Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day -to -day interactions with developers.
It's about how an organization supports products as a whole, the systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers.
With the help of some boundary -pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader.
This is the Product Thinking Podcast.
Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast.
Joining us today is Vishal Kapoor, the Senior Vice President of Product Management at Affirm.
Vishal brings over 15 years of experience in software development, agile methodologies and product design.
At Affirm, he leads all product management, product design and product marketing teams, and has been instrumental in forming strategic partnerships with iconic companies such as Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, Stripe, Apple, and Expedia.
His impressive career also includes pivotal roles at Dropbox and Microsoft where he achieves significant milestones in product growth and scaling.
Vishal is also an active startup advisor and investor, supporting various seed and Series A companies in the tech sector.
Before we talk to Vishal though, it's time for dear Melissa.
This is a segment of a show where you can ask me all of your burning product management questions.
Let's see what this week's question is.
Dear Melissa, I strongly feel that there is something wrong with viewing Product Manager and Growth Product Manager as two separate specialties.
How the heck does a team create a differentiated product without considering customer segmentation?
So, this is an interesting question that I love your passion around how these two things could be separate.
Let's talk about what those terms are.
When we say a Growth Product Manager, it means that they are doing 100 % product management.
But a lot of times when we say a Growth Product Manager, they're in charge of acquisition and activation.
So, in a lot of product -led companies where there is not a robust sales team and instead they're trying to grow through product -led motions, they'd hire a Growth Product Manager to think about how they lay out the landing pages, the onboarding experiences, and the activation there.
And there is a science to that in many SaaS companies.
This is where you get into like freemium and trials and stuff like that and how you actually run it and what is the right thing to give people in the free trial versus not.
So, that's really what a Growth Product Manager is.
So, a Growth Product Manager is a fancy way of saying that they really are owning acquisition and activation.
So, what they are focusing on there is how do we take a free trial member and convert them into a page subscription or a team plan or anything like that.
And what they're trying to do too is get people to either recommend or upgrade or send it to the rest of their team if it's a B2B product.
So, they're going to look at onboarding which is incredibly important.
They're going to look at activation.
How do we make sure that the first moments of this person's experience with our product are really valuable?
They're going to really look at some pricing and packaging, things in there.
What do we put into premium?
What do we put into freemium models?
How do we slice and dice that?
Now, a Product Manager needs to be growth minded when they're working on user experience things as well.
And especially when they're pertaining to goals or surrounded by goals of trying to get people to stay on the product, spend more money or invite team members.
I believe that a lot of Product Managers need to have that mindset when it comes to growth.
But, you can specialize in different things in larger companies as a Product Manager.
You could be a Platform Product Manager.
Now, a Platform Product Manager does need to be business minded.
They have to understand how growth works, how those cycles work, how those metrics work, and how people find your product valuable.
But the stuff that they're actually overseeing is usually more technical in nature.
And it's going to be about refining platforms and making them extensible, more about integrations into stuff.
Some of those levers could be growth levers as well, so they should be familiar with it.
But it's not really that acquisition and activation piece.
That's not really what they're overseeing.
So I think it's just a fancy term for saying that somebody's overseeing acquisition and activation.
They're usually working with sales more.
They're plugging into the sales enablement process as well as a Growth Product Manager.
So you're making it easy for sales to figure out where do they pick up, where are they most valuable in this process so that they can help seal the deal.
But they're still doing all Product Management work, right?
It's all Product Management work at the end of the day.
I do believe other Product Managers working on customer -facing products should be growth -minded as well.
I think your Platform Product Managers should understand growth as well.
This is just a fancy term for that.
So I don't love the term, but if I'm going to be looking for somebody to own that activation and acquisition piece in a B2B SaaS company that's doing a freemium model or a reverse trials or product -led growth, I'm probably going to look for that title because that signifies that that person has experience
doing those funnels, right?
Doing those pieces.
That's important there.
They just specialize in that area very much like some people specialize in data, right?
They might be doing data products and they're very much about how do you use this data to get more leverage.
They might be specializing in AI products.
They might be specializing in B2B workflows for clinical things, right?
It might not be their forte to do B2B freemium models and how to convert people on that side.
That's okay. I think you can learn it.
I think it's possible for a lot of Product Managers to learn this.
So I wouldn't be deterred to actually bring somebody on who can get up to speed and learn these patterns.
