Episode 141: Building a Global Product Powerhouse with Jag Duggal, Chief Product Officer at Nubank

In this episode of Product Thinking, Jag Duggal, Chief Product Officer at Nubank, joins Melissa Perri to unravel the process of building a strong global product management team in a fast-growing business. They also dive into the importance of customer obsession, challenges in talent acquisition, and the power of documented principles in scaling businesses.

You’ll hear them talk about:

[11:32] - When Jag joined Nubank, the company was at a key point as it had successfully established itself as a leading credit card company in Brazil and had recently launched a rapidly adopted bank account product. However, the challenge was to transition users from adoption to consistent engagement. Upon joining, Jag and the new executive team faced three key objectives: transform the new bank account product into the primary account for users; broaden the product range by introducing lending, insurance, investing, small business accounts, and cryptocurrency products; and reach two-thirds of the Latin American population. From 15 product managers, Nubank expanded to almost 300. This rapid growth determined the company to adopt a consistent and unified approach to product development across all areas and regions.

[15:50] - When it comes to team development, maintaining high-quality hires is essential. Nubank aims to be a global leader in product development education, so team composition is critical, combining expertise from traditional banking, Latin tech, and global hubs like Silicon Valley. On the product side, ensuring genuine success is a concern. As the company releases more products, initial positive metrics can be misleading. Nubank's goal is to move users from trying a product to becoming its advocates. The company's ethos is cultivating a passionate customer base, given that over 80% come from referrals.

[20:06] - Nubank is dedicated to turning everyday users into product champions by adopting a strong customer satisfaction strategy. The company's guiding metric has always been the Net Promoter Score (NPS), with Nubank consistently scoring high global ratings. Additionally, Nubank closely monitors the Sean Ellis survey score to understand its product's need to users. Beyond feedback and scores, the focus on maintaining a low churn rate is critical. Any unexpected rise in churn drives Nubank to act and correct it. By employing a mix of data-driven insights and innate curiosity, the company ensures it continually refines its offerings for maximum user satisfaction.

[26:47] - Ensuring a unique approach is key to aligning team actions with a broader strategy. Nubank's culture focuses on empowering cross-functional teams' autonomy for teams with clear targets, expecting them to adhere to quality and cultural standards. This level of autonomy requires strong leadership, allowing senior leaders to focus on the broader strategy.

[41:53] - With his extensive growth experience from roles at Google and Facebook, Jag highlights the importance of documenting decision-making processes for product leaders bracing for rapid expansion. Reflecting on his time at Facebook, he recalls how senior leaders frequently referred to guiding principles during debates to ensure aligned decision-making. People make decisions based on their unique perspectives, so having clear, documented principles maintains consistency across larger teams and ensures decisions are aligned with the company's core values.

Transcript:

Melissa Perri – 00:16:17: Welcome to another episode of The Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're joined by Jag Duggal, who's the Chief Product Officer of Nubank. Nubank is a leading digital and mobile banking company that is transforming the fintech landscape with its innovative banking and credit solutions. And they serve over 75 million customers in Brazil and Mexico. Before that, he was a product leader at Facebook and Google. Welcome, Jag.

Jag Duggal - 00:16:42: Thanks so much, Melissa. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat.

Melissa Perri - 00:16:45: So you spent the last 15 years in Silicon Valley. How did you end up at a Brazilian bank?

Jag Duggal - 00:16:53: That's a question my wife and my parents ask me all the time. David, our Founder and CEO found me and we started chatting. And towards the end of our first conversation, which was over video, he asked me if I would ever consider leaving Facebook and moving to Sao Paulo. And my answer was, “David, almost certainly not”. And David gave a classic entrepreneur's response, which was, “well, there are people who work here now who are far more definitive than you just were. Let's keep chatting”. And over a long series of conversations, what I found was I was getting increasingly excited by the potential of what Nubank was building. And especially with the degree of customer obsession that Nubank was displaying that David personally had, which resonated so intrinsically with me about how you build products and how you build a company that I just got more and more excited. I do come loosely speaking from the region and grew up in the Caribbean. So serving people in Latin America was also spiritually exciting for me as an opportunity after 15 years here in the Valley. And so with that, I spoke to the family and we decided to give it a go. And it's been an incredible ride for the last three and a half years.

