Episode 190: Mastering Product Focus: Balancing Legacy and Innovation with Shruti Patel
I enjoyed sitting down with Shruti Patel, Executive Vice President and CPO of Business Banking at U.S. Bank, to explore the evolving landscape of product management in the financial sector.
Shruti, with her extensive experience in transforming product experiences at large financial institutions, shared her profound insights on staying focused amidst the complexities of product development and countering disruptive technologies. In our thought-provoking conversation on the Product Thinking podcast, Shruti discussed the importance of balancing investments in existing products with the need for innovation, as well as the practical application of the Horizon 1-2-3 model for strategic planning.
Her perspective on modernizing infrastructure, aligning engineering with product goals, and leveraging agility to enhance customer experiences offered a fresh take on navigating the challenges of product management in a rapidly changing environment.
Join me as I dive into Shruti's strategic approaches and gain actionable advice on optimizing product development and driving impactful customer solutions.
You’ll hear us talk about:
04:03 - Navigating the Differences Between Traditional Banking and Fintech
At the top of this episode, Shruti highlights the distinct differences between traditional banking institutions and modern fintech companies, particularly from the perspective of product management. As she explains, while fintechs like Shopify operate with a narrow focus and modern tech stacks, banks like US Bank handle a broader range of services and face the complexities of managing legacy systems. These systems, having been built over decades, often necessitate a more deliberate and slower approach to innovation. Shruti is keen to underscore that the responsibility of managing people’s money in a highly regulated environment further complicates the speed and agility typically associated with product development in fintech.
13:22 - Addressing Small Business Challenges Through Product Innovation
In discussing her work at U.S. Bank, Shruti elaborates by insights gained from U.S. Bank’s annual survey of small businesses, which identified cash flow management and access to capital as two of the most significant challenges faced by these enterprises. Shruti emphasizes that understanding these pain points is crucial in shaping the bank’s strategy to provide digital tools that not only facilitate financial transactions but also offer businesses valuable insights into their cash flow.
35:10 - Transitioning to a Product-Centric Organization
Shruti shares with Melissa her insights on how large enterprises can successfully transition from a project-based approach to a product-centric one. She advises that organizations start by clearly defining their core product sets and mapping the customer journeys associated with these products. This involves understanding how customers interact with products and identifying pain points across these touchpoints. She also goes on to emphasize the importance of organizing the business around these customer journeys to ensure that all efforts are aligned with enhancing the customer experience.
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Intro - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa - 00:00:37: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking podcast. Today, we're joined by Shruti Patel, the Chief Product Officer for Business Banking at U.S. Bank. She focuses on developing innovative solutions to enhance the customer experiences for over 1.2 million small and medium-sized businesses. Her impressive career also includes pivotal roles at Shopify, where she drove strategic partnerships and sustainable business practices. Today, we're gonna be talking all about the landscape of serving small businesses, but also about transformation with product management at U.S. Bank. So stay tuned for that. But first, it's time for Dear Melissa. This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com, and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Here's today's question.
Dear Melissa, I'm growing a product team at an SMB SaaS company. We've got developers who have a team structure on their end. Devs report into lead devs, report into engineering managers. The product structure, however, is still to build. Other than a product manager, what position do you recommend going with first? Thanks in advance.
So here it really depends on what you need. There's a few places to start. First, if you want to think about the traditional career path for product managers, it looks something like this. We usually have an associate PM who is brand new to the role, has no experiences, who's very, very junior. And then above them would be a product manager, then a senior product manager. And in some very large places, mostly enterprises, we'll have a principal PM. And that's a landscape of individual contributor product managers. All of those people are not necessarily reporting into each other. Don't think of that as a ladder. It's just different seniorities of product managers who are individual contributors. They would report into usually a director of product management or in a smaller company, a VP of product management. And then the larger the company, you probably have a chief product officer on top. Now, you're in a really tiny company, SMBs here, so you don't need all of that. But what you do want to think about is when you start scaling out your product management team, when do things break? So if all the product managers, all the ICs are reporting into you, which is typical, that's what you want, usually around eight people reporting into you is when it's a little too much to handle. That's when you want to think about another level. And that's usually where people bring in directors in an SMB business. So you would have directors reporting into you and then individual contributor product managers reporting into the director. Now, at this time too, you may need just like a senior individual contributor product manager, somebody who's done it before, somebody who can get stuff done. That might be a way that you can go. Or you might need some help between you and the IC product managers to help evenly distribute that.
