Money Moves: Inside Fintech with PMs Who've Been There

Speaker A: welcome back to practical product management the podcast today we're going to talk about fintech and um product management um which i think is uh no matter what else we do we'll always be a little near and dear to our little fintech nerd hearts

Speaker B: big big fintech nerd

Speaker A: heart yes our big fintech nerd heart this came from um a user or a watcher a viewer um who asked me you know given your backgrounds is there anything unique and special you need as a product manager to be in fintech and i thought well that's a good topic that'll be fun because i mean kind of and also no so what do you think about that question what do you maybe we should start by defining fintech a bit should we start there okay i think we should start there so what's your definition of

Speaker B: fintech fintech's a weird word and i think people use it in multiple ways um and like a language in lexicon is kind of my jam like i always think that people use the same word to mean different things and i think fintech's one of those words when i say fintech i think it means um technology related to financial transactions whether that's like new disruptive fintech or like mainframes in a bank yeah that's fintech for me what do you think so

Speaker A: yeah i regularly say that i was in fintech before it was called fintech because i started working in payments in two thousand one right and so spent a lot of my career i mean i have a twenty three year career i think i've spent sixteen or seventeen years in payments in fintech right um and fintech is a relatively new word while payments is not right like this the payments industry has been around for a long time and i agree with you i think fintech is everything that is technology related to financial payments transactions exchanges and i think that there are sort of relevant areas that are considered fintech so insurtech wealth management investment lending i think you start talking about also areas of nuance like bitcoin which is definitely in this space but also definitely sits in a different bucket um blockchain like all of these things play a role in in fintech right um or are part of fintech um but also there are you know card brands and acquirers and issuers and you know uh giant companies who have fintech arms you know and so i think there's it's really broad m and people tend to get sort of nuanced about it and i'm like it's really this big not this big right so i think they're

Speaker B: really interesting and so like just for those of you that don't know us for those of you that don't know us yet uh um just just to sort of like level set because i agree with you leah why don't you just sort of hit um your previous experience and what we just defined as fintech just to sort of help people understand that the lens we're coming at

Speaker A: this from sure so let's see my first product management job was as at a um company who did ach and credit card processing as an acquirer processor and i was an ach product manager so my expertise was in really bank and ach transactions through the federal reserve i then went to work for a acquirer an acquirer right um who was one of the largest in the us um and i also went to work for a payment gateway so i worked for a gateway who did some of the very first transactions um for software specifically for square um i then worked at amazon and was specifically responsible for transaction processing which is everything from wallet tokenization the the flow where it goes how it goes where you know the the what we call the dmz the demilitarized zone out to the processor and back so i owned all of those pieces which is tiny um i worked for um i worked for a company that built a payment method buy now pay later um so i've done that and then i've worked for companies that had payments as a as a core part of the business in travel health tech etcetera right so that's i think that covers the majority of what i've done m yeah i missed a few nuances right but i'm like even even um i guess at amazon i also worked in sort of business to business payments and lending so so i also worked in that space so so you

Speaker B: know a few things yeah i know

Speaker A: a little bit what about you

Speaker B: yeah so i have worked at a retail foreign exchange brokerage um so i understand how banks do foreign exchange and how that translates to what people are able to do from a trading perspective uh i then went to amazon where i worked on the foreign currency uh platform for both um purchasing and for seller disbursements uh thank you by the way oh you're welcome do you use that

Speaker A: yeah yeah i mean i got money in all kinds of places thanks for

Speaker B: doing that uh uh i worked on the platform that was ah that underpinned the the authoritative seller balances as well as the amazon digital coins yeah um i worked in uh payments for uh aws which is really interesting because it's sort of microtransactions on credit cards and then it's the very large corporate transactions um and how you manage that globally i spent time at citibank um which you know kind of is a bank um i was at you know a ticketing place where we did payments globally and we had to understand payment methods globally um i've done some work uh back when i was with a much larger company on how you move money globally around from like currencies like you know brazilian real where it's very hard to sort of repatriate and how do you move money globally um i spent time at mastercard as a network um understanding how payment transactions flow and what that looks like uh and most recently i'm now with a biotech firm and we just released payments for you know businesses business to business payments so a