Melissa Perri - 00:18:15: That's awesome. I love that you took that leap of faith as well. I think there's so many people out there who think if you want to be a great product manager or you want to do something super impactful when it comes to product management or software in general, you have to be in Silicon Valley. What's been your experience working outside of Silicon Valley now and especially in Latin America?

Jag Duggal - 00:18:35: I moved to Silicon Valley 15 to 20 years ago now, and it is the epicenter of global technology revolution. But I do think we are getting to a point over the last three, four, five years where that revolution is truly going global. And there are incredible tech companies in places like India, in Indonesia, in South Africa, in Brazil, even in places like Kazakhstan. There are some amazing companies that are being built to world class standards, sometimes from people who have worked in Silicon Valley and gone back home. The Venture Capital community is increasingly going global as well. And so I think this is an interesting inflection point where some of the most interesting technology opportunities are actually happening, not instead of in Silicon Valley, but complementary to Silicon Valley, as I think tech truly does go global.

Melissa Perri - 00:19:35: One of the things I keep running into when I go to other countries and talk about product management, like I was just in Paris, for example, a couple months ago, and I find sometimes the product management communities there feel almost inferior or like they haven't caught up yet to Silicon Valley. They're not pushing the boundaries, but I do see, like you said, some of these really innovative companies. What have you observed about product managers, I guess, around the world or working through Nubank and how they interact and how they're learning and developing their craft as well?

Jag Duggal - 00:20:06: I think there is something to the fact that Silicon Valley in the last not that long really, ten years has really defined what product management is. I think that just speaks to how new the discipline. But having said that, I think the larger point is the discipline really is at its infancy. And so it's being defined everywhere. And there were core concepts in product management. After 15 years of doing it, I showed up at Newbank in Sao Paulo and they were talking to me about concepts they were using, very specifically, for example, the Sean Ellis Survey Score. I learned after 15 years of Silicon Valley, I learned in my first couple of weeks in Sao Paulo. And then I started doing research on it and listening to Sean and his podcast and other things and thinking this is a really powerful concept. And I think something I found certainly in Brazil and Colombia and Mexico where our teams tend to operate. That they are passionate to learn what the cutting edge techniques are. There isn't as much conventional wisdom, and so there's a greater willingness to try new concepts. And in some respects, that leads to faster learning and a faster pace of innovation in the craft than you might even find here. Again, I think it's a great complement to what's happening here in the US and in Silicon

Melissa Perri - 00:21:27: It's kind of a breath of fresh air. I feel like sometimes when you've been doing product management for so long or you're in one of these hubs like New York or San Francisco, you kind of think, “oh, I know it all. I'm really good at this. I don't have to keep learning. I know what I'm doing. I don't have to actually innovate on this or get better at my craft”. So it's really nice to hear that people are pushing the boundaries there and learning all these different ways. For you too, you transitioned into Nubank coming from Facebook, from Google, which aren't banks. And I've worked with a lot of banks in the U.S. And they're very passionate about product management or product leadership must be run by somebody with domain experience, right? Somebody who's deep into the financial sector, who's really up to speed on how the bank works. What's been your experience, coming from not the financial sector, coming into a bank and learning the ropes there?

