Sila’s Framework for Prioritizing Features in a Complex Technical Landscape

When you’re building financial infrastructure, prioritization isn’t just about what customers want – it’s about what’s possible, practical, and profitable. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Sila co-founder Shamir Karkal shared how his team navigates these complex decisions.

Learning from Past Experience

The lessons began at Simple. “It took us three years to actually build and launch simple,” Shamir recalls. “The biggest problem was not finding customers. The biggest problem was just building the technology and finding the bank partners, the vendors.” This experience shaped how Sila would later approach feature prioritization.

Understanding Market Needs

Sila’s mission became clear: “to make it easy for everybody to innovate and program with money and financial networks.” This mission statement helps guide prioritization decisions, focusing on features that enable innovation and programmability.

The Core Infrastructure First

The initial platform focused on essential capabilities. “Our core product is a REST/HTTP API platform that enables our customers to build financial applications and offers tools like KYC and KYB APIs, digital wallets, virtual bank accounts, ACH payments, and buyer and card payment suit,” Shamir explains.

Prioritizing Based on Impact

Feature decisions often come down to customer impact versus development cost. “You just have to prioritize,” Shamir emphasizes. “Do I invest a lot in building out wire functionality, which maybe only 5% of my customers are interested in? Or do I spend more… put it into building, like, whatever, a savings feature or something else that my customers care about more?”

The Edge Case Focus

A unique aspect of Sila’s prioritization framework is their attention to reliability. “Everything about payments, especially, it’s not about the 99 or 99.9% of payments that work fine. It’s all about that .1% that have a problem,” Shamir notes. This means sometimes prioritizing robustness over new features.

Scaling With Purpose

The approach is working. “We’ve seen like about five X growth in total transactions this year… and we do anywhere from ten to 25% transaction growth month on month right now,” Shamir shares. They now serve “close to 100 customers in total, more than 50 of whom are live.”

Looking to the Future

Future prioritization will continue to balance existing capabilities with new payment systems. “I think three years from today, we’ll still be serving the same customers with the same products and continuing to grow and scale that,” Shamir explains. “I think what we will add is support for a lot more payment systems.”

For founders building complex technical products, Sila’s framework offers valuable lessons. Success isn’t just about adding features – it’s about choosing the right ones at the right time. As Shamir puts it, “Startups are not like an overnight success. It takes years, sometimes decades of building before you do become that overnight success and everybody hears of you. So it is 99% perseverance.”

The key is maintaining focus on core capabilities while carefully expanding into new areas. It’s about building for the long term while delivering immediate value to customers – a balance that requires both strategic vision and tactical execution.