Speaker A: little bit a little bit of something right yeah and i mean even even when we think about what we did together at amazon like there was both sides of the transaction we were building a point of sale amazon product which has lived on in different versions right and we were on the other side holding funds for merchants using some of the marketplace tools that are there but also building new marketplace tools so that we could deliver funds to people in fifteen minutes which else was doing at the time right so we were literally if you bought a cup of coffee that merchant had your money in fifteen minutes and could spend it on amazon right and so we were doing those kinds of things and then while i was there and i know you you were there as well like we were doing things like launching american express in india or launching a new you know a new payment method for taking cash in japan or you know like all these very you know discreet things that were very localized payment methods all came into the same platform within payments right and then like you said with aws we were like the payments platform was like we can't handle it you'll have to do that yourselves good luck right so and that uh i think that was just one of the you know i always talk about that generally at amazon nobody could do anything unless they came to the through the platform but there were some exceptions like aws where we said we can't handle these microtransactions we would have to do some we'd have to build something new anyway so why don't you build it right and so i mean there were just there were there like there's so many little discrete decisions to be made in payments right and i think it's just really fascinating all of the little bits and pieces um so that i think it's really why once a payments geek always a payments geek yeah i agree and

Speaker B: i think the most interesting thing about payments from a product perspective is you're largely invisible to the consumer yeah yeah on either side whether it's disbursements or payments um your job is to be

Speaker A: invisible yeah totally totally it's not a

Speaker B: ah like put a new button somewhere like magic needs to open complex complex transaction flows need to look like magic

Speaker A: yeah and the truth is almost everyone is a customer there's very few people who aren't right like uh not only the people those of us who are building it but everyone out there is a customer i even worked for a startup where we were building banks in a box for the unbanked people who didn't have didn't have id and couldn't pass money around in the us banking system and so we were building solutions for them that were very much like casino systems right and so we were using the same m technology so i mean everyone is a customer in some form or fashion because people need to be able to pay bills and move money from point a to point b and so there are systems underneath that right so it's super super super fascinating

Speaker B: i love it which brings us to

Speaker A: your question yeah yeah so the question is like what's what does a product manager need in order to be a fintech product manager is it any different than all the other things we've talked about product managers need what do you

Speaker B: think leah

Speaker A: i mean i think that i don't think it's i don't think it's really all that different i do think you are you know if you're gonna be real good at it you're gonna probably have to get some expertise or some experience in understanding how money moves like what happens behind the scenes and i think there is a whole element of this that is about security and compliance um that not every product you touch as a product manager necessarily has i mean security more and more right but compliance not as much i do think that the other uh the other industry that's similar is is healthcare right like just the the kind of the data you're holding and what you have in your hands is so special and precious that you have to treat it as such right yeah so i think that that makes a difference but those are all in my mind things you can learn on the job like who walks in knowing that right yeah

Speaker B: yeah i do i i one hundred agree with you i think i think that uh um i think it's the same the same and it depends yeah

Speaker A: yeah totally because it really is just

Speaker B: a it's understanding a complex system and finding a way to help uh users solve their problem yeah um and uh you know largely in an invisible way again like i think some of the best products just work yeah um and i think a lot of the challenge in fintech the broader term of fintech that we just described is that it's largely undisrupted we accept some pretty crappy experiences as people as as users as humans um weeks we we accept some pretty bad stuff uh yeah because we there's a there's the concept that it's hard and it's difficult and right um

Speaker A: i mean it's to me i think we've talked about it like there there are things that i will do to log into my bank account or you know whatever whatever i'm using to move money around pay my bills et cetera that i would not do if i were just trying to buy you know dog food right that i'm like okay i'll click this button and i'll find this code and i'll do and i will jump through hoops that i know as a product person are likely highly unnecessary but the friction is just like oh we don't need to worry about that and so they just the friction stays in and i'm like fine just take my firstborn just let me get my money right like i don't have a firstborn so it's okay but and