But that's what we mean by a Growth Product Manager, and I hope that helps.
So remember, if you have any questions for me, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what those questions are.
Now let's go talk to Vishal.
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Hi, Vishal. Welcome to the podcast.
Thank you for having me.
I am so excited to talk to you today about your product management journey and also about an innovation at a firm that you've been working on.
But for our listeners, can you tell me a little bit about what led you to get into product management?
You've had a great career at Microsoft, Dropbox, now you're senior vice president at a firm leading all of product management.
Tell me a little bit about what brought you here.
The thread that ties all of these things together is that I've been a tinker at heart for a very long time, along with my brother, who's also a tinker and engineer.
And I grew up in a house of playing around with things that we found fascinating and interesting, from video games to microprocessors to computers and Unix.
And my aunt was one of the first senior computer scientists in India, and where I grew up with my brother and my family.
And we used to be very fascinated by all things of technology growing up.
And so I did my degrees in engineering, one in computer science and one in computer engineering.
And, you know, over time, I pivoted from building things and tinkering with things to taking a step back and understanding who are, you know, am I building for what are the customer problems and what are the ways that, you know, these solutions are meeting or not meeting the needs of people over time.
And so I've been incredibly privileged to be in these companies, as you mentioned, from Microsoft, you know, right out of college, working on products like Windows and Xbox and Azure.
And then moving into Dropbox, similarly amazing technology company and working on products that were core to the growth and revenue of Dropbox.
And now here in a firm been on this incredible mission of reinventing more than credit from the ground up.
Tell me a little bit about a firm.
I love the mission of this business.
It's really focused on users and helping them achieve, you know, their goals and making finance a little bit better for them.
How did it get started?
It was born, you know, with our founder CEO, Max Levchin, having this vision of after being one of the founders at PayPal to do this particular thing in a unique and differentiated way.
And by this thing, I mean is how customers transact and are getting into transacting online and in other e -commerce scenarios in a better way.
So what a firm is trying to do is to reinvent how transactions between consumers and merchants take place in a way that has not been done before.
So traditionally, if you think about how folks transact, it's maybe using a tender like a credit card where they're going and using it for small purchases or big purchases.
And the unsaid thing is the points is the way to get consumers into this ecosystem.
But the way that it works is you end up potentially revolving.
We see more than half of the customers who use a credit card revolve.
And those customers are actually paying for the other half to have the points in their pocket.
That's the business model.
And Max found this business model to be upside down, where the interest of the consumers were not lined up with the interest of the credit card.
And here's where a firm enters.
And we're trying to get customers acquainted with a confident and flexible way of payment right on the point of sale.
So the canonical example is you're trying to purchase a big or small transaction.
You go and find us on the merchant website.
You see the plan as low as that's our messaging on the product display page.
You see, OK, this is something that I want to finance.
You go through the application process, which takes very little time, and voila, you have the loan right on the fingertips.
And you know exactly how much you're going to pay for the duration of the loan.
We finance card sizes from $50 all the way to $17 ,500.
And we have plans that go from six weeks to 60 months.
So it's a very flexible and transparent way of payment.
So that's what a firm is here.
And we're helping consumers.
And then on the flip side, we're also helping merchants introduce these new ways of payment to set customers.
So you recently came out with the firm card, which is really cool because you don't have to necessarily go through a company that takes a firm.
You get to just put it on the card.
Can you tell us a little bit about how this idea for the firm card came about?
What drove you to decide to go into it?
The idea of a card has been as old as the company itself because we started with following our customers' feedback and what they were telling us, what they were asking of us.
And the one consistent theme after customers used the product online is that they came to us and asked us, we loved using it online.
Where else can we use it?
How else can we use it?
We are used to this plastic as a construct.
And we put it as a plastic construct.
And so we painstakingly understood this feedback to deconstruct it and understand what were all the different ways that the customers would benefit from having power of a firm now available in this card construct.
We didn't want to just copy what was out there in terms of available financial instruments.
We wanted to actually look at this again from a first principles view.
And that included and entailed understanding how this modern way of payment can be born with the app first experience.
So we have the app as the co -pilot for this experience.
And the software on the plastic can be updated, that's what we say, to produce more and more functionality.
A couple of cool features that it has is that you can bring your own bank.
So you can link your own debit card to it.
And then you can start just swiping as you go, as you would do with any other plastic that you would have as a debit card.
You can also load up a loan on it.