Some people call this director level that I'm talking about a group product manager. I don't have big designs over whether we call a director or group PMs, but I don't think you need both in a SMB business. In very large enterprises, sometimes I see like group PMs roll into directors. But typically, that's a little bit overkill. So I like to think of this as the manager of product managers. That's what I call a director. So let's go with that. Now, in a small company too, you might not necessarily need another product manager. You might need somebody outside of product management. Do you have a user researcher? Is that what is slowing down the team and would allow them to be unlocked more, to go faster and get more insights about your customers? Do you have UX designers or are the product managers doing double duty here? What about data analysts? Don't think just of, do I need another product manager? But what is the work that needs to go around? And what are we efficient on? What are we not efficient on? And what do I need to add from there? That's where I would start. Get a lay of the land of what your roadmap is going to look like, what your people are going to look like for the next year, and then try to figure out what's the most appropriate role. So I hope that helps. If you have a question for me, again, remember, you can go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what it is. Now, let's go talk to Shruti.
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Melissa - 00:05:02: Hi, Shruti. Welcome to the podcast.
Shruti - 00:05:04: Hi, Melissa. Thank you for having me. I'm excited.
Melissa - 00:05:07: I'm excited too. You've had such a great diverse product management career. Can you tell us a little bit about what drew you to this field?
Shruti - 00:05:15: That's an interesting question and I wish I could answer it myself. I would say, unfortunately, it was a bunch of coincidences which got me here. But I started out my career in financial services. So, you know, if you look at my background, almost 15 plus years were at American Express and J.P. Morgan, where I did a lot of work around, you know, both B2B payments as well as B2C payments across the retail bank. And within American Express, it was a lot of work within merchant services. And so a lot of the early on in my career work was focused on product and product building, whether that's for large enterprises or small businesses. And I enjoyed it, keeping customers at the center of a lot of how we thought about products and strategies and go to market and kind of creating more frictionless experiences. And it sort of just continued to evolve from there. I continue to do more and more around product development across different segments. And that led to partnerships. And then that led to me doing my stint at Shopify for a while, again, thinking about product building within the fintech environment.
Melissa - 00:06:26: And what made you excited about joining U.S. Bank?
Shruti - 00:06:29: A lot of what I had done in my career and background was focused on small businesses. And so whether that was within specifically focused on merchant services network within large banks or fintechs, a lot of it was around how do we help small businesses manage both their front office and their back office more efficiently? How do we create financial services products, which essentially help small businesses start a business, continue to grow it and mature, or for that matter, offer them value-added services? And so U.S. Bank was exciting because essentially, it's all focused around how do we think about our financial services products focused within the small business base I have. I have 1.5 million small businesses as our customers today. And so a lot of my work and a lot of my team's work is focused on how do we continue to drive value to our financial products, whether that's our deposits portfolio, our lending portfolio. A lot of the investments we're making now is within software services, enabling our small businesses to accept payments. All of that was just exciting. It was exciting to manage both the product and the distribution of such a large customer base and essentially hoping that we could support them through their journey.
Melissa - 00:07:54: So U.S. Bank, your experiences too at American Express and J.P. Morgan, it's a lot of traditional banking. You also went to Shopify, which I think we would think of more as a modern software company since they started from software. What have you observed as the differences in product management between the traditional banking sectors and places like Shopify?