Speaker B: i do think like that's so one of the with with my with the limited experience that i have in this space um so let's let's just let's just start from there i'm going to try to be a little humble i um think a lot of the challenges that you face or i face on a daily basis when dealing with some of these larger entities is that they're not actually um they're surfacing their org chart and their application yes um and they're not biasing on what the customer really needs and i think there's two reasons for that right one large um companies so let's talk about companies that were really founded and developed before um tech we'll define that term later um they were paper based and they were process based and they had people and people took a piece of paper from here to there and we got stamps and shit happened um when they went to digital um and digital is like this buzzy word that everybody says that makes my head explode i really hate it um when they went to digital they digitized the process yeah one hundred percent and they left the silos and the misfunction and you know this part of the company doesn't talk to that part of the company and there's no holistic notion of the person across systems um um you ever wonder why like when you apply for a mortgage they can't like pre populate half that shit because they already know you they've got your bank account information but they cannot um um and that is i don't want to say it's lazy um but it would take a lot for a company that's grown up couple hundred years with paper processes to think fundamentally different about the process right and i do think like good product managers good product managers in this state in this space think about the user out and disintermediate the complexity um and i think that's why like more digital fintechs yeah have a first mover advantage that some of the bigger companies are going to really struggle to fight against yeah i mean

Speaker A: quite frankly you and i both know because we've worked in this kind of space like some of the companies that we that are major players in the fintech and payment space still run mainframes somewhere in you know georgia right or whatever you know like virginia right and there there's a mainframe over there and some guy named carl who's seventy eight is still going logging in every day and making things happen and you're like okay that sounds terrible right but uh some of that there's some of that legacy that's there is so hard to lift i mean if you just think about ten years ago in the us the act the concept of a card with a chip and pen was like rocking our world what will we get what were we gonna do meanwhile in europe everybody was already doing it yeah right but it's because we like uh i always liked to try to explain to people when you start something the legacy tends to like really follow you while everyone else can innovate against your legacy yes right and i think that's one of the problems in this space is that the the newcomers are like oh uh those are crusty old guys i know what they're doing and i'm like those crusty old guys are what you base all your shit on yeah

Speaker B: that's the foundation of everything right so

Speaker A: i mean that some of that legacy those systems those things that are really core they're in there and they're hard to disrupt and but the people sitting on top of them or outside of them or who are just connecting to them are like fancy fancy fancy look at our fancy you know and you're just like why can't those guys do that and it's like m there are some reasons right i think the risk

Speaker B: is if you are a if you're if you are if you are a core company and the risk is you're going to get commoditized yeah like the value is no longer in your house right um and so i mean this is where like i think product thinking uh and actually you know a while back we had a conversation with someone who is in growth product right as a company that has a commodity that is in the in in the you know has the potential to be disrupted or have your uh you know your innovation capabilities uh superseded right um it's really important for you to think about you know how you're approaching the market from an ecosystem perspective how are you looking at growth you can't be lazy and really just think about um your thing is the you know we can never go away we're the commodity you will get commoditized and that's a that's a race to zero totally i actually had someone leah once tell me um with all seriousness um well we're not really worried about the tech companies because like amazon and apple like they don't have wallets they don't know the customer identity how do you feel about that oh

Speaker A: that's precious that's so sweet and not true right i mean yeah i think there is such a uh i think a lot of users would be like oh i just go to amazon and i give them my credit card and then i buy the thing and then that's it and meanwhile amazon apple microsoft starbucks these companies are all holding massive amounts of money either in their wallet or the access to your money instantaneously that maybe you didn't even like think oh they're holding all my credit card data and uh you know like all these things and it there it's insane to not really think about the fact that those companies are financial companies

