 Hey everyone, this is Carlos. I'm the founder and CEO at Product School and today I'm here with Polumi Damani who is the general manager at Credit Karma. Hello. Hey Carlos, so nice to be able to participate on this with you. You have the honor to be the first ever Credit Karma leader to be on the show. Like I said, I think we can change that pretty easily. I'm sure there's a number of product leaders who would love to come on your podcast. Totally, I mean your company's on a rocket ship and we're going to talk about that in a second. But before, I'd like to learn more about your own personal experience. How did you get your first product management job? That's a really good question. Like most engineers, I started off in the engineering side and building according to what somebody had laid out and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to understand the why behind what we were doing, getting more context, understanding what the user benefit would be, how would we differentiate. And my engineering manager was like, well, you sound like a product manager every day. Let's put you in there. And so luckily I got a chance to do that and then kind of fell in love with that whole aspect of being in the middle of between, here's the consumer problem you're trying to solve, here's our unique ability to do it and then really figuring it out with the engineers and the designers. What do we build? So now I see that you've been at Career Karma for five years and your first title there was VP of product. Right? Yes. So now you're a general manager and I'm very curious about that. We always talk about how to break into product management or go from product manager to senior and so on. But how do you go from VP of product, what is the difference between a VP of product and a general manager? Yeah, well, I've been blessed at Credit Karma to be able to have different opportunities and different roles roughly almost every 18 months. So I joined in an area that I knew a lot about, I thought, and I could sort of leverage that expertise to help Credit Karma build around data and systems and recommendations was something that I have kind of a deep background on. And then sort of started pivoting into more, hey, where are the unknown spaces, right? So, you know, we talk about this sort of building environment called Lightbox where we essentially have helped our banking partners figure out, you know, who are the right people on Credit Karma for the right borrowing products, whether it's a personal or a credit card, and really creating a synergy there on our platform. So building that set of capabilities and tools, which is more of an enterprise product, to be able to, you know, remove that disappointment from members. So when they come in, you know, they try to apply for something and frequently in financial services, you don't know until you apply whether you're going to get it. And so if you want to have that indicator of like, hey, your chances of getting this are great or bad. And so don't apply or go ahead and apply and giving that confidence. So that was again, started with kind of that consumer centric view. And then as we moved into it, you know, got an opportunity. So I love kind of that sort of zero to one space of taking a, you know, white space and kind of building that capability and figuring out what a unique value prop is, and really solving that member problem. So this opportunity came up on on Credit Karma Money, which is a business unit inside of Credit Karma where we actually, for the first time, moved to the other side of the balance sheet. So we've traditionally been about credit and borrowing. And now this is about your checking and your spending and your income and your savings and where you want to go with your with your wealth opportunity. And so it was sort of like, you know, I'll be biased and say, product people make good GMs, particularly in this space, because they understand all aspects and they're used to what I would say is responsibility without direct authority, which I think has been the number one thing that I've learned as a GM, right? How do you motivate? How do you energize? How do you get a lot of people behind that, that vision? How do you share that context? How do you story tell so that, you know, everybody's sort of marching in the right, in the same direction? So a lot of transferable skills. And also, you know, having the ability to have that, you know, product or consumer and depend conversation, right? So it's not just about revenue or partnerships. And I agree with you. I think product people make great GMs. They make great CEOs as well. And I'm glad to see a thing is very inspiring for the community to see that there's a career path out there. And that you can continue growing and having more responsibilities even beyond the product. So, I mean, we've seen some PMs owning PNL, but definitely as a GM, you also have that type of responsibility. Yeah, agreed. And I think there will be product driven companies need that bent in your head, right? To be like, oh, well, how will this actually show manifest itself in the consumer experience? For the few people, the mind don't know what credit karma is. I started with the free product, like classic, like credit score, but you've evolved quite a bit. I mean, today, obviously, the company has been got a massive acquisition by end to it. So when you joined there, what was the status of the company and how did you personally see the growth of the portfolio of products? Yeah, so over five years, it's been a tremendous increase, both in the number of products that we've fielded, the acquisition we've had in terms of our consumers trusting us more and more, and then also sort