You can say, I would like to go and buy a said merchant for this price.
And you can preload a particular amount.
And then you can just confidently go and swipe with that particular merchant and consummate that transaction.
You can also just swipe as you go, and then you can convert it afterwards into a loan.
So these different modalities that I'm describing, they were all born from understanding the customer problem first and foremost, looking at the feedback loops that we had developed with them, and then solving this ground up from a first principles experience.
And then of course, continuing to innovate in ways still that the customers are asking us to add new features or functionality based on the usage of how they're experiencing the product.
When it comes to launching a new product like this, and this is a big new product for you, right?
It involves a lot of different pieces, a lot of partnerships, a lot of cross -functional working.
How do you validate it as the head of product?
What was your process for looking at this idea, having this spark, and then saying, hey, we should go after this, right?
Like what was all that work entailed before you said, hey, let's start coding or developing it?
It requires a lot of painstaking research and customer interviews, and looking at the landscape, as I mentioned, on if you were to enter into this space with this particular set of features and package it in a product, would customers use it?
Would they not just like it, but would they love it?
Would they really resonate with the things that we are building?
And that requires a certain amount of passion and almost obsession about the space.
So that is what Affirm's DNA is.
Everyone who's on this mission is really passionate about, can we do this better?
Can we do this in a way that helps customers live better financial lives?
And that was the headline that we had for the card, is like, yes, there is a way that where we can empower our customers to use this new method of payment almost beyond what they have been used to with their everyday lives.
And so this included having a lot of prototyping conversations, going to the UXR labs, getting some real customers who have used Affirm before, some of them who had never used Affirm before, getting feedback looking at where they were able to successfully navigate through the different jobs to be done,
where they were falling short, where was it confusing?
And having that really keen eye on that quality that we wanted to develop, because payments and finances are very close to people's hearts.
It's an emotional thing.
So we didn't just want to solve it functionally, we wanted to make sure that the feelings that customers had after they used it continued to be really positive and strong, because we were becoming more and more of their everyday usage product with this particular card.
So that's a little bit of the qualitative parts of it, the quantitative parts of it, the feeling, the intuition, the craft, that all went into painstakingly long and laborious journey of love that ultimately culminated into the card.
And as I said, it's starting of a journey, right?
We're continuously doing the same things that we did when we bootstrapped it to ensure that the quality bar continues to rise as customers' expectations continue to rise over time.
This discovery process that you're talking about with the customer interviews, all of this stuff, sometimes I think people take for granted how long some of that takes, especially when it's a new, big, critical product.
How long did you spend on that time?
And then also, who was doing that work?
Who did you enlist to help you go out and do the interviews and the prototyping, and how did you think about that?
So we have an incredibly talented user resource team that does this as a function.
But I will say that this job is very much distributed amongst all the different folks working on this product.
So they help us, conscript people, and they help us with the structure and the script of the particular interview process.
But everyone on the team is passionate and goes and does this, right?
So the product managers, the engineers, the analytics folks, the designers, it's a team effort because we also want to get different perspectives when we talk to customers on what are they excited about?
What are they frustrated with?
What are the different places where their expectations are not being met?
And so it's really, you know, a team sport in that regards.
And in this, more the merrier, and then afterwards, once we have these sessions, you are asking, you know, how long?
It's a continuous process for us.
It's not something that we do, and then we stop, and then we re redo.
It's like we have continuous stream of customer feedback coming from these UXR sessions, but also from the data that we analyzed, right?
We continuously look at the data, and then we marry those two things.
And then that's how the product roadmap is shaped and influenced.
And, you know, we debrief after these sessions, and we debrief before the next set of features are supposed to get dialed into the roadmap.
And then we start prioritizing based on things that we hear, things that we know matter to customers.
And then, of course, after we launch, we go back and check our hypotheses, both from a data perspective, but also from a qualitative perspective to understand, did that solve that particular need that we were thinking that it would solve?
When you're thinking of launching a new product like this too and introducing it, I think there's the strategy that comes from your level, right?
The, hey, let's go build this card.
Then there's all the nitty gritty that the product managers go out and figure out, what are the features?
What should this do?
How should that act?
How should this interact?
How do you get to that go -no -go space on the overall concept of the card, right?
Like, how much information did you need?
And how much time, I guess, did you need to say, yeah, we need to do this physical card.
Like, we need to go out there and do this concept.