Speaker B: they are financial companies they are payments companies they're fintech companies yeah yeah some

Speaker A: of them are regulated fintech companies right some of them are trying like hell not to be a bank because they don't want to be even further regulated right and so there's i mean they have whole legal teams that are just making sure they stay on this side of the banking line just barely so that they don't have to be a bank and have all that regulation right and i think it's i think it's um that's also in my mind one of the responsibilities of being a fintech product manager is that you understand something about what your customer information and what how your customer is interacting with you that they may not even understand yes and you have a responsibility yeah right i mean uh go ahead no no

Speaker B: no i was going to say i go back to this fact that it's fully fledged product management just because there's not there's not a website that you can point to and be like that's my thing your thing is critical it is critical infrastructure it moves money around in a secure way and it is largely invisible yeah yeah and they're actually some of the coolest products i mean you and i have worked on some

Speaker A: pretty cool things yeah yeah uh that's what i always say if anybody ever if anybody wants to take a swipe at me about anything i always say well there's something on your phone that i touched i know that there's something i built that is in your phone in one of those apps that you love to go to so you're welcome right like you can that's fine something i did makes your life easier you're

Speaker B: welcome right now regulation's interesting and i want to sort of like poke at that just for a minute because you brought that up as a responsibility of a product manager in the space i think it's really important and i also think it's i'm going off topic a little bit i'm sorry and i also think it's the difference between um what i would call a more digital native company and a company that was founded before um that has its roots before digital um regulation is is often in a paper based um ah society layers upon layers and in fact there's there's strict rules and regulations and everybody takes the thing and checks the box because that's that's keeping us safe but in a lot of cases we've lost the intention behind the thing like you cannot directly tie this check mark to the con to the control to the opinion that the legal has to the to you like to the regulatory body statement like that that lineage has been lost and so you can never change the process it just it layers on itself like the never ending jawbreaker of doom yeah whereas your your your um digital first companies actually look at compliance by automation and so understanding the the regulation understanding the legal opinion around the regulation and then being able to um build audit requirements that happen as digital exhaust versus a checkbox move the paper process and i actually think that's sort of if i had to draw a line and say this is the future of fintech and where finance is going to go and this is the history this is the blockbuster that hasn't quite gone away yet but is looking to get commoditized uh and will shrink over time that i think is the line yeah

Speaker A: yeah i think that's i think that's a really important line i think you know what's funny is what comes to my mind is that you know ten years ago now a little bit more twelve years ago i remember somewhere in a uh somewhere in a regulatory spec of a card brand it said you cannot do a tip for more than ten percent of the transaction and i was like what does that mean what does that mean if the coffee only costs two hundred and fifty yeah right and so i remember that the very first thing i took on when i came to amazon was trying to get some sort of blessing to tip higher than i think it was twenty five it was twenty five to tip higher than twenty five percent because we knew we were going to be doing very small transactions and that somebody might want to leave a dollar for their three dollars coffee right and that that was against the spec which meant that we would be processing transactions that were out of regulation with the card brand and so i was like okay we're going to go get some permission and if they say no then we're just gonna ask for forgiveness later because this is a minor infraction you know so these are the decisions that as a product manager we were making i think in these digital first businesses a lot of the big tech companies that kind of forged the way on these like let's let's push the needle here this doesn't make any sense this doesn't make any sense in the gaming space where kids are buying something for ninety nine cents this doesn't make any sense and there were little you know because there was a time when if you process the transaction under a dollar on amex it caused your card to get canceled i remember because i canceled some people's cards