of in the business, right? And I think we started off as, hey, how do we build trust around your finances with something called the credit score? So credit score is a way of banks rating you. And so we were the first in the industry to give it to you for free. So you could understand what your score was, what that meant, you know, how do you sort of improve it so that gets you into the into the debt products that you wanted. And that created a really big engagement loop. So and then sort of the businesses that grew from there were very much around access, right? So we have an ecosystem of partners that we work with, and we did that matching in our marketplaces. So, you know, for somebody with a 660 credit score, what's available to you today, how far away are you from actually getting the things that you want? We talked about this notion of, you know, we actually tell you your odds before you even apply. So that allowed us to create a credit card marketplace, personal loans, you know, we've added new articles there with with home with mortgages, with auto insurance, auto loans, and you can see us, you know, that's sort of a very sort of extensible model for us, even though each of those spaces come in with their own regulations and their own sort of customer journeys and so on, right? And then the other side of this, like, we actually change our, we expand our ambitions, we saw so many people trust us with these recommendations that we thought, okay, what we're moving from being the free credit score to recommendations about what you should get, how do we help you automate some of that, right? So, how do you remove some of that financial anxiety so that you take the steps to improve your financial life and actually make financial progress? And that's where kind of our next set of mission really is around enabling and automating financial progress for our 120 million members. And that's where that's a, you know, consumer experience, data and insights and actually access to those products that we care of. So, for me, money is around like, how do I give people unbanked, underbanked access to their first checking account or their first savings account? Yeah, I think it's a great example of many things. One is that even though obviously you are in the finance space, it's a technology company. It's a lot of product behind the scenes. And also, you were doing product lead growth before that was mainstream or when you mentioned the example of these free products that a lot of people could access to just to build trust, just to get some value and then from there you saw the opportunity to expand into all their offerings. I think that's really, it's a good lesson there that can apply to all their companies and products beyond just finance. Very much so. And our CEO Ken and he's still, you know, it's a founder led company in that sense, is very much about, you know, focus on the member first, right? Credit Comma users are called members. So, focus on the member, everything else will follow from that, right? Solve the pain point. So, as you think about org chart and structuring your product teams to make sure that you can support all the different products that you're building, how do you go about that? So, first of all, in Credit Comma, we are verticalized, right? So, every business unit is sort of fully verticalized in product and business and marketing together. Engineering is centralized because it reports into our CTO, but they are dedicated to a particular business, right? So, I think that's kind of the structure that we have. What that allows us to do is, you know, bring all aspects of that product line together and really make decisions quickly and be able to experiment and iterate a lot faster, right? As opposed to trying to like globally prioritize some backlog, right? So, I think that's been super efficient. So, the way, and then depending on whether you're a scaled product line and a business to something like us, we're very much emerging, you know, you want to structure the team. So, the way I've organized my team is there is a, this is essentially a three-squad model. So, there's the activation, like so, how do we get people in to try the product and use the product? There's the usage piece of it, which is how do you get to continue to keep them sticky and, you know, driving that engagement. The last one really is retention and engagement, like outside of, you know, using the product. So, in our case, it's like use your debit card or putting money in a savings account. How do you keep you engaged around your insights, your transactions, what you're seeing, you know, your bill is due, your paycheck just landed. So, driving that retention and engagement and stickiness with the product. So, those are how I've organized my team in terms of squads. And that really helps kind of give clarity, right? Because then they know what they're looking at, they know what metric they're driving, they know what customer problems they own versus the other squad and kind of drive from there. And how do you create that alignment between all those different learnings on a squad just to make sure that everyone understands the overall vision? Yeah, really. And, you know, so we've grown from, you know, we were a handful of people who started a year and a half ago to like, we're in sort of double digits right now, right? And so, really sort of setting kind of two big things. Like one is having a weekly sink with the leads, where it's, you know, tell us what you did, tell us what you tried, tell us where you failed, and what are you going to do next, right? So, it's an opportunity for us to exchange insights and be like, well, are you really driving what you think you're