Shruti - 00:08:13: That's a great question and a question which I get asked very often. Obviously, I'm sure because you've done so many podcasts with a lot of these product companies, I think a place where fintechs have done really, really well or companies like Shopify, for example, have done really well is they're very focused from a product development perspective. And so they've taken a lot of the challenges which segments, whether that's consumers or small businesses or the segments they are serving, face today. And they essentially have built great experiences and products around those pain points. And so they're focused on certain pain points and they've built an entire product around solving those pain points or essentially removing friction from journeys. I think banks have done the same, but I think the difference within the banks is, you know, it's a broader canvas to work with. Banks are very diversified. They are large corporate enterprises with multiple business units. And so a bit of where we are in our transformation journey is how do we actually get more agile? How do we accelerate our speed to market? Because a lot of our infrastructure dates many years. The fintechs have the benefit of modern infrastructure, more API and microservices-based, whereas we have some legacy infrastructure where cross dependencies matter.
We are impacting multiple products when we are making small changes. So it's a much broader canvas to work with. You know, it's not just simply looking at a certain product and a service and only being able to impact and improve there. We tend to have a lot of dependencies on other businesses and other products. What I would say, though, there's a huge difference also within the banks versus the fintechs is we're very omnichannel. And so we also have a whole physical network, whether that's the network of ATMs or the network of branches or in-person advisory and consulting services, which we provide to the customers. So fintechs have the advantage of being very digital focused and we are much more omnichannel. So we also have to think about banker tools. We have to think about our branch, frontline workers and what kind of digital capabilities and products are we enabling them with so that they in turn can enable the end customer. Those are main differences. I would say it's a much narrow canvas versus a broader canvas to work with.
Melissa - 00:10:36: I think some people who work in SaaS companies or in software companies, too, don't quite understand the complexity of large enterprises, right? And then all those pieces that you just mentioned. And when we talk about being agile or being fast or trying to get things out the door, I find that they don't have an appreciation for what that actually takes when you're dealing with people's money, right? Or their ATM access or things like that. When you look at the way that you plan strategy or think about what you're doing at U.S. Bank versus something that a SaaS company might be working on to ship out that's not impactful like that, what other requirements do you have that surround making sure that that product is the right product? Like what besides just testing with users and putting it out there?
Shruti - 00:11:19: So you said two great things, which I often tell folks, you know, when they're working at smaller companies or smaller technology companies, banks have the responsibility of managing people's money. They're custodians of people's cash. And so whether that means money movement capabilities, whether that means, you know, cash withdrawals, whether that means simple transactions you want to do online or in the app or in the branch network, banks are responsible. And so trust and security matters a lot. And I think very often when we speak to folks from the SaaS companies, it's not that they don't appreciate. I think it is a little bit of neither would I say undermining, but I think they're not aware of the fact that their scale and distribution also, which goes along with the large banks. Right? And so, yes, we are not as fast as a lot of the SaaS companies and the technology companies, but a lot of the big banks have been around for 100 years. And so when you're dealing with 100 years of what you have built and the different products set and the infrastructure around it speed-to-market and modernizing that infrastructure will take time. And so that transformation journey is on its way, but it's just going to take a little bit more time versus the fintechs and the SaaS, I would say, which are built on modern tech stacks. They're much newer in market. They are more focused in the offerings they have versus being very diversified. But, you know, over time, I'm sure a lot of them are going to go through the same journeys the banks are going through. They, too, will become a little bit outdated in the next 20 years where they have to start thinking about their architecture a little bit differently. The second thing is, you know, you asked what are some of the considerations. Look, we at U.S. Bank are very customer centric.
And so a lot of the work we're doing right now in product development is ensuring that the customer is at the center of a lot of the journeys and is at the center of how we think about the product. What are the pain points or the jobs to be done, which we are solving for? And are we actually really creating a high value product as well as a product which they will really benefit from and solve the core customer pain point? And so obviously, after taking all of that into consideration, we want to build something great. But we also have to look beyond testing, Melissa, because every time we launch a product, it doesn't hit 100,000 customers or 200,000 customers. It hits millions of customers. And so when you're a custodian of cash and trust and security are your biggest pillars and known for the brand. And you're going to launch a lot of new features, whether it's as small as launching a feature with an online banking or actually launching a new God product or a new merchant product, scale and distribution matters. And you're going to be impacting millions of customers. And so it's really imperative that you build really high value products, keeping the customer at the center of it. But every time you're going to launch, it's going to impact a lot more than a few hundred thousand. And so you have to just make sure that when you do these kind of releases, whether it's a feature release or an actual product release, you're just really aware of that customer set and making sure that you're not disrupting something which is already working well or going well for them.