So the good thing about a firm product culture is that we are highly iterative in nature.
And, you know, that's something that we put a lot of premium on, which is like how fast we can move and how we can create these feedback loops with our customers, be it data or be it call.
And for the particular card use case, we actually had a digital card first.
So the inception story is that when we heard this feedback, we wanted to do it in a robust way, but in a way that we could solve the needs today.
So we introduced this concept of a firm anywhere, and the folks could go into the app, could request an amount, could request the merchant they wanted to spend it at, create a digital card, add it to their wallet, and, you know, go on their way.
So we had a beta version in some ways, and that product was wildly successful.
And that became the precursor to having the plastic as a concept, which then obviously, you know, as you were saying, so not go -no -go, but we are constantly looking at what can we iterate next.
And then when we iterate into the next version of the product, how is that sitting side by side to the existing versions?
What are the different, you know, mix shifts that we are seeing?
What are the feedback loops that we are seeing from the new versus the existing, et cetera, et cetera?
And so the team is incredibly empowered to go and, you know, run after these problems once we have identified.
Again, another product process and culture that we hold really to our heart is that problem identification is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle.
Because if you can ID the problem, and for whom this exists, the solution space, you know, is born out of that.
And the solution thing is definitely in the hands of the team who are much deeper into this.
And they run at these problems, you know, at the velocity and pace that they feel is commensurate with the situation, right?
And so it's never, you know, like we get together and we ship, you know, a waterfall product that will take, you know, three years to do.
It's a much more fast -paced and exciting kind of development environment.
When you're looking at that problem space, too, do you go through any cadences at a firm where you say, hey, these are the problems we're going to prioritize?
What's that look like?
Yeah, that is the currency of how we build product.
So thank you for asking that, right?
So we have a weekly cadence of reviews where the teams across the different surface areas brings, you know, their key problems into that forum for feedback and for building alignment for getting to a decision.
And those decisions could range from, is this the right problem to solve?
Is this the right sequence by which we should solve it?
Is this the right dependency chain that we should be going after?
Are these the right partnerships that we should be exploring, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera?
And so these forums are, again, regularly constructed on a weekly basis for feedback and alignment and information sharing.
And that is the crux of and the currency of how products get developed at a firm.
And that feedback loops are generally, I would say, more frequent than the products themselves because some of the decisions that we make is not the right time or not the right sequence.
So that is the decision -making part of the entire process.
Are you thinking about prioritizing bigger -level things on a quarterly basis, or is it more we just go week to week, and how do you keep that thread of the big things going?
Yeah, so we hold those two things constant.
We have a vision at a yearly level, at a quarterly level, but we execute on a daily weekly.
So those two things are very much ingrained into everyone's side guys.
It's, okay, where are we heading?
That's the North Star.
And then we work backwards from that into what are we doing in terms of the next step to get there and the step after that?
And how do we measure that we're getting closer to the destination?
What are the different metrics?
So we are very quantitative of FinTech, so we have key metrics for every single thing in the portfolio, and so we set those goals ahead of time.
We also set directional guidance on how we want to get there.
But then it is the weekly rhythm that we're talking about that then discusses and decides what are the next few steps to get to that end goal.
Are we taking experiments?
Are we taking some known problems into the roadmap?
Are we taking some bigger beds?
So all of that portfolio allocation happens at a quarterly level, and then we execute and we measure against that, look back and look forward at these rhythms that I'm describing.
At Affirm, too, a lot of what you do has partnerships with it, right?
The partnerships with the companies that accept Affirm so that you can shop with it.
I'm sure there's a lot of other ones you just mentioned to me before.
Apple is a big partnership you're working on.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you do with yourself and your teams to coordinate across Affirm as a company?
With different departments to make sure all of those pieces are aligned before you launch something like the Affirm card.
We're a two -sided network, and so we have the consumers that we have been discussing a bunch right now and their problems.
We also have a host of merchants and partners and platforms that are accepting Affirm on their checkout, which is a very important part of the entire workflow, as you can imagine.
We have an incredibly strong partnerships team, incredibly strong revenue team that helps us get those merchants and understand their problems or what they're trying to solve for.
Maybe taking a step back and understanding, merchants are accepting Affirm more and more places because we help them with a very specific thing, which is the conversion that they see on their websites.