Jag Duggal - 00:22:22: I think at the heart of the approach that I take is something I learned when I was at Google. I used to work in Google's ads business. I remember several times Susan Wojcicki and others who led that area for Google for a long time. She always spoke about when it came to hiring, we hire athletes, not position players. When I joined Google, I had never been a product manager and I had never worked in advertising or in media. So I was as much of a rookie in that field as I was when I joined Nubank, having never worked in a bank or in financial services. I think the core discipline of product is an obsession with the customer and the customer's needs. And if you combine an obsession with the customer and a deep curiosity, you can learn pretty much anything else. There are different challenges and technical details you've got to learn when you're learning the advertising industry, as I had to do 15 plus years ago. Then there are in financial services. Financial services comes with some greater risks that have to be managed, some greater regulatory constraints that have to be complied with. And that is important. I think if you bring the right humility and mindset that says, “I've got to learn this, and I've got to understand that just because there are different ways of operating in financial services, and you've got to have a greater respect for the risks involved, now you're operating with people's life savings”.

I once made the mistake in an early Nubank board meeting that I participated in of quoting Mark Zuckerberg and talking about moving fast and breaking things, and there was almost an audible gasp. There were some of those false steps, and there was some learning to be done about the fact that different industries have different constraints under which they operate. But I think if you bring that humility about that, and you combine it with an obsession with the customer and a real curiosity, you can transition industries pretty seamlessly. I think the financial services industry, one of the great opportunities for Nubank is it has been operating in such a consistent way for such a long time that it is in many ways stuck. And I'm not talking about Brazil or Latin America. I'm talking about here in the US, in Europe, anywhere. There is so much room for redefining what banking could be and should be if you rethink it from the ground up from a customer's perspective. And I think in some ways, I have no choice but to embrace this, but being an outsider, I think is helpful. At least that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Melissa Perri - 00:25:02: Yeah, I could definitely see that. You don't have all the legacy baggage of this is the way it's always been, this is how we do finance, so you just, you don't get it, this is compliance, and you're examining it different areas, which I think is really unique and a nice fresh perspective on that. So that's a great way to get introduced there. When you walked into Nubank, what was your biggest challenge, right? What did the organization look like? What were you tasked with actually solving? And how'd you get up to speed to be able to do that?

Jag Duggal - 00:25:30: Yeah, I mean, Nubank had reached an inflection point where it had clearly achieved some pretty amazing success as I walked in. Where we were at at that moment almost four years ago was we were a really successful monoline credit card company operating in Brazil. And we had opened up a bank account product, which was on a very fast adoption ramp, but where we were having some challenges going from adoption to engaged usage with that second product. So I, along with a couple of executives who joined around the same time, had a pretty straightforward challenge from David, our CEO and Co-Founder. I would put it as sort of threefold. One is we needed to make sure product number two, which was critical to our funding needs, you can think about how a bank operates, wasn't just simply being adopted as a secondary account, but was driving real engaged usage and on a path to being customers primary account. That was challenge number one. Challenge number two was going from being a company with one and a half products to being a company that operated across the financial services spectrum.

So we launched lending, we launched investing, we launched insurance, we launched a small business account, and then we built from there. We launched crypto products later, we launched a whole series of new areas. And then the third challenge was from Brazil to the rest of LATAM, starting with Mexico and then adding Colombia, which together amongst the three basically accounts for two thirds of Latin American population and the economy, that simultaneous expansion geographically and across the product suite in a very aggressive timeframe. We did this all in about a two year window. It was an almost combinatorial increase in the complexity of the company. And so what we were brought in to start thinking about what debuted in the existing executive team was how do we manage that complexity going from that single-minded focus to make the first product successful, incredibly hard challenge going from zero to one to now doing it over and over again across countries and across products at the same time while making sure that the core kept growing. And so that's really the challenge we faced from a product management perspective. The team had gone from about 15 product managers the year before I joined. Roughly tripled to about, call it 45 PMs when I joined, but most of them were brand new. And now we are probably 250 to 300 product managers. So that explosion in just the number of PMs, and then similarly with designers and other functions, and making sure that we developed as we exploded the degree of growth and complexity, a Nubank way of building products that was consistent across, and didn't depend on where each individual PM or designer came from, and made sure we had an ethos at Nubank that was consistent across all these products, across all of these geographies. So that was a real challenge and one we're still working on, but we're pretty excited about the progress.

