How can product leaders scale enterprise businesses in the highly regulated financial industry? In this episode hosted by Sid Shaik, Treasure Financial CPO Julia Stefani shares insights on leveraging personalization powered by AI and the potential of embedded finance to drive innovation and accessibility in FinTech. Tune in to learn Julia’s strategies for preparing teams, identifying growth engines, and sustaining success in a rapidly evolving market.
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Show Notes
- Julia’s journey into product management evolved naturally from her background in computer science and finance.
- As a CPO, Julia emphasizes the importance of being the voice of the customer and coaching her team.
- Julia’s fascination with banking and FinTech stems from her childhood dream of being a bank teller.
- In preparing teams for scaling, Julia highlights the need for clear communication, understanding the vision, and efficient processes.
- The right time to scale and automate is when the team is feeling the pain and accuracy is compromised.
- Growth hacking, gamification, and content marketing have been successful tactics for Julia in consumer and B2B settings.
- Collaboration with sales and leveraging their customer insights have been crucial for Julia in B2B environments.
- Balancing work and life as a working parent is a “beautiful chaos” for Julia, who relies on a supportive ecosystem.
- Julia sees AI as a key driver of innovation in FinTech, enabling personalization and accessibility of financial solutions.
- Open banking and embedded finance are two trends Julia is excited about, as they can increase access to financial products.
- Sustaining success requires continuously understanding customer pain points, staying up-to-date with technology, and nurturing talent.
- Julia’s experience transitioning from a consumer-focused company to a FinTech startup taught her the importance of cross-functional collaboration.
- Claw machine-inspired campaigns at Sofi demonstrated the power of gamification in driving customer engagement and retention.
- Julia emphasizes the need to maintain high customer experience standards during periods of rapid growth.
- Maintaining a solid financial plan is crucial for scaling a business, especially in challenging macroeconomic environments.
- Julia’s approach to new opportunities is to seek experiences that put her outside her comfort zone, as that’s where growth happens.
- Content marketing and strategic partnerships have been effective growth engines for Julia in the B2B world.
- Julia’s involvement in sales and customer onboarding at Treasure Financial has enabled valuable customer research.
- Personalization and embedded finance are two areas Julia is excited about, as they can increase accessibility and innovation in FinTech.
- Julia’s blueprint for sustaining success involves continuously evolving to meet changing customer needs and nurturing talent.
About the speaker
With over 15 years of experience in product management, technical program management, and engineering, Julia Stefani is a passionate and driven leader focused on creating impactful and innovative solutions in the fintech industry and building inclusive and high-performing teams. Currently, she leads the product, design, and engineering teams at Treasure Financial, developing the next generation of embeddable investment management products. We provide yield and safety at the point of convenience, without any friction, embedded on any platform.
About the host
Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup-- Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles. As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.