Day in the life of a fintech product manager (w/ ex-Affirm, ex-Google PM)

the failure pattern is as a GPM you will have meetings like dropped on your calendar at this time hello everyone I'm Akash Gupta 15 years in product management most recently a

group product manager at a firm the public Financial technology company and I'm really excited to tell you about the day in the life of a group product manager in fintech awesome well welcome

Akash I'm really excited to have you here and walk through this topic and as you mentioned we're going to be talking about what does that day in the life look like and I know there's obviously a lot of variance but we're going to try

and do some justice to this topic here and give a snapshot for the folks that haven't been there before what this looks like so why don't we go ahead and jump in and you've given me a little bit

of sense of what this calendar looks like and it sounds like you start your day at about 8 30 with something called emails and slack triage so like what is what does that entail what does that look like give me give me a little

window into that yeah as a PM it's pretty important to show your team that you're on top of things that you're not responding slowly like Engineers should be getting

unblocked designers should have questions answered analytics should know what they need to be working on and so I always try to have a slightly earlier

start than my team and so that's where that 8 30 comes from and then the second thing is I do the triage in the sense that I try to figure out what are those urgent things that I need to respond to

and then what are those important things that I need more time and I can put a calendar block later in the day or later in the week to actually fully address

and so my triage usually takes about an hour and in the first 20 to 30 minutes I just quickly Crush through all the emails that I can and slacks that I can and then for the last 30 I'll address

like one or two of the more important ones that require a longer write-up and try to get those done got it okay and then tell me a little bit about like what's an example of some email you might get where you're like oh yeah I

need to do more thinking on that I'm going to put a block on my calendar later today or later this week to do it and then second part of that question is what's an example of some email or slack message you might get where you're like

oh crap you know like literally just clear my calendar for the rest of the day and deal with this because this is a mess yeah it happens more often than you didn't think in uh the group product

manager role is you hear from for example your analytics partner our activation rate is down 10 week over week and that's like a drop everything moment if that activation rate is your

okr and it probably happens like once every two weeks that you really do need to go in and reorganize your day take off some of the recurring meetings that we're going

to talk about right now in order to focus on whatever that problem is so that's what fits in that ladder category in the former category of hey what is an email that I want to take a

little bit more time on it's generally if you think about the two by two of urgent and important it's those things that are important but not urgent because if it's urgent you want

to go ahead and say something like acknowledged CEO I'm addressing this today and expect a response later yeah

but if it's not urgent if it's your head of product asking you like what your big rocks are coming up next quarter that's something you want to really thoughtfully present you don't want to

just hit him with some bullet points you want to put the numbers behind it you want to put your conviction level behind it and maybe like even a release month and so that's something that you're going to want to organize into a beautiful little table that you can just

send to him and so that'll be something that I'll chunk out later and create over 15 minutes and then send got it okay makes makes total sense there's something that you mentioned in there that I think we're going to come back to

later as well which is Big Rocks so I'll put a pin in that and I want to come back to that but it sounds like after this email slack triage your next sort of like on a default basis is like a set

of weekly meetings that might take you from you know 9 30 to noonish what are those key weekly recurring meetings that you're thinking about

so there are a variety of meetings that a GPM needs to be in that are recurring but on this particular day I have two really fintech specific meetings and two

very abstractable group product manager meetings so in the fintech side in fintech meeting with legal and compliance is critical you want to keep

legal and compliance totally apprised of hey these are some new product features that we've added to our roadmap these are how uh features that are an

experiment are performing and then these are some of our finalized mocks and so unlike in other Industries in healthcare and in financial technology you'll often see a GPM in this type of a meeting

where they're actually meeting with legal counsel and they're debating tough issues a lot of times what happens is one of the PMS on your team will be

building a feature and from PRD to mocks that legal and compliance have had their hands on the future gets watered down and so a lot of times what the GPM has to do is understand the root cause of

the watering from legal and compliance and then help rework the future with the team and so a lot of those are like very nuanced debates about learning what the

legal and compliance concern is so that's meeting one that's fintech specific meeting two is with risk and credit so at a firm specifically we're

talking about a lending business and so everything comes down to how tight is your credit boxed what are the eprs that you're offering and so if as a product

team that's focused on activation you're not focused on credit you're going to miss a lot of things in fact like credit leverage tend to move activation more

than basic product levers and so as a GPM it's really important to proactively meet with this team and for this meeting I would have had spent time yesterday to come up with a very impressive update to

help them know that I'm really thinking critically about some of the things that we're doing in risk and credit and then they would present on their side hey some of the features you launched this is leading to lower quality users etc

etc and so it's a very data-driven meeting I'll pause there if you have any questions on those fintech meetings yeah I mean I think the like the risk and credit thing is like particularly interesting in in the fintech world and

