 Hi everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the director of P20 initiatives at Northern Illinois University and welcome back to another episode of Career Pathways Virtual Trailheads. We're excited to bring you this because while you can't be out job shadowing or doing your internships, we can continue to learn at home about what the world of work is like as we prepare for those next steps, which will be coming when we are out of this current situation that we're filming in. So today we're really excited while international work has been a big focus of many of our episodes so far. This is actually our first international call. It is still morning here in Illinois and it is this evening out in the United Kingdom in London. And so I'm going to let our next guest, Molly, introduce herself. So Molly, tell us about who you are and what you do. Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me. So I am the VP of product at Liberus. We're based in London in the UK. We are a small business lending platform with operations in the UK, the US and in Europe. We provide funding to small businesses, anything from 1k to about 400k for them to use as working capital, business expansion or kind of anything they need, really. Awesome. So are you from London? Because if I'm going to be a judge here, you don't sound like you're from London. No, I don't sound British. No, so I'm American. I grew up in Chicago. And then I moved to California and lived in California for a while. So then California and then in Northern California before I ended up in London. Cool. Let's come back to that in just a minute then because that's really an interesting story and probably important for us to think about. We've seen we are likely to work with people from all over the world. We also may find ourselves working in lots of other places in the world. And so we want to explore that for our students today. But first, tell us about like what a typical day or a typical week when we're in the regular workplace, what that looks like for you and your role. Yeah, so I run the product management team at Liberus. And so what that means is we look after the products that we're offering to customers. And so our product is actually quite unique in that it's not a typical loan. It's actually a finance that's provided to the small business that they pay back through their card transactions. And so if you think of a coffee shop, every time you come into a coffee shop and you pay with a credit card, we can take a percentage of that revenue. And so it's proportionate to how the business is trading. So innovative product like that is kind of part of what we look after. But then I guess the other piece of it is the customer experience. And so we are what we call an alternative finance provider. We're not a bank. And what you get with that is a really nice like customer experience. And so we have an automated underwriting. We have a nice application. It takes five minutes and a customer can know whether they're approved or not, which in the sort of business finance world is quite quite a nice experience. And then the other part of it is the platform, which is everything that sits under the hood, which we are actually selling to partners, primarily payment processors, but really anybody who has small business customers. And so that's kind of the three different aspects of what we look after as a product team. In kind of day of the life, we have multiple cross functional teams, and each of them has a product manager. And so they're focused on solving very specific problems. And so my job is kind of lucky in that I have really good people working in my team and they kind of own their own area. So my role is all about sort of removing blockers, making sure everybody's aligned, making sure the kind of whole picture comes together and we're moving towards our vision as a business. So I spend a lot of time in meetings, working on kind of the structure, helping make sure that kind of everyone's talking to each other, we're kind of working on the right stuff. I also personally attend a lot of partner meetings to pitch or to help onboard them onto the platform, which is great because it keeps me close to users. And then I would say kind of pre-coronavirus, I also spent quite a lot of time interviewing because we're growing business and so we're kind of constantly looking for good talent. And so constantly kind of talking to potential candidates, doing interviews, and then even sort of talking to people within the business about how to raise our profile to acquire good talent. So let's go into that for a second because that would be an area of interest for students to think about when you're looking to hire new people. First of all, what kinds of jobs are you hiring for? And then second of all, what skills are most important that a new hire into your company would have? So my team, we have a product manager, so we have what we call product analysts, and then we also have design. So those are the three kind of roles within the team. And we're kind of hiring in all different shapes and sizes for all of those different roles. I think design is a little bit different because that's quite specialized. And so we look at UX designers, which is user experience and UI designers, which is the user interface. And we kind of look for full stack people who are stronger on one or the other. And then within product, product analysts tend to be quite analytical and comfortable sort of digging into data, digging into qualitative insight to really understand how our products are performing. And