Melissa Perri - 00:28:42: So you scaled from, you said 15 product managers before you got there. It's been four years and now you have about 300. Wow, that's like exponential scale right there for her product teams.

Jag Duggal - 00:28:53: Pretty much every number at Nubank has gone exponential year on year. It's been really a challenge.

Melissa Perri - 00:28:58: Good problems to have, but definitely making problems for you. So when you look at that scale and how fast it was going, what were your main concerns about the team size growing that big and then also the products growing that big so fast?

Jag Duggal - 00:29:14: There are two challenges that I obsessed and continue to obsess about. One from a team perspective was team quality. How do we make sure that we are hiring the best of the best, training them to be even better as they spend more time at Nubank, where Nubank is the best place anywhere in the world to learn how to do product? And how do we make sure that we have a mix of DNA? So we have people who actually have come from banking. We have people who've come from LATAM tech. We have people who've come from global tech, places like Silicon Valley. And how do we mix that DNA? Because I think in that mix, you get great debate and a great ultimate synthesis of an approach that we try to instill across the company. So that on the team side, how do we make sure the quality is high and in fact growing even as we scale? When we had 15 or even 50, we could hire the best of the best. Nubank was like Google 2006 here in Silicon Valley. Nubank in 2018, ’19, ‘20, we could hire anybody we wanted. But once we had to hire hundreds, not dozens, you've got to get creative on where you're sourcing the best people. So that was one. And then on the product side, Melissa, the thing that I always obsess about, having learned some hard lessons earlier in my career, is as your company gets really big and it has one or two or three really successful products, products four, five and six, it's quite easy to make them look good in the early months or even first year of their launch. You can make them look spectacular by the metrics because you have this huge install base of customers who love the first couple of products and who will try anything.

Not only that, especially in Brazil, customers are incredibly polite. One of our biggest problems, they're so polite that they tell you how great it is and they tell you what you want to hear because they know you're asking and that you care. And we've got to penetrate that to see, are they in fact using it? Going from trial to usage, going from usage to engaged usage, going from engaged usage to love. Nubank has a very simple formula. It's embodied in the first value of the company. The first value of the company is we want our customers to love us fanatically. And there's a real business reason behind that beyond sort of a philosophical reason. The business reason is if you can get one customer to love you fanatically, they will tell five friends and then each of those people love you fanatically. They will tell five more. Nubank to this day, I don't know the exact stat, but the vast majority of our customers have come through word of mouth, like north of 80%. And so we want to make sure when we are building our new products, that there is the same kind of customer fanatical love as they had for our first product. And how do you do that? How do you make sure that is happening when all the metrics, no matter what you are going to look pretty good in the first few months is a real obsession that we struggle with every day.

Melissa Perri - 00:32:14: What are some techniques that you've been doing to keep on top of that?

Jag Duggal - 00:32:18: There are a few things that we do. First off, the customer's North Star metric, pretty much since the beginning, has been Net Promoter Score. We are always looking for people who love your product versus the detractors. And you know that scale is set to be pretty challenging. We have amongst the highest NPS ratings anywhere in the world for any product. And we've been able to maintain that product by product over time. And the more customers engage with, the higher that score goes. We have a couple of metrics we use underneath that. One that's a leading indicator that I learned in Sao Paulo, but actually comes out of Silicon Valley where I live, called the Sean Ellis Survey Score, about how much can customers live without your products or not live without your products and how they feel about that. We measure that pretty obsessively with new launches. And then we look pretty carefully to an increasing degree at Churn, because it doesn't matter what customers tell you in qualitative interviews or in surveys, or even with the Sean Ellis score, NPS score. Ultimately, those are all leading indicators for, are they using the product month after month after month after month after month? And the Churn rate is something we start, we are getting increasingly obsessive about and making sure that it's low and when it if and when does ever spike, we understand for a given product or in a given year or whatever. We dig into that really carefully to understand why and to go fix whatever the issue might be. So we try to get as scientific as we possibly can, as metrics-driven as we possibly can about the art of product market fit. If we can get that right and the science can at least give us clues, we can then again, follow our curiosity to see what is telling us where we need to double down, where we need to iterate. That's been core to the way we operate.