especially with the the nature of the business you worked at a firm I imagine there's a lot of trade-off of like hey like we can do this thing on the product side that's going to like boost activation get people like signed up

faster or push more people through the funnel Etc but you've got the other side of that which is like hey now we've got a bunch of lenders potentially that aren't going to meet the credit profile and they're gonna like you know our

default rate is going to go up to a point that's unsustainable and so I would imagine there's a lot of like give and take in that meeting in terms of like thinking about what can we do and what's

productive to do from the whole business perspective not just like this will improve some product metrics yeah and if you think about the way to be a product leader here it's never to

increase the default rate and so that's why it's important to have this proactive conversation where you're saying something like hey the profile of

the user that's coming in from my recent feature that graduated is Acts what should be the products that they're eligible for that we should be recommending to them and that way if

you're proactively managing the relationship with your key credit counterparts they consider you like one of the easier product leaders to work with got it makes sense cool so it's

really like making sure you've got a good partnership and like open channels of communication 100 cool and then tell me about the you got two other meetings uh on your uh on

this block or your calendar that are more weekly just recurring meetings that are you know not fintech specific what's the nature of those meetings yeah so there's two really important meetings

that occurred on this day day meeting one is my weekly meeting with my other three key leads so the group product manager I have a team of you know five PMS under me and I also have

counterparts in engineering design analytics who are group or director level folks and keeping those four people aligned is probably one of the

primary jobs of a group product manager they should be going to the more senior engineering leadership analytics leadership and design leadership and presenting your vision really

proactively the failure pattern is hey the head of design they don't actually know what the direction was for this really dramatic change you made in the

app and so it's really critical to proactively as a product leader prepare this meeting in the most sculpted way where you figure out the topics that people need to know about and also the

topics where people might have some concerns maybe it's the case that analytics impact sized one of your initiatives pretty small and that's what the team is about to

take on you need to address that head-on why you guys are working on it and make sure that that person is on board and so that's the key purpose of that meeting and then the second meeting is weekly

Business review this is a famous Amazon tradition and I think it's really effective in getting everybody to be metrics driven so if you're on a product

where you have enough metrics if you're not a very early stage startup and this is a really effective meeting typically led by analytics where they walk through these are like the key metrics that we

look at normally that's like part one that's usually short and then part two these are the key changes or here's a deep dive or here's an opportunity area

and those are typically done with those four leads but then also kind of the fanned out 20 people across the four disciplines that are working in the five pods

got it so you'd have like the reports you're saying for each like engineering analytics Etc what about any senior leadership attending that meeting and see it like seeing like hey what are the

weekly metrics for for this group doing so product leaders occasionally drop in analytics leaders occasionally drop in um and it depends but on a weekly

Cadence that might be too much to bring them into product analytics and something like growth marketing where there's more significant changes on a weekly basis it makes sense but in the product like your big features you're

not going to be shipping gigantic computers every single week that's not sustainable and so we would typically have like a larger metrics reviewing around our area maybe like oh on a

monthly basis or even a quarterly basis with more senior leaders got it and then what happens in one of those meetings like what give me a sense of like what are some of the action items or takeaways that come out of it like if

the analytics team says hey we're going to do a deep dive on activation rate and Trends lately how might that then translate into some

action or work for you and your team so part of it depends on the types of deep Dives that they do but to get really concrete let's say they go

ahead and identify that one of the key drivers of activation are these batch marketing emails and nobody in the room is represented from those batch

marketing emails and the amount of activations we got last week is down 25 from those batch marketing emails then we might assign a Next Step action item

who's the right person in the room to go go interface and I would say like six out of ten times it's the PM and so in this case it would be me like yeah

action item for Akash to go check in with growth marketing team figure out how we can make this more stable maybe even increase the amount since we've now learned this new thing about how important it is yeah got it okay

awesome so what comes next in the daily schedule after after you go through these set of recurring meetings so the failure pattern is as a GPM you will have

meetings like dropped on your calendar at this time but I as much as possible try to create a midday break so like a focus time or a lunch and I will often like be pretty aggressive with like

proposing new time to folks if they're falling within my focus time so you need to go take a break go outside grab some sun there's these studies that they did