arriving? So, I think having those sort of checkpoints has been really important. I think we do a common planning process as well, so we reconcile. And then at the end of the day, we are one app, right? Try to come as a super app, essentially. And so, we have to sort of fit into that piece of it. So, it's been, you know, there's no clear answer. I think it's more communication and having these checkpoints and rituals. And, you know, we have every Friday, we have like a demo day, where you come in and you present something new to the whoever wants to come in and sign up, right? We do a three by three, where you just, three things that I'm working on, three things I'm worried about. And so, we do a lot of those kinds of informal meetings where people are just excited and interested in understanding what's happening. I'm always curious about how product leaders organize their teams, because they, as you said, no, right or wrong answer. And I'm sure that as your product, I'm sure that evolves as well, right? Very much. And, you know, I've said, listen, the structure will stay stable for six months, but we're going to pivot depending on where the business is going or where the needs are. So, don't get too comfortable. I think that's one thing. The other thing is that you want to think about is, you know, people are very, and this may be something that, especially when you're starting out in your career, you're very much about, like, well, how is this going to get me to the next level? How do I make progress? You know, when will I become, you know, a manager? When will I have people that matter? And really what I'm trying to do is say, hey, when you're on a rocket ship, when you're in such a big area where there's so much ambiguity, it's more important to do lateral stuff. It's more important to learn. It's more important to, like, build different skills than it is to be like, oh, I did this, then I became, you know, a principal product manager, then I became a group PM and so on and so forth, right? And so that, like, diversity of experiences really helped me, right? I went from being an engineer to being like a hardcore backend systems to a consumer experience to now a GM, because I had enough of those things in my toolkit. And that's where you really should be spending a lot of your time as a product manager. You know, I just realized that we actually had a GM from Intuit for the main product on the podcast. This is before the acquisition. So I want to ask you now that you explained how you create alignment across the different products, now that there's an additional layer of complexity with all the other Intuit products, how do you make sure that you stay independent while at the same time connected with the other? Yeah, look, it's a really good question. We get asked that a lot. And I think, so the structure is, credit comma is a wholly owned subsidiary of Intuit. So the only thing that really has changed from a practical perspective is my boss, Ken Lin, who's the CEO of credit comma, now has a boss, right? I don't even have an email account on Intuit. And the idea was, you know, let's pivot this, don't integrate for the sake of integrate, integrate to accelerate either our business or their business or like really focus with the consumer in mind and the business in mind, right? So that creates a, removes a lot of like, Hey, I think that could be interesting. Oh, maybe you have this data and why don't we just send that across, you know, so you, you, which, you know, where, if you spend a lot of time in that kind of discovery, you, you paralyze the business, right? So it's very, very focused on what are the things we want to align on that we know will accelerate us and let's go work on those and put teams behind that. And that, and, you know, independence is earned, right? Because we're able to be successful in that mode and we're able to accelerate and credit comma has really accelerated growth. You can see that in, you know, sort of the post pandemic view, like it's, that model is working. And so people tend to trust it more because it is working now. Love it. And switching gears a little bit, I want to learn more about how you go about building your own product team. You mentioned that an engineer, someone gave you an opportunity. Now you're in a position to hire product managers. So how do you go about like, uh, hiring peers? That's a good question. It's, it's an art, definitely. And not a science, but I would say there's the few things that have worked. One is, you know, we, we have a very structured interviewing process. So, you know, we, we test on those six PM skills that we care about that strategy, that's consumer design, that's, you know, problem solving, collaboration, executionability, right? We test for those in the interview process. The other thing I always make sure is that there's at least one or two women in the interview rounds, right? Because I want to bring in that cognitive diversity. I want to bring in people who are thinking differently from, from what you traditionally see in tech and consumer products, right? So I think that's been, that's been important for me. And then I will, I will prioritize, you know, if I were to sort of pick, you know, I tend to lean into, with people who have kind of a more growth mindset, right? So people are willing to be like, I don't know the answer, but I know how to figure it out, as opposed to sort of deep domain expertise. You do need domain expertise in certain areas when, particularly in regulated industries, but I will, I feel like that can be learned over somebody's mindset of like, how do I approach the problem? How do I keep it bigger and continue to sort of innovate there? We