Melissa Perri - 00:34:09: Thinking about strategy too, you went into lending, you went into all these different divisions. When you're thinking about that and launching a new product, how are you thinking about de-risking that it's not going to work, or that you're just doing too much or you're not really focusing on the core of the value? What types of things do you look at to make sure that your strategy bets are the right bets?

Jag Duggal - 00:34:32: I think there are a couple of things. First off, you never know if you're getting it right and you're always torn between we're not doing enough and we're doing too much and we're spreading ourselves too thin. That tension never goes away. We felt again, following in from the customer, we did a big piece of foundational customer research right when I joined, which we called Project Amanha, which is tomorrow in Portuguese. And we wanted to understand what our customers needed from us over the next three, four years. And what we found is they loved the Nubank experience. They wished it were an experience they could have across their financial lives and even beyond actually. And they were practically dragging us into many of these new verticals. For example, the customers we had in their personal lives, where we were their bank in their personal lives or their credit card, they were demanding that we build a small business account for them, those who are entrepreneurs or small business people. And so we hacked it at first and then kept building from there. So our customers were pulling us in very specific directions and we thought it was worth the bet. Having spent seven years getting the core right and really obsessing about the quality and the detail and the scale of it. And then the other piece and the piece that I tried to introduce into the company as I joined was every time we entered into a new vertical and every time we entered into a new product, I have a mantra that now everyone at Nubank sort of smiles and laughs whatever I say it because it's such a, it's almost cliche at this point.

We are going to build something that is fundamentally different, not merely incrementally better. Incrementally better when you're new into a vertical is a gift to the incumbent you're trying to disrupt because it's almost impossible to break through the clutter and the noise that's out there. The only products that really break through and change the game are fundamentally different on some dimension for some group of customers. And so we try to be very precise before we even begin building the product in articulating who is this for and be as specific. Even well before I got there, Nubank had, when it was just launching, what they called the bullseye customer target. There were only 7 million of them in a country of 200 million plus, but those 7 million were the foundation of what Nubank has become because those 7 million loved the product. They were young, millennial, urban, just cutting edge tech and all with mobile phones. And they were the ones who adopted early and then told everybody else that helped Nubank cross the chasm in Brazil. And so for each product we try to find that bullseye segment. Who are we building for? What are their very specific deep pain points? And what are we going to do that is fundamentally different, not just a bit better, for those customers? And so that's basically been our formula that we've tried to follow. Most times with a lot of success, a few times with not as much success that we've had to iterate and we've learned some lessons along the way. That's been the key to break through the clutter and to have those customers, again, tell their friends that they just have to try the product.

Melissa Perri - 00:37:46: With a team so large right now, too, we've got 300 people we've set a couple times out, but you want to see and keep track of, obviously, what's going on and are we working towards our strategy? How are you making sure that you are doing things fundamentally different? How do you keep on top of what the teams are doing and kind of marry that back up to your overall strategy?

