How can product leaders in the banking industry scale their products? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Sid Shaik, U.S. Bank SVP & Product Leader Sean Scott discusses his career journey in product management and how it differs working in the banking industry compared to tech companies. He shares insights into how product managers at banks approach scaling products by focusing on customer needs and feedback through various phases of maturity. Sean highlights key factors that have impacted the banking industry including digital transformation, agile methodologies, and growing customer demand for digital banking experiences. He also provides lessons learned around the importance of testing ideas with customers and the challenges of introducing changes to established banking processes. Tune in to discover product management best practices for scaling in regulated industries such as banking.
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Show Notes
- Product management is accessible to anyone with curiosity and continuous learning.
- Making a great product is difficult, but the discipline itself is not inherently hard.
- Banking product managers focus on scaling through introduction, market fit, and maturity phases.
- Metrics like weekly/daily active users and composite metrics are important for measuring banking product success.
- In addition, understanding customers’ natural rhythms like pay cycles is key to designing effective banking products.
- Collaboration with risk, fraud, acquisition, and other teams is important for scaling decisions.
- Digital transformation and agile methodologies have accelerated product development in banking.
- Growing customer demand for digital banking experiences is a key driver of innovation.
- FinTech startups continue to inspire and pressure banks to innovate.
- Regulation will keep driving new approaches to payments, data sharing, and customer experience.
- Testing ideas with customers through experiments is important, rather than strongly holding beliefs.
- Customers prefer gradual changes to established banking processes and interfaces.
- Innovation from AI, Uber, and others will enable addressing unmet customer needs.
- Speed of payments both domestic and international is an exciting area of development.
- The Lean Product Playbook provides guidance on product development.
- Good Product Management by Marty Cagan defines the discipline.
- The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick offers tips for effective customer interviews.
- Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug teaches UX fundamentals.
- A Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt covers strategic thinking.
- Inclusive product management from diverse backgrounds creates better products.
About the speaker
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.