spend a lot of time helping people break into product. And of course, there's a lot of engineers, there's also business folks, designers and so on. So you mentioned diversity, which I think is really powerful and necessary if we are trying to, to serve to a global user. In terms of the skills, let's say someone doesn't come from your traditional technical background or MBA. Are there any other signs that can tell you that this person can be a fast learner? Yeah, I mean, you know, if you look at their, their career progression, one is I look at, you know, what are the different things they've done? What kinds of things have they touched, right? Where have they stepped up and taken an opportunity to lead? Where have they failed? Actually, you learn a lot about people and kind of how they approach failure and what they do about it, what they, what they took away from that failure. And then last is, you know, I see sort of some sort of one area of spike. So I think the notion that we're all able to do every skill equally well is kind of outdated. I think there are things that you're really good at, that are passionate, that you're passionate about, that when you get that opportunity, man, you're the fastest person on the field. I want to look for those spikes, because that's what you want to double down. And then you have to be good enough at everything else. But you know, you're going to be successful because, you know, you're great at pixel design, or you're great at like figuring out a really complicated tech issue or whatever that is, right? Or you're a great storyteller. That's the thing that I look for, like, where is your spike? You know, where do you, where do I see you really, you know, leaving the rest of us behind? I think that is a great point, because it's a lot of people who want to be product managers for the wrong reasons. Now, right now from the outside, you may think that, I don't know, you are coming up with all of these ideas telling people what to do, which is not true at all. But it's a lot of context switching and a lot of time to really go deep in a lot of things. So there's a lot of good specialists who really love being the best at something. And I prefer to do that instead of just getting distracted constantly and being in the middle and then end up being frustrated just because they're, you know, they don't have enough time to do what they love. And now they're trying to do things that they don't really want to spend time on. Yes. I mean, I think, yeah, you know, product management, particularly in Silicon Valley, gets a lot of, like, you know, oh my God, you guys are, you know, you're the special people, everybody wants to talk to you. And, you know, I think what you really realize is, and I did this when I transitioned from engineering to product, you just have to be really comfortable with ambiguity, right? As an engineer, it's very black and white, you know what you're going to be doing, you know how you're going to solve it, and you know what's going to get shipped. Even though you have a little bit of unknown, there's a product manager, you're like, I think this is a good idea. We're going to try it. It might be wrong. We may have to U-turn. You just have to be careful. You have to be okay with that, right? Totally. I come from an engineering background, too. And I don't remember those days where I had no meetings. Now my life is like 30 minute blocks on my calendar. And that's the thing that's the other piece as well, right? You're just constantly like trying to figure out and trying to hold that context across all of that. I think that's one. I think the other one is really this ability to influence without authority, that you don't have direct line of responsibility on somebody, right? That legal person or that engineer, but somehow they still have to believe in what you're saying and agree to do the thing you want them to do. So that aspect of being able to bring people along and share the context and kind of recruit your little army, right? I think that's a skill that good product managers always have. So now that you are in a much more advanced position in your career than when you started as a PM, what are you curious about learning these days? What am I curious about learning these days? Workwise, I'm really, really interested in how do we increase access to financial products? And so there's a lot of new interesting things happening on open banking and distributed finance and even some of these newer scarier products like crypto, etc. So I'm really sort of interested in learning about that and how can that sort of translate into getting people into a better financial situation, right? I think that's one. And then the other piece on this is I think, I know you said we shouldn't talk too much about the pandemic, but I'm really, really interested in this digital health piece, right? It's the first time I've seen where very similar to tech, medicine collaborated. We did open sourcing of the virus and so a lot of people could work simultaneously on finding cures and finding vaccines and so on. So I think there's something here around, you know, that's the second big area, right? Which is how do we make access to medical things more, more, more Galgian, more available because whether we like it or not, we're a connected world, right? So if I were to take a peek into your calendar today, what would be the main theme? How do you usually spend? You know, first of all, I have an EA who bless her heart. If I didn't have her, I would die. I mean, I just, I wouldn't know what to do with my time. So she really sort of manages the calendar Tetris. But I have, you know, dedicated times or days in which I'm like, okay, I'm going