Jag Duggal - 00:38:08: Again, like my last answer is one of these things you struggle with every day and you're never sure you're getting it right. But a couple of things, Nubank has a culture that prizes autonomy a great deal. We try to have empowered cross-functional teams that are basically given a target customer set and goal. The rest is sort of up to them as long as they adhere to certain quality standards that abide by some of our cultural principles. And so that autonomy requires some great leaders at all levels of the org. We've tried to invest in that, which allows more senior leaders to think about the connection to the overall strategy and the portfolio. The main answer to your question is we have great leaders who are thinking and obsessing about the product and the business, and they are enabled by great cross-functional teams that are not in functional silos. We've increasingly over time, even in the time I've been at Nubank, pushed more and more in the direction of cross-functional rather than functional. And again, that involves a trade-off, but that's a choice we've clearly made. And then within that, we do a lot of the standard techniques, which is we use OKRs to be very clear on what our priorities are at any given moment. We do product reviews. And the question I always ask in those reviews are, who is it for? How is it fundamentally different? We borrow techniques from any number of companies, but one of the ones I like a lot is one from Amazon where my wife used to work. Jeff Bezos making the PM write a mock press release before we even green light the product. So like, “tell me in three months or six months when we release this product, why will a customer care? Can you articulate that? If you can't, back to the drawing board”. So these are the kinds of things we do, but those are tactics basically in the service of highly empowered cross-functional teams who are very clear on which customer and what are they trying to achieve, what big ambitious goal are they trying to achieve.

Melissa Perri - 00:40:16: One of the things I've seen is that when you want to have very autonomous teams, right, you have to give them some good direction, like not give them all requirements, be like, build this, but like you have to give them the right amount of guidance of what do we want to do and what do we not want to do type things so they can go explore. How are you and the other leaders handling that? Like what types of strategy do you put down? What's the bounds around it? And how do you make sure that you're not just dictating down solutions to others?

Jag Duggal - 00:40:44: At this point, it's impossible for us to dictate solutions. We're not close enough to the customers anymore the way the teams are, at least consistently across every product. We can pick and choose a few. We try to be very thoughtful about what are strategic priorities every six months? What is most important? What hills do we need to take in the next six months or the next year? And work backwards from that to allow the teams to say, how are we going to contribute to those key goals? And then there's just the inspection mechanisms that you run. Some of them are at very sensitive moments or businesses are at very sensitive moments where you need to go very, very deep with the team. And there are others that are flying or that are early and you just got to give them the room to run. And it's part of like managing your own portfolio of time to understand where the priorities are, either because something is flying or something is struggling and leaving room for the other pieces to just largely run with much lighter check-ins. So that is the challenge of scaling an org. Nubank's gone from about 2000 employees when I joined to almost 8,000 now. So Forex in less than four years. Before that, it was growing pretty quickly as well. So I noticed earlier in my career that every doubling of the org in terms of number of people is a brand new company. Everything that used to work, every process used to work just fails. And so you've just got to keep reinventing how you do the key things you're trying to do at each stage. And that's, and we're struggling with that every day.

Melissa Perri - 00:42:14: For your org too, you hired so many product managers and you touched on this a little bit earlier when we were talking about, you had to hire a bunch of product managers and then you had to make sure you had the right mix. I imagine when you're small, you can hire all these people who have a lot of experience. You only need a couple of people. When you get bigger with 300 people, especially being in a market like Latin America, let's say where you don't have Silicon Valley with Google down the street who turns out PMs like every day through their programs. Did you do anything specific to do help people level up on product management within the organization and how would you look at really building out that team of 300, making sure people had the right skills and development and that it was diverse? What types of tactics did you use for that?