Melissa - 00:14:39: In the case where you do have that type of impact, right, where you're affecting all the millions of people, how do you still test or learn about your customers in ways that are less risky than hitting a button to everybody and releasing everything at once to millions of people?
Shruti - 00:14:54: So we have started doing a lot of A-B testing, focus group testing and experimentation. And this goes back to some of the transformation journey banks have been on for a while now. And, you know, we're becoming more and more adaptable down that road. And so what I would say is that rather than just a plain-cat testing, both from the conceptualization of the product to when the product is actually ready to launch, there's a ton of investment we make in A-B testing, collecting feedback from our customers, doing very focus group solicitation, and making sure whether it's the small businesses or our consumers, we're inviting them to test the product, provide feedback, and going through that iterative cycle of constantly improving. And that's really when we get to the launch phase. And so a ton of that goes before the launch itself. But even after launch, I'm sure, Melissa, you know, products now have a much shorter shelf cycle than they used to have before. And so we are investing more and more into just that iterative experimentation to make sure that we are constantly improvising and improving something, which is not working after delivery as well.
Melissa - 00:15:54: So at U.S. Bank, you recently released the cash flow management app for small businesses. Can you tell us a little bit about what that product development process was like and from the strategy component all the way through to launch?
Shruti - 00:16:06: U.S. Bank does a survey of about a thousand plus businesses, small businesses each year. One of the key reasons why we do the survey is to make sure that we understand some of the macro environment had been small businesses are facing just in general, in the U.S.. But in addition to that, it actually is a really good bus check for us to understand what do businesses care about? What are some of the digital tools and services they're interacting with and how can we offer some of these services to them? So our survey findings were recently released, and there were a lot of things we obviously learned from the survey as we do each year. Among the macro environment headwinds, they are clearly facing a lot of pressure from increased cost of supplies because driven by inflation. They have labor shortages, and in general, they are looking to invest more in their businesses. But what was really exciting to learn from the survey was also how optimistic small businesses are. So they continue to think that the businesses are feeling optimistic about the success. They're seeing year-over-year growth, and they're continuing to move forward and invest in the overall success of the business, regardless of the shortages of labor or the increased cost of inflation. There were two big things which came out of the survey. The two biggest pain points, you know, almost 80% of our small businesses, outside of feeling the labor shortages, have two big needs. Number one is just cash flow and access to capital. And so whether that's working capital, short-term loans or long-term loans, to be able to run their businesses, invest in expansion opportunities or invest in raw materials, just access to capital in the high-rate environment continues to be a challenge.
The second one was how do we enable our small businesses to run their back offices efficiently, which is inflows and outflows of cash, right? Like, help me pay my bill, be able to pay my vendors or employees effectively. Small businesses have bills to pay, whether it's for raw materials, their suppliers, their vendors or, you know, their employees. And we want to have a really simple cash flow tool for them with multiple ways to pay. They can use their card, they can use their check, they can use our ACH facilities, which the bank enables. But we also want to actually give them insights into their cash flow. If you talk to a lot of the small businesses, you know, often they actually are not fully aware of their own cash flow situation, because they don't have great back office management tools. And so we want to be able to give them insights into what does their inflow look like? What does their outflow look like? And, you know, how can we enable them to make better decisions, both from a cash flow management perspective also, but overall vendor management and supplier management perspective.
So the survey findings helped us essentially identify a few pain points which we're looking to solve. We have a great lending program for small businesses. We're going to continue to, you know, enhance the program to ensure that we meet the needs for working capital with our small businesses. And then the same goes with cash flow management. We have existing tools and capabilities which enable our small businesses to pay a bill, whether that's to your vendor. Supplier to their employees. We're going to continue to invest in those as well to make sure that we are keeping up with some of the needs identified as a result from the survey. SMBs are constantly looking for better cash flow management tools and so essentially giving them insights and almost a calculator on their inflows and outflows and what's on the horizon for us.