to zoom in into the product or I'm going to go do this thing or, or I'm going to spend this afternoon having my one-on-ones. So I try to sort of dedicate a time across that. You know, Emily, my EA has now started adding like 15-minute breaks in there to be like, breathe. You know, it's just called breathe. And I'm just like, oh, that's great. You know, I have 15 minutes before the next thing and it gives me time to sort of prep and do things. So I think, I think that's been there. The last thing that I'm trying to do, not always successful is really take time out and be like, this is an hour I don't want any meetings. I just want to think about the things that are up there or the things I need to do or work on things and go from there. Well, there are so many things that you said that I know. But that 15-minute buffer, I think it's important to not forget about yourself, right? Yes. You're a human, too. And then I think switching context takes a toll, right? I go from a meeting to a finance, sort of engineering meeting and then just being prepared to really be the best for others. It's something that I took me time to learn and I'm still working on it. But I also do that thing of like creating a buffer in between meetings just to prep and breathe. Yeah. It was easier when we were in the office because you were walking to something and you got that little bit of a mental break or you had a conversation. Now we were like eight hours of, you know, video, right? And it just, I hadn't realized how draining that is, just being on all the time in front of the screen and not having that sort of break to step away. Totally. And water. Water, bathroom, lunch. So how are you thinking about the, you mentioned part of the future of finance, you're interested in like new finance and models, cryptocurrency and so like what is your take now considering that you have a business that it's working to? Yeah. I mean, look, so, you know, credit commas across section of America, we have 120 million people, you know, everybody from the young and just starting out to people who are sort of, you know, have lots of opportunity for wealth creation. So we, you know, we look at, you know, there's four member segments, right? These are people who are slipping backwards who, you know, one little thing can put them on the path to, you know, a debt cycle, staying upload, living paycheck to paycheck, kind of building momentum. They've got a little bit of savings. They have a little bit of a cushion and then finally like, you know, navigating opportunity, which is where there's wealth creation, right? So we have that entire spectrum on credit karma. And so I'm thinking about how do you draw people along that curve, right? So how do you take somebody who's living paycheck to paycheck to getting them to save for that rainy day fund and eventually building $5,000, $10,000 to then now create wealth, which gives them independence and opportunity and other things, right? So that's where this is coming in. I think that's a good way. I mean, you basically broke these down into user personas, which makes so much sense because from the outside we're all leaning into the same product, but there's a lot of data that personalizes the experience just to make sure you're providing the right next step. Yeah. And there's no point in giving sophisticated financial advice to somebody who's got $5,000, right? And the same way it's like, you know, somebody who's got $50,000 to invest, you know, you want a different set of skills and a different set of tools. So one of the things that I like to ask, especially by the end of this interview is, so if you were to give advice to your younger self, how will you change your life? No, but like, let's say you would want to be where you are just a little bit faster. What would you have done differently? Yeah, I started talking about this. So I think one of them is try a lot of different things. I always say like data lot in terms of the jobs and the projects and the things that you work at. So you understand yourself, you understand what you're good at, you understand what you like, what you don't like, where you need to work, you know, on yourself more. I think that's one. I think the other one is follow the people that you admire, right? Find your board of directors, find those mentors, find those people who are like, you know, I see something in you here, let me help you tweak it and shape it better. We all benefit from personalized coaching. So find those people in your lives who care about you. And they can be your friends, right? They can just be people who are very honest and objective with you. And they can be people at work who are further along in their career and can see, you know, can see where you might be making mistakes. I think those two, I tended to do a lot of these things on my own. And now it's something that I've learned to lead on other people, I think that's been good. And then not getting hung up on the career ladder, right? Like I said, like, and when you're starting out, you're like, for you, for me, it was a sign of competency, right? That I moved up and I got a promotion and I got a team. And not really, it's not really a sign of like your competence, a sign of it's a reward, for sure. But it's not really calibrated to where you want to go, where you think you're, you're good at and where, you know, what your next thing will be. Totally. Everyone is more than their LinkedIn profile. We have a lot. But it's been an honor to learn from you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much, Carlos. It was a pleasure chatting with you. Let me know and we'll have lots of credit comma product managers coming your way. Yes. Bye-bye.