I believe it was Harvard researchers and they found that if you're sitting in like mini back-to-back meetings you can literally see the effect on your brain

in an fmri sky and so it's it's really important to just take a second like we're all about doing our best work not the most work right in product management we could do unlimited work and so I need to walk the walk for my

team and say like hey I'm going to take a little lunch so usually what I do is I take an hour break I like quickly make lunch eat it with whoever's at home since I work remotely my son is often at home with the nanny

we'll have a quick lunch together and then I'll use like the remaining time often for something out of the email slack triage that I couldn't get

or this day in particular what I needed to do was send out a business update on our progress towards activation and so I use this little time to quickly draft it up we've just come out of our wbr

metrics review so I had a bunch of awesome charts I could put in there and I sent that out got it and what's like for something like a business update go click deeper on that like who's the

audience for that is that your VP is it the C staff like who's getting this update that you're that you're putting together with some metrics about like hey here's here's the help of the product I'm working on

so it depends that it should be bespoke based on the email because you don't want to spam senior leaders so I'll actually often write the update and then I'll think back to like who is the

plus one level of leadership across all of my xfn partners that I want to keep on top of so at a firm there was like a team called Marketplace there was a

sales team there's customer success there's all these different groups and so I would look at like that list of say like 20 people and I decide like based

on this week's Upstate eight of these 20s should be getting it and the goal would be that on like a monthly basis or something like that all 20 of them hear from me at least once because everybody

likes to hear and feel like they're having a say in a critical area of the product and so I use this type of an

update to drive that got it okay cool um awesome and then it looks like next on the calendar you've got some one-on-ones starting at like 1 30. so

tell me about those yeah I mean as a manager one of your most important meetings of your day is your one-on-ones with your direct reports what I try to do so that I can

be really prepared really energetic and really stacked up against them is put like one or two in a day instead of just stacking them all five and so in this

case I have one of the folks on my team and I'm gonna be coming to them with some agenda items the what I don't like as a manager or being managed is like my manager just shows up and expects the

whole agenda like I will usually have either like something from their development plan where we're tracking progress positive or negative or really probably 70 80 of the time

there's something that leadership or product leadership wants from this PM that wasn't so urgent that I'm gonna bring it up at the one-on-one like hey

our CTO is really concerned about the amount of ml Engineers we have on this model so can you make sure to like double click and present a plan and have a meeting and invite me to it so

something like that yeah got it okay and then um so you've got like sort of three ones list it was like engineering person on

my team and then syncing with someone from analytics tell me a little bit about like on the analytics component like what does that relationship look like there what are some of the key topics

that are going to come up in like a recurring one-on-one so yeah this is it happens to be a monthly one-on-one but one of the most effective tactics I think for as a

product leader especially when you're in that middle management layer is to regularly meet with your counterparts manager so I have in that four key

leaders meeting earlier in the day met with my director of analytics but at the same time the VP of analytics he's in the room when all of the key decisions

are being made with the c-suite and so making sure that he's apprised of our recent successes and the impact size of the current features coming up is really

important to build that credibility and so that he can speak up for you when you're not there so that's what that meeting is about and I tend to meet like monthly with almost all my counterparts managers the other meeting with my

engineering counterparts is we already had a meeting earlier today right as a group of four but we didn't have a one-on-one more building that personal connection understanding what the

problems are giving each other feedback and so that one-on-one is really a relationship building with kind of the most important counterpart I have who's the engineering leader got it and so

that like one-on-one with your engineering leader will that will you go into that because it sounds like you're focused on relationship building there more than like tactical like hey let's

sit down and talk about feature X for this Sprint or you know like this particular bug that's still like ongoing that type of thing you try and like leave that stuff for another discussion

is that the right way of understanding it or is it defense I didn't create enough surface area that they don't feel like the one-on-one is where they need

to surface that information there may be a hot issue that both of us or one of us wants to talk about that's along those lines but if you're not creating enough space

in your one-on-one to have those more casual debates get what's actually on their mind about how product is doing then you're never

going to hear that feedback until like 360 review time and that's not never good got it okay so it sounds like part of the intent is like make sure you've got some like breathing room for just

like building that Rapport and getting issues out and discussing maybe you know bigger but less urgent items that are relevant to your product area yeah 100

like the bugs and the blockages ideally those are done in like a weekly project meeting that that engineering leader is all ready leading and so this is like a

different purpose okay awesome cool um what comes next by this time have like 72 slack messages like 15 emails because I've been in

meetings and I've been doing Focus time and so I personally like to batch my communication period so this is the second of three batches which is kind of the afternoon batch and it's often just

like a calendar hold that I'll put on my calendar myself because otherwise people will put meetings onto it yeah and as I mentioned at the top like responsiveness

is a critical future of a good product manager and so this block is there to make sure people feel like they can come to me midday with an issue and I'll

actually try to action it really quickly so a lot of these messages will be Beyond just like an okay or an acknowledged and that's why I need the blocked Focus time I'll actually do

something about the issue you know maybe um one of my PM's messages me that we're gonna have a two-week delay in our big rock feature now that's a big problem

right and so I'll immediately go to them and say like okay like did we evaluate the alternative options is there you know a solution we could do if we gave

you an extra engineer from another team you know I would actually come in with some very specific ideas to just help that person along got it okay cool makes sense

and then it sounds like you've got a product review for what you call the big rock so I'd love to hear what you know tell us a little bit about like what is this product review and then also just

for folks that may not know the term big rock what is what does that mean product reviews are probably the most stressful part of a piano's job right so

you're doing a review of kind of your proof of work which is your PRD and you're doing it on a big rock which typically in the planning process you'll identify like these are the two to three

features that we think are going to have the highest impact and then for those features as outcome of the planning process senior leaders like the head of product the head of engineering even the