Speaker B: i did not know that a dollar

Speaker A: yeah so if we ran a test i mean i actually um yeah ksenia got her her amex canceled because we ran a test transaction when we were testing at amazon she called she's like they just called me from amex my card's been canceled and i have to they're reissuing me a new card what did you do and i'm all i ran a transaction for seventy five cents apparently that's not allowed right so these are like the things that we didn't know in that really kind of labor intensive legacy world that companies like amazon and microsoft and starbucks and google and these companies apple have done a lot of that legwork so that the digital first companies just they don't have to think about it yeah they just do shit they're processing little wealth management transactions and bitcoin transactions and and um magic is happening yeah because labor sweat equity was put into overcoming how those non digital companies were thinking so that we could move them forward yes right and i'm just i mean i'm just using that example because it always makes me laugh to the look on someone's face when they were like like my car just got canceled right and i'm like sorry i didn't know that was a

Speaker B: thing we need to tag her in this post and find out what she's doing and if she remembers that uh i think that i mean but that is that is that is a pattern that exists and it's very prevalent if you think about like a stripe yeah remember what a pain in the ass it used to be to try to get a payment system up and you know yes they made they made integrating with a with a payment ah provider trivially easy yeah they solved a problem yeah um and created an ecosystem yeah

Speaker A: ah right huge ecosystem and and they could skip some steps because they had been skipped before them right before it ever got to them right um you know and i think you know i think that those those companies they then have multiple channels they can work with huge companies they can work with small businesses individuals they they then have a breadth of of sales opportunities and channels they can go to because they've kind of they've they've gotten to skip over some of that heavy lift right because

Speaker B: a product manager somewhere worked on a problem on behalf of a customer um you guys got you guys got two answers out of this very poignant question one is like what do we think about the whole fintech industry and you get that one for free thank you

Speaker A: very much you're welcome uh you're welcome

Speaker B: and it's different to be a product manager in this industry yeah how would you how would you answer that do we answer that in the standard way leah and just say i don't think it's different but i think it depends

Speaker A: yeah totally i totally think yeah i i do think it depends right i think i think there are you know one of the questions i have for you because this is somewhere where you have skills that are far beyond mine like is there a difference in terms of what is expected in the actual customer experience right like we were talking a little bit about how clunky it can be but i think about you know and i use this example a lot like the the fact is the amazon checkout payments checkout experience is not brilliant but it's so routine that so every company tends to follow it yeah and as we've talked about in the past like it doesn't even matter what language it's in i know what's going to happen and even if i go to a different website if they use that same series of events i roughly know what to do and i'm like

Speaker B: right um but before online shopping was ubiquitous it could have happened a million different ways but now there's a pattern that people expect right right yeah um i think it's so you know as someone who really cares about the user experience i think sometimes the user experience is invisible um and i think that relates uh it's not to and for all of you product managers out there that believe you need to like have an experience and like you angst over what it's going to look like and you care about the like how rounded your buttons are i will tell you if you're not thinking about how to make it as seamless and as simple as possible to the point of not being there almost especially in this space right um then you're doing your user a disservice you're you're glorifying your work and trying to put it as something you can point to and some of the most beautiful things that i think that probably you and or i ever built don't exist they they get rid of an experience um and i think the one that the one that's my favorite example and probably the most interesting heavy lift is do you remember when we were um talking about how long a customer would stand at a point of purchase and wait for a response yep uh how long yes yes i

Speaker A: do we have lots of conversations about

Speaker B: this and i remember how long should it take for this transaction to go from someone's ipad or a phone and how many hops was it going to take and then how long did it have to come back before someone's going to start to experience dissatisfaction um would

Speaker A: you like the numbers on that i

Speaker B: would love that please do remind me

Speaker A: it was from from the i want to buy this round trip and out it was twenty three steps it with two seconds at the processor yeah not good enough for a customer chase and visa had two seconds when we first started doing it it was taking us five and a half to seven and a half seconds it needed to take sub three which meant we had to take twenty one twenty or twenty one of the hops had to happen sub second yeah including tokenizing and uh detokenizing

Speaker B: in multiple spots and allowing for uh someone to be in a low network zone which yes which increases latency and

Speaker A: at amazon what was unique about it is it was an anonymous transaction yes they were unknown we were running transactions through a platform who always knew their users and they're and could fall back to a different payment method could do all these tricky things in the online space this was a an anonymous transaction twenty three hops two seconds belong to someone else and we had to get