then product managers, I mean, I quite like the idea of starting out as a product analyst before moving into a product manager role. But the product manager is all about setting the vision and the direction for their product area and kind of getting the best out of the people around them. So depending on the seniority, a lot of times I'm looking for people who have experience influencing their product roadmaps at their business, whether that's in a product role or not. A lot of times people in sales roles, for example, as they're talking to customers are getting feedback and they're saying, well, why don't we change this about the product and same for customer support. So I think it kind of varies the specific experience that people have coming in. So I'm going to come back and ask you a follow up question. But first let's talk about your pathway to getting there. You said you're from Chicago, you've lived in California, you ended up for now at least in the United Kingdom. Talk about what kind of that pathway was, what kind of education did you need, what work experiences did you have, and how did those things lead to other experiences then moving from one to the next? Yeah, so I think I guess I believe pretty strongly that tech and working in tech should be accessible to everybody. And so personally when I'm hiring, I'm not looking for any one educational background or kind of experience. That's just a sort of personal thing. I know that's not true across the board. And so I can tell you about my experience, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's the sort of the only path. So I studied math and economics in university. University is a kind of Britishism that I've picked up in London. People don't talk about college here because college actually means something else. Anyway, in college I studied math and economics and I kind of thought I wanted to go into academia actually at the time, which I decided was absolutely not for me. So when I graduated, I ended up in San Francisco and worked in a couple of different startups. And one of the businesses that I joined was just nine people when I joined. And so that was a really good exposure to me across sort of the entire company and all aspects of the business. And I could have a really big impact. And I just sort of took anything I could get my hands on. I grabbed and so I just said, you know, any opportunity that I saw, any responsibility that was sort of up for grabs. I took advantage of. And so I think that kind of attitude suited me really well. And I ended up kind of through my career in a kind of support and operations leadership roles, managing call centers and building out customer support teams. And the sort of sweet spot for me was the feedback loop between what the customers are saying, either on the phone or over email when they're calling support and they're saying, hey, this thing was broken. Or why isn't it doing what I want it to be doing and kind of feeding that into the product and engineering teams. And then also the sort of other direction of product and engineering building stuff and using the customer support team as sort of the almost QA in a way to understand stuff so they can support it. And so staying really close to obviously the customers, but then also the product. And so then I think kind of product management was a sort of obvious fit for me and it's something that I've always kind of done in one way or another throughout all of my roles. And then I have to say I kind of just ended up in London. I didn't. It wasn't something as planned. I never in any of my kind of previous career path expected that I would end up in London. My partner was transferred here and so I went back and forth from San Francisco to London for a bit and then decided to just move here. So about four and a half years ago, I moved to London and I love it. Awesome. Awesome. So first of all, I want to point something out to students watching this. So one of the things you've heard and we heard the joke from Molly about the British isms about referring to it as university and not the unit's just university or if you're in Australia it's just going to be. What's a good yeah it's just going to be uni. And so exactly. So with that said, but there's also a bunch of really important business terms that Molly's thrown out in this and and select QA QA is something we talk about in part of my job all the time. And there's other terms like that that have been mentioned and just kind of flow real freely and you might be thinking as you're watching this. Whoa, I don't even know what she's saying. Well, this is when you dive in and get these work based learning experiences all of a sudden that vocabulary is going to become very easy because you'll see it used. And that feedback loop is a really interesting concept from customers who call in their email or however they're connecting with support and say this thing doesn't work. And I have certainly been in in that loop where I've heard designers say no they're just doing it wrong and and so that's a really interesting situation that you've described that you enjoy being in the middle of that. Tell us more about kind of what that looks like and how you have helped people manage that because all of us have experienced whether it's an app, you know whether students have an app on their phone they're like. Why does this why is this like this or something they've tried to help a parent or another older relative maybe figure out how to do in a device or on a website. Tell us about your experience managing that feedback loop on such