the recurring-vs-one-off product bet, what shipped, what the data showed) still to come.