Product Principles at Shares

Product principles at Shares

Shares is a social investing app we’ve recently launched on the App Store and Play Store where people can come together to invest, chat and learn in one place.

Marrying social and investing is a problem we’ve set ourselves to solve, as we believe social interactions can play a key role in helping everyday people grow as investors and ultimately grow their wealth.

Our product principles are essential guidelines that help product designers and product managers make decisions within their teams and across verticals but also help the wider organisation understand our product decision-making process.

They have served the early team as the basis of our entire product decision-making process, helping us to define our social angle on investing and, by extension, execute on the MVP.

As the team grows, we must continue to adhere to these principles rigorously, as it will result in better alignment, better and faster product decisions, and ultimately a great, consistent and meaningful product for our users.

Biased towards simplicity

Because of the nature of our industry, we’ll naturally drift towards complexity. But we’re building Shares for everyday people, so the burden is on us to always keep things simple — or remove as many abstractions as possible.

Ruthless mindset

We’re here to deliver value and we’re ruthless about it. Whether it’s innovating from scratch or reusing existing solutions, once the source of value is identified, we go after it.

Approachable

Our product should be friendly and easy to interact with. Finance has always been serious and elitist, but we’re mindful about understanding everyday people’s goals and challenges and creating a space where they can be themselves and grow.

Challenge the status quo

We’re operating in a space where often the answer is “that’s just how it works”. Our attitude should always be to ask why, challenge existing solutions and innovate in our space. Life is too short to build average products.

Build for trust

People trust us to have their best interests at heart and we always build solutions with that in mind. It’s about making their experience transparent, truthful and reliable in a space that has been historically opaque.

Quality is impact

Our ambition is to provide an excellent user experience, not only on our mobile app but across all our offerings. People have extremely high expectations of mobile and social products — quality will make our business thrive.

Like everything we do at Shares, we challenge these principles constantly to make sure they are always helping us build the right product for our users.

Join us!

We’re always looking to work with great people who are passionate about making a difference.

Read more about our social features and everything product related inside the app:

  1. Behind the scenes building Communities

  2. More stock communities coming your way

  3. New social features on Shares

  4. Did someone say more social features?

  5. Ed Westwick × Shares: Debunking the myths of investing

If you choose to invest, your capital is at risk.

Meet the authors

James Ashoo photo

James Ashoo

Senior Content Writer

James has been investing for over five years. His aim is to explain the hard stuff, easily! When he's not chewing your ear off about stocks and crypto, he'll most likely be telling bad jokes.

Harjas Singh

Harjas Singh

Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder

With a wealth of experience in fintech, Harjas is the man in the know when it comes to all things product. Investing features, chatting capabilities and thriving communities – he oversees all development on the Shares app!

Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison

Finance Writer

Harry is an experienced business writer, with a love for all things tech. In his free time, he enjoys reading, playing sport and winning at chess. He also loves posting inside the Shares app!