a large scale. Yeah, so I think I guess that when it comes down to it there's a lot of people making product decisions that are smart probably and have lots of experience but ultimately what actually makes good products is the users and so. 9 times out of 10 whatever we're going to build the first time is going to be wrong or it's certainly not going to be as good as it could be. And so the way software software development when done well. Works is through iterative design and so I feel very, very passionately about this and this is something that I've set up in in various roles in the past where you can look at what customers are telling you either with their words or with their behavior. We look a lot at data in terms of you know when you're using that app to bring that example. And you're swiping over here every single time instead of I don't know clicking some button that you're supposed to do so on Instagram you can double tap to like something or you can push on the actual heart right. And so Instagram's monitoring how many people are doing the double tap and how many people are actually pushing and they have a way that they kind of want you to interact with it. And so anyway so we kind of take all of these different data sources and figure out you know what's really the pain point what's going on here and then how do we want to solve that problem. But it's not. Okay we've solved that problem it's over now I mean this is kind of always iterative and always evolving and so then the next release comes out and we're going to watch how people are interacting with that and there's going to be some new stuff that we didn't think about. And so I tell my team all the time you know software is like it's a living breathing thing and it needs constant you know love and attention and it needs to be improved all the time otherwise you know it'll it'll get stale and die and it just won't serve its users anymore. Yeah, that's that's so true and even even just a refresh of the user interface can both on the one hand make it seem like oh this is awesome this is completely new. And on the other hand confused people and upset people because like now I don't know where something is that I've done and your Instagram example that is a great example on the likes because I know I do I hit the heart. And I know my child. She she double clicks on the image and and and doesn't even look at the image. So you know just quickly double clicking and she'll be very upset if she gets assigned to watch this for class. With that said, so that's really that's really fantastic. The move to living and working in another place if we can just touch on that because again, we have a lot of 16 year olds or 18 year olds who will watch this who also like you have no idea that they might live somewhere else. And 6, 8, 12, 15 years from now they might be living in a very different place. Talk to us about what that's been like a little bit personally, as well as what that's like work wise how is how does work look different in in another country a very similar country United States and United Kingdom have a lot in common culturally but If you can walk us through that to help people kind of open their minds that that'd be awesome. Yeah, so I think I was definitely surprised when I moved to to the UK just how different it was. And I think, you know, to your point, you know, we speak the same language, you know, it is, you know, lots of things are very similar and there's more that similar than different obviously. But I think I didn't really quite appreciate how different the sort of thinking and the ways of working are. And I guess I want to be careful not to stereotype because I don't think it's particularly helpful to kind of put you know British people in boxes and Americans in boxes. And my my experience kind of coming from from San Francisco is also going to be very different from another American working somewhere else. Absolutely. So, so I just wanted to caveat that. Absolutely. But but I guess I think that there were a couple of things that felt very uncomfortable to me when I first moved from from San Francisco to London and one was around the sort of the like kitchen chat where when you're going and you're having a cup of tea when of course it's tea always and it's I mean not so true people drink coffee here as well but a lot of people drink tea. And the sort of the expectation of the kind of small talk and like how deep into substance you get with the small talk was very very different from what I had experienced in San Francisco. And then I think there's also a lot of the British tend to be quite uncomfortable being very direct. And so they like to kind of say in a million ways besides the one direct way you know what's going on and you're kind of reading between the lines and that certainly was not my experience working in San Francisco. And I like to use kind of as few words as possible to say you know what what I you know to get my point across. And so I think those are probably like the two big ones. And it was definitely an adjustment period for me and you know I got I got some good feedback from colleagues early on that and you know they they didn't think I was you know friendly enough and that I was too direct and so I kind of you know what the right balance is. Now I think I'm probably so comfortable in it that I don't really know you know if I'm you know just just like these birds that I encounter when I first showed up and if an American would even recognize me as innocent American style anymore. Awesome. So I'm going to finish up with a couple