Melissa - 00:20:14: So SMBs that you're developing for are very different than large enterprises too. Can you tell us a little bit more about the nuances between those two types of customers and how you are learning more about the pain points and making sure that you're building for the right customer?
Shruti - 00:20:28: I always smile when we get this question because we serve a segment of a million plus small businesses. And, you know, they run from small micro businesses to mid-market to large enterprises. And so as we think about a product development cycle, we are constantly thinking about how do we serve the entire segment holistically. I would say the biggest difference in the micro SMB space is that they're really looking for more integrated experiences and more bundled solutions. If you look at the trend today in the marketplace, a lot of banks are really investing in software capabilities. They are building cash flow management tools. They're building payroll capabilities. And that is because they're really trying to serve the need of this integrated experience for small businesses. You know, if you're a small business owner, you're running a business with less than five employees. You really don't want to do the mental gymnastics of multiple softwares. One to manage your back office. One to manage your employees. One to just manage your ledger.
You're looking for bundled products, whether that's to merchant services or payment solutions. And so as we think about product development within U.S. Bank focused in the small and the micro SMB segment, we are investing a lot more in our bundled offering, which is how can we be this one-stop shop? For our small businesses to run most of their back office effectively where they're managing their money. And so as custodians of their money management tools, we also want to make sure those money management tools have utilities tied to it and they can use those accounts to do the different things they're intending to do. With large enterprises, their needs are complex. These are bigger businesses. They are much more broader from their distribution and reach perspective. They have more complex needs. And so they're looking for very custom solutions. They're looking for corporate treasury solutions. They are looking for more liquidity solutions. They're looking for large loans for their working capital engagements. And so in those cases, we have actually bigger custom enterprise-wide platforms to serve their needs versus in the small SMB space. It's sort of like a one-stop shop where we are bundling a lot of the software services together.
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Melissa - 00:23:15: When you think about your journey with SMB2 and getting up to speed on those markets, but also knowing it from Shopify and all these other places, what do you think have been the best lessons that you've learned?
Shruti - 00:23:25: I would probably say over the last 20 years, having worked at big banks and big card institutions, there are two or three. One is product development is complex. And so it's really important to stay focused. And be very focused on the need you're solving for. Especially in large corporations or large financial institutions, it's easy to kind of lose that focus, right? Because you're trying to solve for so much. And it's a much broader canvas, as I mentioned. But I do think that the sign of a good product leader or a good general manager, for that matter, is really looking at your portfolio of products, what products are driving really high impact, solving core customer needs, and how do you continue to invest in those products in a focused way to not only differentiate in the marketplace, but also to counter disruption, because there's constant disruptive technology being introduced in the marketplace. So I would say stay focused, don't get distracted easily, pick a few things which are going to drive step change impact versus small incremental things you want to do.
The second one is the Horizon 1 to 3 model. I tend to follow that, which is spend 70% of your time on Horizon 1. And Horizon 1 is really constantly looking at your existing products, your existing processes and capabilities, and how do you continue to improvise them. You continue to drive impact from your current portfolio. I usually spend 20% of my time on Horizon 2, which is how do you take those existing capabilities and expand to newer segments and markets without reinventing the wheel. And then probably 10% on Horizon 3. And that is essentially just thinking about new products, new capabilities, new segments and markets to counter disruption. The reason I say 10% on Horizon 3 is because all corporations are always disciplined about expenses and investments. And there's only so many dollars you're going to have to invest in capabilities. And so you want to make sure you squeeze the most out of your existing before you can actually start thinking about new products and new services. I think it's easy to get lost on something new, which is trying to really fix the basics and fix your existing business to continue.