By adding Affirm and by having these funnel messaging as low as X amount a month or week, merchants see incredible value to bring these new audiences, convert them at a better clip than other payment methods, and that is how those partnerships have been born by understanding the deeper needs of it.
We are incredibly privileged to call the biggest names in the U .S.
as our partners, ranging from Walmart and Amazon all the way to partnerships like Shopify, where we are exclusive to now Apple Pay, and that has been one of the fuels by which we are accelerating this flywheel of acceptance, and that is our mission to provide honest financial products to as many customers
as possible, and those partnerships are very key into distribution and ubiquity, and being accepted everywhere customers are shopping.
With these partnerships, too, I imagine there's different departments at Affirm that manage those relationships, work with them very closely.
When you're working with your product managers and lining up something like the Affirm launch, how are you working with the other departments?
You talked about the weekly cadence that you do with your team.
Is there any cadences to align with them, bring everybody together on the same page, and say, hey, what else do we need to be successful besides this software piece or this physical piece?
Who's going to run it?
How do we get all that done?
The cadences that I mentioned, and I should have been more explicit, are across all the different functions also participating in these rhythms, because to your exact point, these products that we're building need a vehicle to get into market for the go -to market motions, and we work hand -in -hand with the revenue
team, with the partnerships team, to ensure that the timeframes and the mechanisms by which we're launching are commiserated with the expectations from these particular merchants and partners.
The yearly rhythm that I mentioned, the quarterly rhythm that I mentioned, and then, of course, the weekly rhythm, they're all interlocked similarly with the cross -functional teams so that we have the same goals, the same exit criterias, and the same quality bar as we are discussing some of these launches.
And some of these launches are multi -quarters, maybe years.
Some of these are much smaller in nature.
So, depending on those, the go -to -market motions are commiserated and proportionate and aligned with the cross -functional teams.
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That's really cool.
I feel like a lot of companies struggle with go -to -market motions in product management.
Like, how do you align those teams?
How do you make sure everybody's on the same page there?
Is that something that you started creating from scratch?
Did it evolve over time?
Like, how did you kind of figure out what's the best way to bring everybody together?
As with most things at Affirm, it has been an evolution for sure.
We have learned by shipping a few different things, including how to take them into market.
Right now, the product marketing team actually sits within product and helps us identify, from the get -go, what is the customer value prop that we are promising?
What is the positioning that we're going to have?
What is the pitch that we're going to take, both to the merchants as well as to consumers?
That is one of the first few things that the product roadmap is influenced with.
On the other side of this, the bookend part of this is actually taking it to the market part, and we have two different teams.
One does the B2B side, which is on the merchant side, on how do we then take it to market.
Then we have a B2C side, which is direct to consumer, and how do we take some of these messages and take it to market.
Again, as I said, a lot of evolution and tweaking and adjustments, but right now we feel we are in efficient motion of taking the merchant value props, packaging them up, making sure that they're well communicated, and then having the key consumer value props and having mechanisms to take them to market
via email or through our app or through push notifications.
Then those two things are working in tandem hand -in -hand as we do some of these launches.
When you're thinking about the launch, too, do you have a go -no -go meeting where you get everybody together and say, hey, is this ready?
What does that look like?
Who owns that decision to say, yeah, let's push the button, let's launch this?
For big launches, we definitely have a go -no -go call.
In some cases, we actually have that with our partners where we sit together and we look at different facets of it.
The facets include quality, they include the product experience, they include availability, they include the customer support standards that we have set, and we go line by line and look at, are we ready?
Are we ready? A -priori, we have set some standards, I think I mentioned, exit criteria for big launches, and so we check has this exit criteria been met?
Has this been met? We take this incredibly seriously, and in some cases, it's a no -go, but it's a no -go until these things are fixed, and then we reconvene when they have been, and then we finally say that, yes, these standards have been met, and then we are now ready to scale, because for us, we put
a very high premium on how these customers are going to experience this product, and even if that means delaying it a little bit to ensure higher quality, we would do that in the service of our customers.
Some of the stuff you were just talking about sparked this question for me.
When it comes to B2B, especially on the B2B side, launching things, there's a lot of weight on making sure it goes correctly.
Do you do any testing beforehand in alphas or betas to make sure that it's ready for prime time for scale?
How do you handle that?
Absolutely. So we have a process, again, that product marketing helps us with, to conscript early adopters for merchants that are happy, willing, and able to test some of these features, also from a product quality bar, but also from a performance of conversion bar.
