 Hello everyone, I would like to thank you all for joining today's webinar on the topic of demystifying fintech product management. I'm your host and presenter Vinod Jain for today's session. Let me start with the brief introduction about myself, followed by setting up the context, talk about industry facts, then spend some time understanding of the fintech and its associated product manager rules and responsibilities. I will share some key drivers and influencers impacting fintech product manager rule. And then I'll follow with few minutes of review of the impact metrics and some of those influencers and drivers impact in product managers day to day activities. Finally, we will start demystifying and we'll look at some of the skills which required to navigate through to become a successful product manager in fintech industry. With that said, let's get started with a small introduction about myself. I'm Vinod Jain, global product manager with 17 plus years of business and finance industry experience. Within that six years at the JP Morgan Chase and more than 10 plus years of experience with the top innovation companies like Oracle, BNY Malone, Pementos and PayPal. There I have played enterprise wide role focused on new product development, strategic transformation, digitalization, fintech startups and client first experience. As you have seen, I have spent time delivering product at different capacity, both in larger institutions and medium to smaller size fintech startup companies culture. And I will try to bring some of those knowledge to today's conversation with you and provide you some of the insight which will help to navigate through or plan for fintech product manager role in future. So let's jump into today's webinar. I would like to set some context. As you have seen, industry experts mostly focused towards enhancing the tech skills required to be a successful product manager or landing on their first job, which is not sufficient in today's dynamic environment. The focus should shift towards enhancing the soft skills and capability to navigate through the organizations to build a successful product leaders who have capabilities as a product manager. Let me share some of the industry fact which I have gathered from the different sources. Global fintech market value is expected to grow $309 billion in these years. Tremendous growth opportunities in the market and we have seen that one. It's not too far. Product managers are higher in demand than ever before. 32% more product managers are needed in this fintech space than ever earlier before. Big tech focused on financial services. Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and tons more hundreds of more are aiming at the financial services, which positively impacts the growth of fintech market. And that's what you see the search in the need of product managers. As you have heard with the great responsibilities comes with the greatest stress. And that stress on product managers brings the high iterations are burnt out among them. And the key factor one of the key area which has been identified by the exit interviews is that product manager always complained about lack of clarity. It's the single most important criteria which they have complained about that they were not new. What is the expectations, what ownership are there, what the role will entail to what they are looking forward from the management perspective is contributing to a lot more stress on them. Lack of leadership was another contributing factor that the familial to senior management, there was not enough clarity in terms of expectations from the new product managers or existing product managers, along with our all expectations of the product delivery and product features and future road maps. After working to three years, these product managers with chaotic conditions or understanding an ad hoc basis, they find lack of opportunities or the professional growth in the market, which make them more stressed and look out for the different opportunities. So some of these factors how we can heal, how we can help them to groom a product manager who just starting their career or who are in the interview process or going through the final round of interviews or are already landed in the product manager jobs into the fintech area. My goal is try to help them understand today through this webinar to better understand their roles, responsibilities, what is the meaning of fintech and how does the key driver and influencers impact them. With that said, let's start with understanding of the fintech product. Fintech is a term coined with combining the financial technology with internet application software. The fintech industry is about developing and delivering product that helps customer make better use of their money or asset, either as a result of sophisticated technology replacing manual processes and sub-processing or financial management software simplifies complex transactions with lower fees and allowing companies to scale at higher level or advanced stock market trading systems, data-driven approaches, investment results to be improved on those aspects and help create more opportunities for private investment funds to earn more. All these factors help as part of the fintech. I divide fintech into fintech products into two categories. One is the financial product. Financial business complexities and regulatory requirements are the key driver behind the product offerings and these are enabled by the technology. So the fintech financial product, fintech products which are highly supporting the complex financial product offering behind the scene, the technologies enabling them fall into this category. Very structured, very large scale, very precise structured data and those kind of aspects comes here with behind these products. Tech products, the tech innovation driven products and which enables or helps the financial businesses and transactions are the second category. Lightweight, quickly driven agile, tons of unstructured data, big data, blockchains and bringing them together to enable some financial transactions on that point. Complexity of the finance is less compared to the financial product fintech