CEO depending on the size of the company are going to be pretty interested in like basically right before you go to building can they give all their feedback and so that's generally when

the product review happens like you had it on your roadmap everybody okayed the road map so they know it's coming but what they want to see now is like what are the design mocks what's your refined

impact estimate now that you really went into the details and figured out which user flows are going to get access to the feature versus not what is the key risk area why this future wouldn't hit

its metrics and so a product review is really tough both for the group product manager because they need to work with their pm to really impress the product leadership to show that they have a

strong team but especially for that PM who's typically leading the meeting and so I would have often had like a meeting the day before with my pm and said like let's walk through like what are the key areas I can help how can we help improve

this presentation and hopefully like a day before that they would have actually sent me the document and I would have marked it up in one of my focus time email prayers right so you're trying to to help him or her understand like

here's the nature of some of the questions here's maybe something they're going to press on I know they're focused on this metric like how is this going to impact that like it's sort of like a you

know like a trial run right exactly and depending on how busy the pm has been sometimes they might not have had time like maybe they had a bunch of

other senior reviews that they needed to do so they didn't have time so sometimes that meeting might even just be like a working meeting where we're jamming on okay I think like we need to reorganize the doc structure to put this at the top

like okay I think that with the dock is missing is like some really pointed discussion questions let's add those that type of thing got it yeah that makes sense um and then let me let me ask like I

think you sort of alluded to this but I'll ask uh specifically what's the audience in a product review like who is who is yourself and your pm on your team generally presented to obviously there's

going to be some variance company to company whatnot but so at a company that has 2 000 people like a firm generally it'll be like

my manager my skip level which would be like a director and VP of product the design manager so it'll be like a

senior director of design yeah um and then potentially product leaders who are impacted by the change we're making because rarely it does a product chain just impact one area yeah so there

might be a couple other directors of product and so those become like the most important depending on the org there might be a senior director of engineering or senior director of analytics who really cares

about this stuff but a lot of times they're pretty busy as well and that's not their main focus so it tends to be like product and design leaders got it

okay cool awesome so I think we're at uh let's see five o'clock now we're basically at the end of the day this year but there's a few other things on the agenda so so take us home what's what's left

yeah unfortunately being a group product manager is not a 40 hour a week job um so from 5 to 5 30 a practice I've

really found important for me is planning the next day and the reason I find this important is it allows me to like actually close my day otherwise I

feel like this overriding anxiety about all the other things that I need to do but if I can confidently tell myself okay I'm gonna work on this and this thing tomorrow or this week or next

Thursday that really helps and so I tend to use this as kind of like my cool down sign off period and figure out like what is important and Urgent to do tomorrow

got it okay and then it sounds like there is one last thing on the agenda right you've got 9 30 blocked off that I can see uh catching up on messages tell me more about that

yeah we live in a remote world I live on the east coast and my colleagues are still working until you know nine Eastern and going back to the very top like as a PM if you're one of those PMS

who's responding to your colleague like the next day like you're just losing an opportunity to build credibility build responsiveness show them that you really care and so I tend to find time at the

end of the evening to once again do the final clear out of my email and slack and at this time like a lot of times I'll be doing it out of pocket I won't even be on my laptop I might be on the

exercise bike or I'm gonna be going for a walk or something like that and so a lot of times the messages will be like hey James thanks for sending me this message I'm gonna check it out tomorrow

type of thing but that level of responsiveness helps build that expectation also from your colleagues that they respond to you that quickly and builds that credibility that you

really care yeah yeah I mean also in a case like that that example you're acknowledging like hey I got this I saw it here's what I'm going to get to it so they have some certainty if they're trying to plan other things understand

when feedback is going to come or you know review or whatever the case may be that type of thing yeah cool well this this was great I feel like we've got a very thorough run through of what a day might look like

and some of the sort of the ins and outs and um how things work between sort of tactical stuff like email slack triage all the way down to a product review for

as you said big rock like a big you know sort of foundational feature of maybe your quarterly road map or something like that so thanks for watching us through it my pleasure thanks for having me