So as I mentioned, we are very quantitative in how every transaction and every customer is going through the customer funnel, and so we have this program by which merchants can be early adopters, and then they can test the flows with their particular customer base, and then we can collectively look
at the data together and the experience bar, and some of the metrics around availability and serviceability to understand how it is progressing, and then if and only if it is looking well, then we can graduate.
And we have an amazing experimentation and data platform by which we can actually look at these in real time, and if things are progressing, we can actually graduate in real time as well for those merchants that adopted, but then also for newer merchants that want to take on the technology, because we
built this container called adaptive checkout, which is basically the meta -container by which all of these things can be tweaked and adjusted and shipped, and as and when they get shipped ready, it requires no lift from the merchant partners mostly.
We can just automatically ship the update, the checkout changes, the pixels change, and we monitor the performance with that.
So it's pretty neat, and that's how we go through the different sets of alpha merchants, beta merchants, GA by just creating these feedback loops, but also reducing the lift that those merchant partners need.
That's a really great experiment.
I really love the way that you set up that platform.
And one thing you've been talking about too, which I thought might be good to dive into, is how much data that you actually look at a firm.
What do you feel like are the key pieces of data that help make your product management team the most effective?
Where are you getting the sources?
What are you looking at?
What's the heartbeat of the pulse on how you're doing?
That is in some ways one of our biggest trends is not just the amount of data, but the fidelity by which we can look at different cuts and different parts of the stack, and I would break them into three parts of the puzzle usually.
So one of the key business metrics, these would be how much transactional volume we're seeing.
What are the number of transactions that we're seeing?
How much is the average cart floor that we're seeing, et cetera?
So these are the business -centric metrics, and these are all interrelated.
The second would be the product -centric metrics.
So what are the leading indicators of customer engagement?
How many customers are starting an application?
How many customers are visiting the app?
How many customers are activating based off the flows that we're sending them?
So those would be the product -centric metrics, and the third one would be the quality -slash -engineering metrics.
What is our uptime?
What is our latency that we're seeing on checkout?
What are the different facets by which we know we are scaling up during peak season, et cetera?
And those three buckets that I described, business product and quality -slash -engineering are the heartbeat by which we measure how things are progressing on a daily basis.
So we have daily dashboards that get refreshed, then we have weekly synchronous meetings that we look at, and then of course on a quarterly basis we have the more aggregated view.
But those three essentially help the product manager understand are the products working as expected?
Are there any outages?
How are the new products that we have launched performing?
And keep a very good 360 view of the situation as things happen.
So we get almost real -time data on all these three things that I mentioned.
Who on your team is responsible for making sure those streams are coming in and setting up those dashboards?
Product managers actually do a bunch of this.
We have an amazing analytics team that also help out and then engineers themselves as well.
But product managers are expected to not just create but monitor and be very data -informed.
And so that is a core part of many of our product managers' daily lives is to be very metrics -oriented.
When you're looking at the data that you need to in your role across of it, do you have your own dashboard that you're looking into that's specifically across the portfolio or the different products or are you diving more into the product managers?
Yeah, I mean the expectation for me specifically is that I have my own set of dashboards that I've set up and created and I dabble in SQL or here and there and we have Looker and Appditude.
So there's a lot of self -serve tools that you can use.
But to a certain extent, the high -level control system is good.
But when you need to dive deep, that's when you need to go and find the subject matter expert for that particular area and tap them on the shoulder and say, hey, I'm noticing this trend, is that correct or is that anomalous or maybe my query is wrong and that is where a lot of the debugging and diagnosing
happens. But that happens across the spectrum, right?
So I have one particular view but all the product leaders and then the product managers have their specific views that they are continuously looking at for their particular part of the business and then aggregating, as I said, there's a weekly rhythm where we look at it in totality and understand are there
any things that are not going according to plan and if so, what are the yellow flags or red flags that we are monitoring in this.
When you're looking at this data too, how are you using it for road mapping and what's kind of your process to create that road map?
What does it look like too at different levels?
You know, we talked a little bit about the higher level where you're setting the big problems, keeping them focused on a quarterly basis, but then the teams are doing week to week.
How do you manage that with balancing launch road maps or road maps with your B2B side of the business with all of those big companies you work with?
It comes down to feedback loops, right?
So we've been discussing metrics as one kind of feedback that we get from customers and we see specifically one feedback would be if we see any breakage in the funnel performance, right?
