Facile.it

Problem

I joined Facile.it as a QA specialist in 2017. Within a year I was running the product side, and not long after I became the company’s first product manager. What I owned was unglamorous and high-stakes at the same time: the software the largest credit-broker network in Italy used to move applications from first contact to signed contract.

Most of that flow still leaned on paper. Documents printed, signed, scanned, posted, re-keyed. Every manual step was a place where an application could stall or a commission could be paid late. The brokers felt it, and so did the people processing the work behind them. My job was to make the digital version good enough that people would choose it over the paper they already trusted.

Approach

I treated adoption as the real metric, not feature count. A paperless workflow nobody uses saves nothing. So I worked close to the brokers: opportunity workflow, digital documents, e-signature, all shaped around how they actually sold rather than how we wished they did.

I shipped in slices and watched what stuck. The document-signing piece went cross-business-unit once it proved itself on the first workflow. Invoicing was the other heavy manual area, so I automated it end to end: less hand-keying, faster commission payouts, fewer disputes.

Coming from QA helped more than I expected. I knew where the workflow broke under real load, and I could write the kind of acceptance criteria that left little room for a half-built feature to slip through.

Outcome

The paperless workflow reached 80% adoption in under twelve months and saved around €150K a year. The number mattered less to me than the curve behind it: people moved off paper because the digital path was genuinely faster, not because they were told to.

The invoicing automation cut manual workload by roughly 70% and saved a further €120K a year, with commissions paid out faster. The cross-business-unit signing suite lifted conversion on utility contracts and took a real bite out of operating cost.

I left Facile.it in 2023 having built a product function that did not exist when I arrived. It is still the work I point to when someone asks whether a PM can come from a technical seat and own outcomes, not just tickets.