versus tech product fintech. We need to also understand in terms of this fintechs which industry verticals they are aligned to because all these factors will influence later on in terms of the product manager's understanding of the rule. I divided industry vertical into three categories or three pillars. The first pillar is the institutional product and services fintech like large financial institution, investment banks, hedge funds, alternative investment services, capital market and broker dealers where huge amount of financial complexities aligns. The companies are mature and are in the business for longer terms having a established client base user base and financial technology products are enabling those deliveries across the board. Second pillar which I defined is consumer fintech in payments space where the retail banking for example, consumer lending, payment processing, acquirers, networks, PSPs, payment facilitators, global settlements. These are the areas vertical where the fintech aligns and help enable the transactional financial aspect of the business. Highly time sensitive, very critical, very agile, nimble, but having more technology innovation driven than the finance financial complexity driven. And third pillar is focused towards the other fintech very small subset which enable help financing the loans, energy sectors, healthcare and other areas where the fintechs are getting to enable some of their business needs over there. Moving towards the understanding of the rule, what are the key indicators for the product managers? First of all, product manager need to understand what is the rule entails means what message they are getting from the job descriptions or what message they are getting from the interview process and if they have landed into the product manager in fintech industry, what they are sensing it out. This will help align them and adjust them that which category, which spectrum these individuals are positioned right now. Product management is more towards the defining what and where we should be doing. What's the production support management and program management are there. All these kind of jobs are lumped and the descriptions are more overlapping to each other under categorized or parked under the product management. What I'm trying to explain here is that the ideal day of a product manager and their key tasks as a day to day basis shifts percentage time allocation shift as the rules overlaps into these three spectrums over there. Typically the product managers are the outward looking thinking of market strategies, liaisoning with the design architect team, product oversight, market supporting, mission goals setting it up. North star metrics and KPIs into those one delivering the product to meet the user segment, user's requirement and making them successful over there. What's in the program management is resourcing, making the key tasks get assigned to the individual one, cross-coordinations, budgeting, software delivery, quality management risk logging and those kind of aspects which require a lot more inward work into the product delivery. And production support is falls in between where the responsibility of product managers shift from product management idealistic task towards the production interruptions, firefighting and making sure that existing systems are working as expected. So there are few indicators which a product manager can look into the descriptions or their current responsibilities at a different level. If the product jobs or the description state towards the new product development, tech or business, launching of a new product and services, innovation, redesign, development of niche product into a different market. These are indicators that is a small-sized company to a mid-sized company which is looking towards launching a brand new product. They are trying to solve a problem of the user which no one has solved or need more refinement, a lot of thinking, a lot of brainstorming, designing aspect need to be done. Thinking of the KPIs, matrices and delivering in the short span of time, highly focused of the product manager will be on those aspects. Versus, enhance and expand the product off into new market segment, enhancement and build new capabilities or digitalization. These are the indicators that the product is already existing. It's a mature and the company is trying to enhance, expand into different markets or different horizons or they're trying to upgrade themselves into more next-generation softwares. User interfaces aspect which directly indicates towards more time spending, understanding the existing product, adding it up the designs or already defined roadmaps trying to execute on top of them. Shift of the time and allocation will be shifting towards the production support management to understand the existing system, more and more firefighting, a lot more coordination with the other teams because those are already been defined. One way or other, nothing is wrong. This will help individual product manager to position themselves to understand where do they stand in terms of the fintech product manager day-to-day activities. If you see more into the consolidation into the single platform, a lot of more mergers and acquisitions, rebranding redesign of existing product, it means trying to look into the different capabilities metrics and trying to consolidate to make them a single for existing users. So running, you're changing the wheels in moving bus. It's nothing, something which you're building it from the ground up. So this will help set up the expectations of the role for the product managers. I'd like to continue in terms of the understanding the role and how does the previous parameters to identify once you start seeing them will influence by the other factors which are not in control of product managers. But they can easily understand as they are getting into the new organizations or working with the hiring managers or if they have landed in the job. Organization culture is one of the key factors which makes a organization's delivery, product quality and motivation of the team. It's a very big contributing factor. If you sense or you see that it's a startup or