Melissa - 00:25:46: That's a really interesting note, because I've definitely seen that in the market, especially with AI coming out. A lot of big pushes from large enterprises to do everything with AI. And if you do look around, there's still so much room to grow just by fixing user experiences. I think that's a really good lesson for people to listen to. In these large enterprises, too, that we're talking about, a lot of questions that I get from product managers who work for financial institutions or pharmaceuticals, anything like that, who work especially on the back-end pieces, like making sure transactions go through or the APIs or the platform, basically the entire infrastructure of how we run our banks. They have a hard time sometimes explaining to leadership how they impact these revenue or cost metrics. And just, hey, this is more efficient or this is like that, especially if it's designing new platforms, let's say. How do you encourage your teams and people who are working on back-end systems that might not just be like, hey, here's a credit card. I can say we get fees from how many times you use a credit card. How do you kind of connect those things back to value? And what do leaders want to hear about why you're making improvements to those systems?
Shruti - 00:26:53: I think there are three things to keep in mind. It's just agility, speed to market, and new product development. And while I called out NPD is super important, I think it's important for folks who want to kind of push the agenda on, you know, why do we need to modernize our infrastructure? Why do we need to have a microservices-based environment? Why do we need to have an API portal? There are just three things, right? It all goes back to product development. I think it's important to tie that if we continue to be on some of these legacy infrastructures or the way we did the waterfall way of product development, the speed to market, the speed to market is just not going to be sustainable versus some of the SaaS companies or fintechs out there. And so that in itself will quantify a lot of how we're thinking about a new product or a new service to be introduced, right? Something which took a year is now going to take maybe six months or four months and that you're going to start seeing some of the revenue impact much faster on your P&L than you're going to see later. I think agility is the second one. Large enterprises. Obviously have failures and outages and especially in the financial services sector. Like I mentioned, trust and security are very synonymous with a brand. And so you want to continue to protect that.
And so if you don't invest in some of these capabilities, fixing small bugs, small gaps, when you face an outage, getting back online, those things take time. But as a result of you fixing a lot of these things or investing in more modernized, you're going to be able to just solve for customer pain points, solve for some of these outages in a much more agile and flexible manner. And I think sometimes it's hard because technologists always look at it purely from, hey, we'll be able to do this faster, but you're not able to quantify to why that matters. And it matters in a way that customers care. Customers don't want to lose sight of their digital tools. They want to be able to log in anytime, 24-7. And essentially be able to do all of the activities they want to do. The same with small businesses. So I think what I would say, constant advice would be tied to a revenue impact based on time to market, but also tied to the fact that what does it do to customer satisfaction, customer experience, right? Everybody, every company cares about NPS. And NPS matters when you are going to have constant failures. But some of the investment in these kind of technologies are going to help you get to better NPS over time.
Melissa - 00:29:33: I've heard some leaders, larger enterprises, ask product leaders like VP levels or directors to justify the revenue or cost impacts of some of the things they're doing. And they don't want to stop at just like, we have logical reason to improve. This will be NPS. Do you think that's fair, first of all? And then two, if it is, how do you get there to justify those costs? But if it isn't, how should these people go back to leadership and try to explain why they can't do this or what that looks like?
Shruti - 00:30:00: Pick a few tangible and intangible metrics to measure. The tangible metrics would be direct bottom line impact, which is, as I mentioned before, right? Speed to market. Are you getting to market faster? Are you going to be able to sell your product or reach the customer faster than you anticipated? If so, then the revenue will justify itself because you're suddenly going to see some of that revenue impact come in earlier. But the intangible aspects are also if you're building an API portal so that partners can actually integrate. With your infrastructure much faster. And that's a better partner experience that allows you to get some of the capabilities or features you were trying to build with the partner up and running at a faster speed. But it also makes it easier for more partners to contribute to what you're trying to do. There's also the, as I mentioned, NPS, customer satisfaction matters, right? And customer satisfaction is based on how a customer really interacts with the brand and the product and what does the brand stand for them. Right? I think people sometimes don't appreciate the fact that as the evolution of more and more digital tools happens, customer expectations of availability has just been heightened. You know, you want the internet to work 24-7. You want your apps and your software to be up and running. You want to be able to check a mail, pay your bill, check your balances, or even shop 24-7. And so I think that today what happens is, there's too much onus put on revenue and business case development. And I think we need to start shifting towards what does it actually do towards stickiness, engagement, and loyalty of the customer base? And what is their expectation from that?