If we see customers coming to a particular step in the funnel and then dropping off, that becomes an interesting puzzle to go and look deeper into.
The other feedback loops are what we look at similar cadences on customer tickets that come in, right?
What is the kind of customer frustrations that we are seeing, either them calling us, emailing us, going to the chat experience, and what are the trends that we are seeing there?
Another feedback loop is just reading our app store reviews and understanding what is happening in that regards and what customers are seeing in the public domain or on Reddit threads or on X, etc., etc.
And then we have a completely different channel for understanding the top merchant needs through the B2B channel that is facilitated, obviously, from our revenue team and product marketing teams, packaging it up in a way that then is used to inform not just quarterly planning or annual planning.
Actually, the week by week, the time of mentioning.
Some of these just get born because we don't wait until the next quarter to start.
We just say we are noticing these trends.
This particular thing is, you know, in the funnel is getting impacted or these customers are facing this challenge, come together, have a product review on this, and see whether we would like to fund it imminently and add it to the product backlog and then see what else gets displayed.
So we try to make decisions in near real time as we see some of these trends and feedback loops emerge.
I love the flexibility of this, too.
And I feel like it really promotes an agile nature with it.
I see a lot of companies struggle with thinking that they need to spec out every little thing, especially for B2B or the big customers, right?
If you've got Walmart asking you for what's your roadmap, what's coming out, how are we going to handle this, versus hey we've got a bunch of feedback and we should probably re -prioritize this stuff because our customers are unhappy.
How do you think about what gets communicated out to your partners versus what you're doing on a day -to -day basis and how do you manage that desire for knowing what's coming up versus having the flexibility to adapt when you need to?
This is another part where we are constantly learning and adapting and evolving because there is no perfect answer here, right?
And so what we aspire to do is to have a balance of things that are well -established and known and bigger rocks, let's say that we want to move, and then have the agility and the budget to intersperse smaller pebbles or smaller rocks that come along for the journey, right?
Because we want to always be in a position to be able to react to customer demands, to market needs, to merchant asks.
And so we're trying to always continuously balance this and harmonize the different parts of the puzzle and that is like the art and science in some ways of the product manager, right?
Like how do you take what we have known and we are committed to versus what are the new things that are coming in?
How can we juggle it together?
How can we maybe blend it together because that could become part of another thing that we were thinking about?
And so it really comes down to the specifics, right?
I'm talking at an abstract level on how we do this, but in the specific product services that we are trying to innovate, we have a long -term roadmap, we have a budget to take on customer feedback.
We have a mechanism of packaging it up and sharing it with the large partners, as you mentioned.
But we're constantly trying to evolve and find that balance on how much are we committed to a particular set of things and how much are we able to react because we don't want to be too much in depth in either direction because the beauty is somewhere in the middle where we're doing both.
We're committed, but we're also agile in the same way.
With that, too, one thing I think that's important to know is that a firm is a fintech, so you do have these complex financial regulations that you have to worry about as well.
And I hear from a lot of financial companies that the reason they can't be agile or the reason they can't adapt as much is because of these compliance issues, right, or the complexity in this industry.
How do you balance those regulations and those needs on that side with maintaining this agility that you're talking about?
Compliance is a core part of our product development process, right, for all the reasons you mentioned and actually then more.
Going back even the early days of a firm, we have been always trying to help the customer.
That's our mission, right, like honest financial products that help customers' lives.
And so for us, regulation is really a key thing because it levels the playing field for everyone.
So for us, as I mentioned in the beginning, our business model is really aligned with the customer interest because we don't charge any late fees, we don't have any gimmicks, and we only get paid when the customers pay us back.
So we really try to make sure that we are lending responsibly.
That is one of the key things that the CFPB really has come about in the recent days and said, here's a few of these things that we would like all the different players in this space to do.
And when we came back, we were like, yeah, we're almost silly compliant.
Yeah, and we helped create some of these like trends that now become mainstream in some ways.
And so we are benefiting because we have been doing that as part of our DNA.
But to answer your question, compliance is definitely a key thing that we take as input in any of the products that we develop and make sure that we continuously remain compliant and exceed compliance, actually, because we're trying to raise the bar and we see compliance as the bin bar for some of these things.
In many large organizations, there is like a compliance department or a legal department that the product managers see as roadblocks.
You can't do that, you can't try this, you can't do that.