last questions. First of all, and I think this is particularly interesting in light of the needs of small businesses today in the environment we're living in right now due to the coronavirus and it's certainly something that's getting a lot of high level communication in Illinois, because both the mayor of the city of Chicago and the governor of the state of Illinois are paying a lot of attention to it. How does your your work your company's work have a positive impact on the world. Yeah, so I mean I think we every day we're giving small business owners access to funds that they need. And the truth is that traditional lenders banks. They do serve small businesses but they serve a small minority of small businesses and so there are quite a lot of businesses in in the US and actually you know in the UK and in Europe kind of across across the planet that are just not able to access the capital that they need. There's a lot of sort of unsexy history around why banks are not able to lend to small business profitably. But they're not and so they've pulled out quite a bit from small business lending and that has meant that. New entrance fintechs and other startups and like my company have kind of come in to fill the gap and and that's been a really good thing for small businesses not to say that there aren't bad actors in the space who are taking advantage of the opportunity that is you know a thing that is happening. But I guess for me you know some of our small business customers are really just looking for a bridge to get through a hard time. Sometimes it's you know a second up in for their bakery or they're doing a renovation to expand their business. Sometimes they're doing a second or a third location that they're opening which is a kind of lifelong dream for them. And I guess I you know as I walk through my own neighborhood you know here here in London. You know small businesses and you know their activity makes me feel like I'm part of this community. And so I think you know keeping them alive and healthy is like just a really important thing for these local communities but then also for for the economy as well. Awesome. And then the last real question I'm going to ask you one special question at the very end but the last real question is any general words of advice for students today. I think my I guess what has worked well for me in my career even kind of while I was still in school I you know I had a job in a restaurant in high school and you know kind of worked throughout throughout my education. And I really believe there is something to learn and something to gain from every opportunity. And so it's kind of like a silly almost made a cliche piece of advice like what's the thing that they say you know no small parts only small actors. And that's a little bit condescending so I don't mean it like that but but I do think kind of looking back and I actually gained a lot of really valuable experience even just from you know working in a restaurant for three years in high school and I think that is true kind of throughout my career that whatever it is that's thrown at me a lot of times it's not what I signed up for and it's way worse and just like crumbier than I kind of anticipated. So I guess my kind of one piece of advice I had to pick one would be to try to find you know value in all of those opportunities. And even if you think you know man I hate my job or I'm not appreciated or you know people don't know what they're doing I mean all of these things have been true points in my career as well. There's still you know stuff to learn from that and there's still a way to kind of look inwards and you know figure out how you can be better within the environment. That is fantastic advice and I have also found that to be true from from my earliest jobs still to today so that's great advice. So last question. Have you have you picked a London football team that is your side. So I was petrified when I was first moving to London that I was going to have to all of a sudden have this interest in football soccer. And I don't care at all about it and I was thinking oh no I'm not going to have any friends this is going to be horrible but actually I've managed to survive four plus years in London I don't care about football and I'm still alive and it's worked for me. Well when you change your mind go spurs just remember that OK. When you change your I mean here I am sitting so far from that new stadium and you're right there you have an opportunity when the Premier League shows back up. So take advantage of it and go spurs OK. With that said so that's actually really important. You don't need to have a favorite football team though I will tell you as you travel around the world if you have one. Students who are watching this that will give you something to talk about and and argue about so but you don't need it and that's actually a really important take away from this. Molly thank you so much for taking time to work across time zones and and give us this time for students across Illinois and beyond we really really appreciate it. Yeah thanks for having me. For students and teachers who are watching remember you can we ask you to please share questions with us that you'd like us to be asking ideas for occupations or even specific people that you think would make a great interview for an episode of Career Pathways virtual trailheads. You can do that through Twitter. Our Twitter account is at P 20 network. That's P two zero network all in word. We look forward to bringing you more episodes and again cross the pond. Molly thank you so much.