Speaker B: it below three that was one of my favorite problems to work on with

Speaker A: you and then to add to add

Speaker B: to that like let's you just you sort of brought up something people always talk about product management in terms of happy path like oh i made a website if you click this this happens what happens when your network is low what happens if your payment method what happens if a response times out doesn't come back in time there there are hundreds of non happy past scenarios that

Speaker A: need to just work uh yeah yeah and i mean i think we we forget that i mean and what feels normal today so if you think that four g and five g is what's normal today it wasn't normal twelve years ago and it won't be normal ten years from now yeah so everybody's solving there are lots of product managers sitting out there trying to solve for how do i get this to work in a four g network and how do i get to work won't even that problem that you work on and labor over will just vapor and vanish someday and you'll be like man i spend a lot of emotional labor on that

Speaker B: i spent a month you and i spent a lot of emotional labor um on that problem that you just described

Speaker A: yes yes i mean hell we spent a lot of time talking about return codes there were i don't know three hundred return codes one of which was take the person's card and and cut it up ah no do not do that yes decline the transaction and send them on their way we are not having some little coffee shop cut up cards like it's nana at the farmer's

Speaker B: market jelly and it pops up into bruce's like return screen that nana's gonna take your card it's not happening you

Speaker A: have to understand yeah ah that's the kind of that we were thinking about back then like what do we do with this return code and it's like not a damn thing this return to decline and move on

Speaker B: i just tell bruce to give you a different payment

Speaker A: method pay cash for the gym you have cash otherwise you can't have the jam get out yeah but i mean that's the like the things we labor over technology wise today in fintech and in any product but i think in fintech it's the speed at which things are changing is i mean crazy i mean when i started when i said i was an ach product manager the federal reserve was still flying planes to move checks from this region to that region there were still fleets of planes when my first year in in product management there was a plane crash in the federal reserve and we didn't know what to do because there were checks on the plane that just and what do you do like there's we don't know which checks they were right you had to we had to go do a uh the federal reserve had to do a quick hustle to try to just figure out which checks were so that seems like so yeah that was quite a while ago it was twenty five years ago but twenty five years is a fast pace to have it all totally change completely right it's only

Speaker B: going to get worse i mean i do think like it's been ten years or whatever since people were like omg bitcoin and the blockchain are going to blow up everybody's lives i don't think that's true i do think there i do think this sort of some of these features and the ability to create a network that's independent of the networks yeah is really interesting and as soon as we figure out how to make these wallets more um portable and more accessible i do think the game starts to change um and you know people that are at risk of being commoditized or at risk of being commoditized uh right but again you probably ought to have some great product managers thinking about

Speaker A: these problems having some of those conversations and saying what do we need to do um i mean i think about um even as a product manager in the fintech and payment space often wherever you are feels like it's the most important place right in terms of if you are a product manager in sweden you think that's the most important way that money moves around and then you try to take your swedish product and put it in another market and go i mean why won't the germans use this and it's like well because the germans carry cash in their pocket right until the pandemic happened right and so even just as a product manager being very market aware takes so much work right like in the in the you know apac region people expect to use their phones for everything yes if you go to some parts of europe you will have to go to an atm and get money to pay for your dinner because the person says i don't we only accept cash and you're like i don't know what uh we've eaten like where's the nearest atm right like

Speaker B: can i leave you my kid like

Speaker A: right do you want to pay off do you want to keep my friend while i go to the atm right like like it's literally that those differences are super dramatic um yeah and very overcomeable when you have digital solutions right that are fast but again those legacy kind of old school systems don't always flex as easy so then they often find themselves in need of those local payment solutions and they're like please could we work with you right absolutely yeah

Speaker B: we should put on our backlog um there there is a case for um so we talk about making things easy and we talk about solving customer problems and we talk about making things simple but there are a whole bunch of use cases for when you want to intentionally slow the user down yes um and i think we should talk about with someone at some stage uh user it's just like user behavior design yeah yeah and it's not always about invisible or simple it may be about making you pause or making it feel harder because you want the customer to feel more secure right uh there that would be a really fun conversation yeah for