How do you navigate working with the legal side and the compliance side in your area?
I just heard you say we take it as inputs.
What's that working relationship look like, and what should it look like to be able to keep building great innovative products?
And this is another very key strength of a firm is that all our departments are joined towards delivering against this mission that I mentioned.
So we actually see compliance and legal as a very important part of the product development process.
In fact, we lean on them to get the subject -matter expertise and then partner hand -in -hand in understanding, you know, where can we go, what should we be aware of, and what are the different inputs that we should be thinking about ahead of time so that we don't go, you know, five weeks in developing
a thing and then realize, oh, my goodness, I should have known this beforehand, right?
And so it is a lot like jazz.
We're playing it together, the different instruments, and we're trying to improve, but at the same time, we know what the set list looks like.
So that's why we're here, and legal and compliance, you know, are embedded deep into the product process with each of the product managers having a contact.
They can reach out at any time and understand and brainstorm on potential options and solutions.
So, and that I can say confidently, it holds across a host of different functions because, as I said, we're together trying to get to this mission, and so everyone has that right -hand state in their mind and working backwards from there.
So legal and compliance, very strong partnership with the product team.
So I want to bring it back to the AffirmaCard for a minute, too.
You've launched it.
It's out there now.
It's new. What's the next steps look like?
How are you thinking about the process of innovating on it, iterating and going forward?
Very much so in the same way we got from zero to one, and then now we are from one to scale.
We announced in our last earnings that we have 1 .2 million actives, you know, using the product on a regular basis, and what we're doing right now is the same thing that, you know, inspired us to build a card, which is to listen to the customers, to look at the data, to make sure that, you know, the features
that we build are being used in the ways that we think were supposed to be used, and constantly pressure -testing our own assumptions so that we know, you know, what we're building is at a level and raising the bar, not just for ourselves but for the customers, right?
So specifically what we're doing, we're looking at every ticket that comes in from the card.
We're looking at, you know, all the data on every funnel that we have constructed for the app and the card and, you know, when people take out loans.
We're looking at all the different post -run action issues that might come up in terms of cancellations, in terms of refunds.
We're looking at where the merchants, where this card is being swiped at, and how are they reacting to it?
So we're looking at the landscape holistically, and then with that, we are borrowing pieces from each of the different parts to then add it to the product roadmap and prioritize it, because I do really believe that strategy is a set of interconnected choices, and, you know, it's not big S strategy,
but for us, the strategy is what the sequencing should be.
That is the choice that we will have to make on a daily basis, because the demands far outweigh the supply that we have.
So our job as product managers is to essentially have a keen sense of prioritization and sequencing that comes out of that prioritization.
So that's how we are dealing with the card next gen and the next gen after that and so on and so forth.
So, Michelle, for you, you've been in product management for over 15 years.
You've got this great track record of success.
What are the trends that you are seeing in product management that are getting you excited these days?
Well, I would say the customer centricity, you know, we talk about it a lot, but at this time and stage in, you know, product management, it has become much more accessible, and the secular trend I'm seeing is know your customer is becoming much more easier than, you know, when I started 15 years ago.
It took a lot of effort and time to go deep into problems.
Now with the, you know, the host of tools that are available, you can actually self -serve and understand a lot about the demographics of the customers, the segments of the customers, their key trends and attributes and how they interplay.
The data parts that, you know, we discussed a bunch, even just in this interview, it's like that is becoming easier and easier.
So to know your customer and to live in their shoes for a day or for a week is becoming much more accessible, which I find very heartwarming because that is where the art of product management starts.
Just know your customer, go deep into the problem space, understand their frustrations, understand their delights, and then marry it all in something that can be packaged and delivered to them.
So that is what I find most interesting in this time and age.
I'm pretty excited about the customer centricity too.
So Vishal, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
If people want to learn more about you and Affirm, where can they go?
They should go and download the app.
They should take out the card, send feedback directly to me.
I love hearing from customers on how they are experiencing the product.
We're also available, as I said, in Apple Pay now, in Amazon, at Walmart, at Shopify Merchant.
So anywhere you go and shop and you see Affirm, please try it out and send feedback to me.
Well, thank you so much for being on the podcast and thank you to our listeners for listening to the product thinking podcast.
We'll be back again next Wednesday with an amazing guest.
In the meantime, make sure you subscribe and like this podcast so that you never miss an episode.
We'll see you next time.