innovation driven out of books, thinking, idea are there at a small level. And if you're looking for that, that culture will be dictating a big part over there. If you are a seasoned, traditional or established organization of large scale, they have a proven culture which is based on that which they have delivered so far successful over there. One versus another is no good or bad, but these are different kind of culture in terms of organization. Lot of time, small and incubation, we think innovation, companies talk about innovation, they out of box idea thinking, but if the culture is hierarchical based and traditional way of doing the things over there, these talks are just the talks. They are not making as immediate change because it's so big to bring those kind of changes over there. It will take longer time to over there. So product manager need to understand the culture is one which is driving the change and it will may take longer time than small and startup kind of companies over there. Organizational hierarchy also plays a contribution, plays a vital role in terms of the product manager's success and their happiness while they're performing their job. If it is a flat organization versus hierarchical based organization, lot of time the companies which were based on the hierarchical base started talking about the flat organization, but that is, it is not there. It's just the talks because hierarchical based only they have delivered the things so far in last 50 years, 200 years of those companies changing that to all of sudden the flat. It doesn't work in the execution mindset and driven version versus being a real flat, flat organization brings up the individual's pressure on the product managers to thinking about their titles and the people are identified based on the title rather than the real work. So they can more focus into the innovation delivery thinking about their qualities which they can bring on the table. So none of them is wrong or right. It's more of thinking and identifying early in your days. We do it into this part. Process maturity model. This is also one of the factor which triggers some of the product managers out of the tech. If it is the organization is agile execution result oriented and really delivering the agile framework is different than traditional waterfall model who's trying to become agile organization agile name is given but it's still pushing towards the waterfall delivery because that has been worked and big organizations needed in that one. Is the organization is based on or the company is driving based on the KPIs are they keeping any kind of North star matrix or accountability not only for sake of name but exactly track during their child development versus multi deliverables have some matrix but and slow and steady progress is providing them. So these are some of the areas which influence the rule of a product manager. This is the page where I would like to spend more time and I enjoy looking at this matrix again and again here. I call this a litmus test matrix for a product manager. I tried to build this matrix three dimensional. First I took what are the key activities or focus area for a typical product manager. Typical or ideal scenario never exist but if there is ideal scenario someone says this is how the standard distribution of their time should be done across the activities over there. So left side you see the key activities where product print tag product manager get engaged mostly are like the product strategies customer and partner engaging with them collaboration collaborating with the tech teams designing requirement gathering defining the matrixes analysis and competitive pricing server there team building some part of that to the production support debugging interruptions PMO tracking so on and so forth. Then I put the layer on top of that how does our organizational culture the things which we talked earlier and to the previous slide things about which vertical digital lines to what kind of jobs are there which you are signing up for that. Those all factors are incorporated into this metric. So if I put another layer on top of that in terms of the whole culture which is agile versus non agile kind of thing and then the third layer on top of that this is industry vertical. Looking at the different industry verticals which we talked about earlier three different vertically small medium large plus print tag financial driven versus new tech driven aspect and seeing how does a product managers day to day activities changes in terms of the percentage their time. So let me take a few examples and observations here which will help understand better the things which we have talked in previous slides defining product strategies and you can see that. The time based on the organizations and cultural aspect is been shifting if it is agile the time spent on terms of the product strategies working with other teams and spending less time on the debugging interruptions or the existing products will be less product project manager or program manager so it will be less because it's been a system which we are doing every two weeks cycle having the reviews detail giras tracking definition acceptance criteria that you find is more structured versus having less some portion of the agile but more of waterfall aspect in the larger organization on a structured existing mature products are there. What will be end up happening with the product manager role their roles and responsibilities day to day contribution will be more shifting from defining rather than the design or strategy they will be spending more time collaborating with other teams. Because it's a mature product it's a waterfall going back and forth bringing multiple teams on board convincing them agreeing them and side by side getting thrown into a lot of interruptions products and support the product existing product is there. The best way to teach the other new income or is to put them into the production so they will be keep on doing this work. Good or bad this is how the different mindset organization culture vertical plays a role in terms of defining how much time you will be spending in doing what kind of task kind of thing. So