Speaker A: sure for sure and i do think that sometimes you know even in some of these clunky fintech experiences if you really stop and think about it i uh you're like oh that they're just slowing me down so that i feel like they care yes right and i'm like oh that's nice can i get a little faster here right can we

Speaker B: move they want you to see the little secure lock logo remember like remember how like how did we introduce the lock logo into our experiences and like look it's safe because we actually worked with people and they were like i don't know what just happened actually this reminds me of the story of when one click launched in china yeah yes and it freaked people out because they didn't know if it was secure or if this is what they wanted like

Speaker A: blew their minds mm mhm yep this

Speaker B: is a real transaction did it really happen was it secure yep um i

Speaker A: mean i similarly i sat in a room and convinced amex that they couldn't throw an interstitial in india because people wouldn't proceed yeah and they wanted a uh they wanted to throw up a screen and i was like no they won't they'll bail that you they won't finish the transaction and they're like oh come on and i was like no for real like and so we had to get somebody from the royal bank of india to come in and be like we no no right but it was such a difference they couldn't do it whereas here we're used to these three d secure messages and this and that you know like in the us and in europe but in that environment they were like no absolutely not it will be uh a it will be seen as a as a fake transaction

Speaker B: yeah you've been intercepted which is so funny um and i love all my marketing friends and my very distant past i was a marketer um but i watch people agonize over some of these experiences we put up i watch them i watch them argue i have seen people that are way too senior worry about where to put a link and at the end of the day here's my here's my opinion it doesn't matter because we're wrong right what matters is you got something up and you learned what people respond to and you adjust yeah um don't like make it pretty the first time but understand you're already wrong yeah you're already wrong one hundred one hundred that was my soapbox yeah

Speaker A: no it's super super true i love it no and i mean i you know i think that there's so many like i just i would say to people to product managers who want to be in fintech are in fintech and are kind of trying to figure out if they are unique and special unicorns or similar like we said i think that you are a product manager just like any other product manager and you may be watching things change right in front of you that don't feel revolutionary and then you're like whoa that changed something right didn't know that was going to happen and so be paying attention for those things and enjoy them when you see them and when you get a chance to take a chance take one right because sometimes those little i mean i worked at a startup that took a risk um taking square's transactions and it changed the landscape of payments to do those transactions within within six months everybody wanted in that game yeah those guys and to be clear just so for those of you who don't know this the guys at twitter built that on a weekend to use at a trade show they built square on their phones like just over a course of you um know a few days weeks because they needed to be able to take payments and didn't want to have to go buy a big device and they weren't sure that they were going to have power and they weren't sure they were going to have like all these things right and it turned into its own business and that's one of the things about the fintech industry that can happen like somebody has a little idea about lending and pretty soon they're uh they have a lind tech company and once somebody's like we should do insurance for uber drivers that manages all the transactions and now they're a whole company and you know you have all these little things that come out of the the basically that whole experience that happens on the road whole companies are born out of those little those little nits that are part of a whole payments experience and i think that's something that's fun if you like that sort of thing clearly we do exactly exactly that's what i i jokingly say that if you look at my resume it's me trying to leave fintech me too fintech fintech fintech i'm leaving fintech fintech fintech fintech i'm leaving fintech fintech

Speaker B: even when you leave fintech then you're like oh yeah i can do payments

Speaker A: yeah no big deal watch this so yeah no i think it's i think it's important and i think it there is so i think there is this i am a product manager i learned something about the financial sector and how money moves i learned something about customers and what creates trust and security i learned something about security and regulation and compliance congrats you're a fintech product manager

Speaker B: yeah and if you're a product manager not in fintech and you want to go into fintech it's not an impossible barrier no it's the same set of skills it's the same approach you know there's there again there's a different balance right you're not going to be so healthily focused on the ui you're going to be more focused on the experience and how do you make it seamless but it's it's product management yeah and