Jag Duggal - 00:42:58: I mean, a whole bunch. You're right. Brazil and Sao Paulo in particular, and Mexico as well, has a growing sense. You've experienced yourself, has a growing community of product managers, designers, engineers, et cetera. But given the standards we try to hold, we knew when we, this became very clear when we looked at our talent strategy two or three years ago, we knew that we would have to grow at the scale we were getting to in Sao Paulo or in Brazil. More generally, we are the Google, like we are the factory to churn people out. And so we did a few things. One is we hired the best of the best, particularly at the senior levels that we could find, gave them a lot of autonomy, gave them a lot of room to innovate and built a culture that they enjoyed working in. And then we gave them a challenge. We are going to get people from all sorts of backgrounds, some straight out of college or business school, some from consulting, some are engineers. Some are from different verticals, not financial services. Some are not from big tech, although Uber and Google and Amazon also do have operations in Brazil, for example. All of those sources, the key challenge then was to take people who are speaking 15 different languages of product management and get them to speak one common language. And so we've invested a lot in defining what is the Nubank way of product development. What do we think is right in the endless series of trade-offs between a good way of doing things and another good way of doing things? The way Amazon does things and the way Google does things are very different. The way Apple does things is very different. Again, what are our choices, either one, the other, or some kind of synthesis? How do we feel? We for example bias very heavily, as I've spoken about, to customer obsession as opposed to paint a contrast, technical death.

Obviously you want both, but we would bias on the side of customer obsession first. So codifying that was job one. Training on that was job two. Implementing that product review by product review over the course of years so that the principles are articulated clearly and explicitly was a big part of that. And then as we hired more junior people we thought had incredible potential, we had to invest in their training. We built a product academy with dozens and dozens and dozens of courses on the whole life cycle of product management. And the reason we chose to build it ourselves was we wanted the idiosyncratic Nubank way of doing things. And so our particularly senior PMs have invested, and designers as well, have invested a ton of effort building out course materials for those academies, investing in teaching and doing that cross-pollination. So it's been a big investment and it's still relatively early days, but I think it's been a critical investment for us to make sure we are all speaking the same language.

Melissa Perri - 00:45:54: Yeah, that sounds very impressive. When you were building out this program too, did you have the leaders do some of the content? How did you make sure that you all agreed on the Nubank way of working? Was there somebody running that part? How did you get everybody together to talk about those things?

Jag Duggal - 00:46:13: Lots of debate, especially amongst some of the core senior group about, I think X, well, I think Y, well, what about that? And so we have built this program which works backwards from the core premise I stated earlier, which is we are in the business of building fundamentally different, not incrementally better things. And we are going to work backwards from, in line with Nubank's overall first value, we are going to work backwards from fanatical love from our customers. So we've got to, that's the bar. What do we do with that in a repeatable, consistent way? And how do we build a playbook for that? And then we had any number of debates and then someone would take a first cut at it and we'd all throw in our comments and iterate. And then we ran with it. And that was part of the process because if the senior leadership isn't aligned on the way we want to do things, then it's not going to scale across 300 people. That was a big investment of effort, but it was a critical investment for the company we thought to make sure we weren't relying on chance and who happened to be in a given room at a given time when a given product was being conceived. But rather we had a common philosophy and a common playbook, which then each individual could bring their personal touch to.

Melissa Perri - 00:47:27: Do you guys have anything like product operations who owns that playbook? I'm curious, cause now I'm writing a book on it.

Jag Duggal - 00:47:33: I heard, I think it was your last podcast on the Product Ops. We have for product overall, which includes design, we have Center of Product Management or Product Center of Excellence, which is a small group of people who make sure these programs are running. We also have, and when I say 300, we have always had product management and product ops, and we've put them together as one common job family, because one of the key differences, which I alluded to earlier between say operating and media and advertising, where you know, if you get your click-through rate a little wrong, it's not the end of the world if you serve the wrong ad, but if you get something wrong with anti-money laundering, that is the end of the world. And so we've always had a strong product operations guru. And one of the things we've done as part of this academy is we're actually cross-training in both ways. We want our product managers who've historically been centered on new innovation to understand the gritty, challenging, excruciatingly difficult at times, operational side of operating and financial services. And we want our product ops people to similarly be cross-trained in the innovation side. That's actually part of why we invested so much in this training is we wanted to cross-train product ops and classic product management and have people by the time they get to the director level, essentially be cross-functionally skilled across both.

Melissa Perri - 00:48:59: So does your product top people do more things like compliance and risk management and dealing with the regulations?