Melissa - 00:31:43: That's a really great way to put it. And especially because that pulls back to a lot of these product metrics that we're all looking at. How do we make this sticky? What's the retention like? Do they enjoy it? Are they going to keep coming back with usage? So definitely a nice way to draw that parallel back there. When you were looking at enterprises, too, going through, transformation, when somebody wants to go on this journey, start to become more customer centric, start moving from projects into more product focus, where do you think large enterprises should start? What's some of the big things you should tackle first to lay the groundwork for this?
Shruti - 00:32:13: I would say, you know, we're going through this journey right now. And we've been part of this product transformation for a while. And, you know, it's really exciting as we're transforming the organization. I think first and foremost, it's really important. And you hit on it. Stop thinking about projects, start thinking about products. What are your core product sets? And you have a clear definition of how you define a product. And I think once you've identified the product, are you mapping out the customer journeys around the product? You know, so many organizations today really lose sight of the customer journey, which is how does the customer interact with your product? What are the different touch points you're touching that particular customer outside of the product? So, you know, start with a product, map the customer journey around the product, identify pain points, and then start thinking organizationally. If you are organized by those customer journeys or organized by those product. So, on the business side, I would say those are some of the really important steps as you move towards a more product-based organization versus just projects and looking at P&Ls and trying to move multiple facets. Sitting in different parts of the organization, you need them all concentrated around the product and the customer.
You want the customer at the center of it. From a product development perspective, moving from Waterfall to Agile, it takes a lot, right? And you're seeing some of that happen over the last few years. You know, thinking about quads or triads. How do you do that? How do you think about UX? How do you think about Agile and Agilist? How do you center around product management and, you know, you're engineering the scrums and the squads of scrums and, you know, center everybody around that journey. But that also comes from, you know, a very deliberate and strategic intent that you're no longer going to be in a waterfall cycle, that you're going to be in shorter delivery cycles, that you're going to essentially take the backlog of your roadmap and create smaller. And smaller stories to execute against. And so I would say a lot of what goes on both sides is just not the businesses who have to start thinking about product management mindset, but also the engineering organization who has to start not thinking about, oh, we are just going to do a code and a code change. But centering the engineering organization also around products and services to support the businesses.
Melissa - 00:34:21: One piece of friction that a lot of people write in to me about is trying to get their engineering teams to be a little more customer centric, too. Having them, like, think about the customers, kind of fill in some of the gaps in their head about, you know, what they should be doing instead of, hey, just give us the requirements and go. And I've had product managers literally say to me, well, my engineers don't want to participate in strategy conversations or they don't want to do this. They just want me to give them what to do. And if I don't specify it to a T, then they get mad. How do you bridge that gap between technology and help your team work better with engineers and encourage them to be as invested in the product? Customer space.
Shruti - 00:35:00: It's a hard question to solve for, but it's an easier answer. And we realized it as we were going through the transformation journey. I think there's a lot lost in context sharing. I think the businesses don't do enough in terms of context sharing with the engineering organization. Why is this important or why is something broken? Why are we fixing it and how it needs to be fixed? I think very often the idea is that, hey, this needs to be fixed. Why don't you just go do that? And so one of the things we are trying to do very actively is bringing the engineering organization much ahead in that product cycle, which is even if it's just the head of engineering joining us on calls, whether it's with our partners or internal, it's good for them to understand the context early on. It's good for them to understand why a product isn't working, what is the gap which we're trying to fix. And so bringing them early on into the journey, having them as an active stakeholder, understanding. Some of the architecture challenges they may be facing actually helps you get to a faster product development cycle. You don't want them towards the end of the journey and for them to come back and say, actually, tough luck. We can't do anything because of the way we are built. And so I almost encourage our teams to make sure that at least some stakeholders from our engineering organization is constantly with us, even much before we get to the delivery part of the roadmap.
Melissa - 00:36:26: Do you practice any set cadences for that? Or is it more about, you know, just working with your engineering lead or your pair and just talking to them more?