this sets up or resets the expectations of a product managers in terms of their involvement on day to day activities. If you shift towards the right you will see in terms of tech companies or industry verticals medium finance or large finance company you will see the time spent in terms of designing or doing the brainstorming or sky blue sky thinkings are less getting involved into the architecture design bringing the aha moments are less but still you're part of the big complex deliverable which is being needing users are there expectations are there and making a big impact in the organization while coordinating and supporting the existing functions. So this is there's no perfect recipe it's more of the individual product managers mindset and their understanding open mindset when they step into the fintech space how and what kind of role with them. You might have seen that initial slides I talked about the part was more the reason for high integration was the lack of clarity because these factors were not considered there. The lack of leadership and opportunity work followed by the clarity once it is not there that brings more chaos and confusion among the product managers. So what to do after looking at all these details influencers impact. And the time is spent in digital satisfaction. The now the question comes to okay so how I can become successful how I should be navigating through the organization and my current responsibility in role in this property and become a better product manager and become successful. Other than a product manager one should be thinking towards becoming a product leader who drives the changes from there and execute and deliver the need of users. So the first point is that a common understanding of the rule is most important expectations and setting yourself for success is as simple as this. The area where the one should be focused no matter which rule which space which vertical you are in is that think of the clients think outside in rather than inside out what the users or what the clients is looking for. Try to align or understand the expectation from the top down what the management is working on what is the expectations are there what is the culture over there. Try to blend yourself into that whether that fits to you if not then yes you will be part of that lack of clarity and higher iteration rates number. Focus on immediate pain points user experience legal or regulatory requirement and complexities out of there because sooner you will understand those things whether it's a small startup or the bigger one mature organization you will be able to navigate start navigating start making your place in the organization. Create a unique perspective of the whole company's ecosystem there are thousands of products offering services and your product and your role is contributing towards one subset of this big puzzle. But it's always good to know whole ecosystem and where do you fit your puzzle piece into this and what impact that puzzle piece is bringing to the bigger thing and that's what will be more attention for the management also. Build a roadmap from the smaller startup if you are a small print tech medium to small size that OK how would it will look like a larger company. So that's the rules or responsibility lies on the product manager and if you start thinking ahead of time you'll be bigger in better space expand your horizon and think big rely on your expert colleague. I haven't find a perfect place or ever where you have a set of training sent of manual sent up a set of records or documents given to you and say that this is how the perfect training starts and person land into the right place. It's always your colleagues your teammates the people you're working with are the folks who will be helping you side by side. So you need to expand your horizon is that put more into city thinking rather than the tunnel vision that it's someone else responsible to teach me. No it's my own responsibility to learn myself and to grow in the organization. Always try to lean towards the data driven culture. No matter like people are saying A B or C based on their experience but data driven if there are some facts to support those data your analysis. If you have certain facts based on your hypothesis data crunching data analytics and then you're suggesting product on the table to bring it on new features or delivery. It will go long way and long term success will be there and try to avoid holding on the old mindset or we will start up 10 folks people. Now we are 1000 nobody's caring about me or looking come out of that as the organization group culture grows processes grows thinking grows nobody has time. Transparent communication communication is a vital part in terms of the success whether it's a product manager in print tag or a product manager in any social media or any other companies over there. More and Christopher communication brings a lot more clarity in terms of your colleague specifically in this COVID environment where a lot of team members companies are remote or hybrid working schedule. And people meet through the zoom or different kind of video conferencing in that the messaging and clarity into the messaging and Christmas is a vital part for your success. Have some sort of documentation if there is no documentation you should be thinking of creating documentation so you don't need to repeat or reinvent the wheel again and again. And provide fair opportunities to your team members. If you are a manager, middle level manager, you start a product manager. Yes, give the opportunity to other team members and if your colleague or individual contributor help them grow to you to grow because their success will bring to your success also. So these are some of the key areas of soft skills or I should say skills which can lead you towards the success in print tag industry as a product manager. That's it for today. I hope I am able to provide you meaningful contents which will be helpful in terms of finding new jobs or while you are in process or landing into a successful career going forward. Thank you for taking out of your busy schedule and being with me during this webinar. Have a great day. Bye.