Speaker A: i mean i regularly have folks say like you know do you think i can get a job at this place or that place i don't have any fintech experience and i'm like ah uh they could use someone with fresh eyes yeah right like

Speaker B: much you know too much and like like the one that like my like my jam for all my product managers is do not fall in love with your solution like you gotta remain focused on your problem because once you put something out in the wild the problem changes and if you're in love with your solution someone's gonna

Speaker A: disrupt you yeah one hundred one hundred and it and you and you can treat it like your baby and you can love it and you can think that it's the most beautiful thing and also you're going to have to you know get a new baby yeah like it just happens right like m my like i my very the very first product i ever built was the ability to take a picture of a check and deposit it at the bank who cares right but at the time that was like i remember blowing my dad's m mind right with the idea that he could just use a take a picture of it or scan it or whatever and then it was gonna he was like why would i do that why wouldn't i just go to the bank and i'm like right i know

Speaker B: i know dad right okay so love that you just brought your parents into this uh have you ever tried to explain to your parents what you do and do they understand you because mine

Speaker A: do not no no my dad would tell people like ah she does she knows how money moves around she can explain do that i mean my mom thought i worked at the warehouse at amazon i think because i think i remember telling you my mom called me one time at work and said do you know if you have a copy of and rattled off some book and i'm like amazon dot com and look that up yes we do and she's like oh do you think you could get me a copy and i'm all it'll be there tomorrow

Speaker B: she definitely thought you worked at the warehouse i mean and be like so can you help me with my shipment and it's like aunt betsy do you know what i do

Speaker A: yeah i mean my mom probably still tells people that i'm an accountant right and i haven't been an accountant since nineteen ninety eight i would love

Speaker B: to also have another episode where we invite people's parents on to explain to us what they do um and i will i can bring my mom and she can tell you that she doesn't know anything about what i do i think she probably just thinks i go

Speaker A: to meetings yeah she's like she goes to meetings and yeah works in computers that's that was the other thing my parents would say she works in computers and i'm like i don't work at best buy selling computers just so for the record it's not what i do

Speaker B: nor can i help you with your email like despite how cool you think i am

Speaker A: yeah so i mean i think what is amazing to me is that in a uh in the course of my career there are so many things that have changed and even as i sit here now there are parts of fintech that now are outside i mean i'm like i don't know anything about that because i just haven't done it right or i haven't been involved or i haven't and so somebody will start telling me about something and i'm like what what does it do and then they start to explain it to me and i'm like uh fascinating yeah you know and i think that's that's the beauty of an industry like this that you can follow across time and i think that's one of the things about product management maybe we have to talk about this in the future too like if you have a specialty you will have the pleasure of watching change right if you are a product manager who does lots of things that's also super fascinating right and i've done a little of that and a little the other but if you have an industry that you stick with you know healthcare or travel or you know whatever um you will find like oh wow i got to watch all of this change and i think fintech is one of the things that just will keep changing because it needs to change to meet the need of society yeah right so but yeah i love it uh i love it too and neither of us does it really yeah it doesn't mean

Speaker B: we don't love it uh yeah it holds a special place in my heart uh having said that i find it equally infuriating and equally uplifting and inspiring

Speaker A: me too me too and i think there are yeah i i think if you go back and watch the episode i did with greg cohen about the great restoration you'll see like there are even more shifts happening because of the market because of the economy because of what's happening in the world because you know there's a lot of change that's happening very fast because of what's going on in the world right and he's an old school payments guy too right and it's like oh boy this is this is moving quick right and and i think yeah there is some of it that is like terrifying and some of it is like that's cool at the same time yeah all at the same time yeah yeah so in conclusion if you want to be a fintech product manager do it please do it's a good idea it's a whole it can make a whole career out of it it's a lot of fun so awesome all right then we will see you next time see you later sa