Shruti - 00:36:34: We have a lot of cadences. We obviously do what we call the quad cadence, which has weeks are engineering, RPMs, all of them together, or how we do quarterly planning cycles, where we look at our overall roadmap and are constantly prioritizing based on high, medium, low impact. And what are some of the core pain points we're trying to solve? We have weekly cadences where we have critical stakeholders across the organization join, whether from engineering or design or from agile. So we have a ton of discipline around the structure, around cadences, routines, OKRs, the kind of OKRs we're trying to track, constantly looking at our backlog health on, you know, the velocity of our delivery and making sure that we are actually getting the maximum efficiency and leverage out of that.
Melissa - 00:37:13: There's one word that you just said that I know a lot of people are going to jump on, which is the velocity piece. Can you tell us a little bit about how does velocity help you as a product leader? And like, what's a good way to think about velocity in agile terms? And which helps instead of holding people accountable for a certain number of story points per month and using it as like a hammer?
Shruti - 00:37:32: So, you know, for us, I think a lot of people will get bogged down on velocity of the backlog, right? Which is, let me just crank out as many stories as I can, because that will just make sure that our velocity looks really good. I would say the way to assess it is to make sure that even if you're cranking out a lot of stories and how you're measuring it, velocity is as a part of how quickly you're going through the backlog and churning those. Ask yourself whether what you are actually delivering is high quality and high impact and actually tying back to what you started out to do. And it ties to the overall execution, right? Because you're going to have multiple stories tied to a particular initiative. You want to make sure that all of the stories are contributing to that initiative. And whatever you're cranking through, even though you're doing it, it needs to be high quality and it needs to be in good health. For the rest of the initiative to play through. And so I think while speed is a way to measure velocity, I would also say quality is a big one. And investing in testing and making sure that all of the things you're trying to do from a delivery cycle is actually going to be high impact and helpful and high quality.
Melissa - 00:38:45: Shruti, it's been amazing talking to you. I've got one last question for you. When you're looking at the landscape of fintech and what's coming up, lots of changes happening right now, especially in technology. What are you paying attention to and what are you excited about?
Shruti - 00:38:59: Well, we're definitely paying attention to AI. Our survey actually indicates almost half of our small businesses are looking forward to and are thrilled at the prospect of AI making their jobs better, helping them run their businesses more efficiently. I can also say the survey also indicates a little bit of concern because a lot of our small businesses and their employees think that maybe their jobs are going to be replaced with AI automation. Or eventually, they're going to see a ton of disruption happen because of AI. So I would say we're definitely keeping an eye on AI and thinking about ways we can leverage within the bank. But like I said, we are also super focused on Horizon One, which is our existing products, our existing customer experiences, and how do we continue to make them better. I think in terms of trends, integrated experiences or bundle solutions for small businesses will continue to get even more sophisticated. I think more and more we are hearing small businesses not having to work with multiple software offerings and standalone softwares. It's way too much for them. It overwhelms them in terms of running their back office. And they are really largely looking at either very, really good fintechs or large banks with whom they have money management tools today to continue to invest in those tools so that they can get more out of it. That's sort of my view in terms of trends. And where we continue to invest in.
Melissa - 00:40:27: That's amazing for me to hear because I run a small business and that sounds perfect. So I will be watching along to see what kinds of things you put out there to help me because I would love to not use 18 different pieces of software. So thank you so much, Shruti, for being on the Product Thinking Podcast. If people want to learn more about you, where can they follow you?
Shruti - 00:40:46: LinkedIn. That's the only social media, unfortunately, I am active on.
Melissa - 00:40:51: Well, we will definitely post your LinkedIn on our show notes. So go to productthinkingpodcast.com for everybody listening. And we'll have all of Shruti's information there so that you can go follow her and hear more about her journey. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode. If you go to dearmelissa.com too in the meantime, and let me know what your product management questions are, I will answer them on the next upcoming episodes. We'll see you then.
Shruti - 00:41:15: Thank you, Melissa, for having me.