Jag Duggal - 00:49:07: A lot of that process piece, a lot of the regulations piece, a lot of the customer experience and customer service process pieces have been historically where our product ops peoples have focused. But I will tell you, some of our best product managers, I don't care what label you put on them, came up the product ops ranks. And at the end of the day, what you want is someone who is able and willing to take accountability for building a great customer value proposition. Part of which is what's embedded in software itself, but part of it is when they pick up the phone and call and have a problem. Part of it is making sure that product we're launching is not just amazing for the customer but is regulatorily compliant. And so we felt it really important about two years ago to make sure that our most senior product leaders were actually cross-trained. And I think it's uniquely important in financial services that that be the case.

Melissa Perri - 00:50:07: That's really interesting. I like that philosophy of getting them closer to those things. So you've gone through massive scale recently, just like the last four years. You've seen scale also at Facebook and Google. What's your advice for product leaders who are about to embark on a journey like this, who are about to go through doubling, tripling their company size year over year for the next couple of years? What do you think are the key things they have to keep in mind?

Jag Duggal - 00:50:32: I guess several years ago I read when it just came out, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And one of the things I took away from that book was how important it is to write things down. How did we make that decision last week? How do we generally make decisions? There are often a set of typically implicit assumptions in any team, could be the executive team, could be the product leadership team, about how decisions are made. When I was at Facebook, one of the key lessons I learned there was that in the middle of a meeting, some of the senior leaders would say, what's the principle here? Two or three or five people are having a debate about some specific decision, and that search for what is the larger principle from which you're operating or I'm operating or we are trying to operate, and how do we interpret that? So the more one can be explicit about what are the principles and what are the mechanisms we are going to use to make any given decision, the easier it is for 50 people, 100 people, 300 people, 1,000 people to absorb that and then act consistently. I've often, I've struggled with this in the past as well, and frankly still do.

Why didn't so-and-so make a decision that I would have made in the way that I would have made it? Because they aren't able to tap directly into your brain. They have their own brain, they have their own set of experiences, they have their own set of principles. The more that can get onto paper, be explicit, be debated, be iterated, the better. At Nubank, the best example of this is, value number one is one of the key reasons I joined Nubank. We want our customers to love us fanatically. Whenever we're in a product review and we're making a decision, we're trying to trade-off between X and Y, we will often typically go back to, we want our customers to love us fanatically. What choice makes that happen? It might be more expensive, it might take a bit longer. There are always trade-offs involved, there are always constraints involved. The customer would love us fanatically if we handed each of them a million dollars or a million hei-ais, but we can't do that. So there are constraints upon which you operate, but having that explicit playbook operating system is really helpful as you scale it. You don't need it when you're 20 people, because everyone sort of knows.

Melissa Perri - 00:52:53: Really good advice for people out there who are about to go on this journey. So thank you so much, Jag, for joining us today. If people want to learn more about you and your journey, where can they find you?

Jag Duggal - 00:53:02: You can always find me on LinkedIn, Jag Duggal, or on the press pages of Nubank. I'm always pretty easy to find and happy to chat with anyone about any of what we've talked about. I think we're at the beginning of a really interesting transition where product development and innovation is genuinely going global across Africa, Asia, India, Latin America, Brazil, etc. And so I'm incredibly excited. I kind of fell into this Latin American adventure, and it's been really incredible. But I think that will only get supercharged by the next era of self-driving and artificial intelligence that's just kicking off. And we're incredibly excited by the potential of all of what comes next. Excited to be connected with anyone who wants to chat.

Melissa Perri - 00:53:58: I'm excited to watch this too, and especially see all these things expand so globally. Thank you again for being here and thank you for listening to the product thinking podcast out there to our listeners. Next week, we'll be back with another Dear Melissa episode on Wednesday. So if you have any product questions for me, please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. I answer them every other week. And if you enjoyed this podcast, we'd really appreciate it if you hit the subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time.