 Everyone and I hope the coffee was good is a good was a good quality for product is important, right? So Simone Poltamo scene that's me a little bit younger, of course end up with a without the moustache What I wanted to bring you is a little bit of my journey the insights and the learnings from Software as a service payment provider as part of a bigger corporate like all the challenges that you could face Especially also if you're working for a startup or a fintech what happens when you start to you know You're in consolidation you be you become you'll get acquired What are the challenges that you face there? So but a little bit of who am I now Simone Paul's a lot of people asking why Simone Paul as a first name I usually the best explanation is for me. I was born in England. So I have a poll in my name My parents were Italian and they decided to have Simone and it's just a mess But anyway, I've lived with it. I lived also 60% of my 45 years in Italy And this means that for me pineapple on a pizza is blasphemy. Don't try to do it with me, please Thank you. I Have also another joke like a you know workshop someone in masochist Everyone knows about this of course someone said like let's use pineapple as a safe word So if we start to fight and we can let's use pineapple and we stop everything. It's like oh 50 shades of grates. Yeah Yeah I'm also so I've also lived 40% of my life in England Especially in the last years and this means of course I fancy my tea and I like my ale in the afternoon. So that's me a Little bit of background when I studied in business economics. I was studying marketing product I love product. I wanted to work for Nestle proctor and gamble cool consumer products and never work for a bank boring First job issuing in a bank, of course But it was the right time because 2002 Things were changed like four decades. Nothing happened and you had cards max tribe and that's it Then you started to see like a chip a chip on a card And I was like young person going there in the bank marketing team Usually you had like really people looking for retirement And it was the guy like starting to look what could you add on a chip like starting to think about loyalty How to follow the life of someone not change things you go in an ATM and they said like yeah a little bit too much But we like you come and join us. Okay, fine, and I never get out of the payments industry now consumers I said like consumer products like the merchant side is boring. I'll never get there. Yeah Started then to move into PayPal. Maybe I was a little bit wrong I like also the merchant side things are changing also in that From that land side of the business to fuzzling 11. I joined post Italian and from there I never got out of the merchant side of the business now Interesting thing also in Mastercard. I joined Mastercard as part of a startup initiative. So it was coming out from labs incubation You have all the benefits of a startup, you know, you can test do whatever you wanted no processes But then you can leverage the the power of Mastercard going in the regions trying to get all the connections and trying to expand your Products and services, but then at some point you get acquired internally Mastercard No one becomes a millionaire you just get a couple of promotions, but then you start to face all the difficulties on the challenges of being part of a corporate So what I'm crap I predict in my future never say never I won't say it anymore I just said it and I love product management and I love payments. Definitely. It's exciting and exciting because you can change things for People you can change things for different cultures and nations like bring a new digital agenda That's really important and that's why I like product to be honest What's a payment gateway? How many of you feel confident that they could say what's a payment gateway? Yeah, I can imagine So let's say you need to go on blah blah car and make that payment I would say that good payment gateway is like if I'm invisible everything is moved You don't know I'm even there fine. Blah blah car is happy is a merchant the consumer is happy. I did my job When I do some trainings for an engineer joining my team I use this to prank them and say like this is how we work. We are there We tried you know merchants They have and the things that become more and more complex unit at some point you start But then in a country but then you need to expand and then if you're in some verticals You need to I don't know in the gambling industry You need to issue refunds you need to have multi-currency pricing tokenization fraud solutions The gateways kind of they're trying to make things easier for the merchants and try to yeah, stay calm. I'll take care of it I'll help you there not always like that, but let's see Engineers again at the end if you feel like this, it's fine. It always happens to me every day. Don't worry Where do I work so I'm part I'm in a business unit as part of mastercard the gateway services We're kind of different from the rest of mastercard and we will see why More than 20 years Pioneers in the wide-label industry and this also brings a big challenge from our perspective Especially when you go in a lot of regions in regulated industries Another thing consolidation consolidation is a big thing It means that at some point you can find yourself with six seven development hubs across the world Each one of them has a different platforms each one of them has different type of culture How do you manage that now doesn't get and then the growth of the industry like Since I've joined like three times the growth of the development teams three times the growth of our product team right now I have a product team of 14 individuals spread across those hubs not easy gonna work life balance, but yeah They manage it The challenges that I believe we can share and if you want to of course feel free to reach me for any kind of a Coffee a pint of beer no pizza with a pineapple, but we can talk about it Geographical distribution, how do we manage these different platforms the different processes a bucket of Prioritization things like how do you prioritize across all the different verticals of different products? How do you prioritize between global roadmap and bespoke solutions, especially if you're a white label provider? Build versus partner what point do you continue to build inside or do you start to look at partnerships? There's a brilliant payment gateway solution provider checkout or comes that says they prefer to do everything inside They're brilliant some others like us that need to do some other kind of decisions And then corporate processes as you move the moment you become part of a different type of corporate And they try to influence the way you work and global resource original. So let's start with the geographical distribution Massika decided to implement a safe scale the job framework and Then we decided also to change a little bit of the processes and it was a kind of a journey for us now So how many of you are familiar with scale the job framework? More than the gateway fantastic now At the moment I was coming out from that labs initiative. So coming from an agile We will deploy in every day with trying to test things fan and then they say like, okay We're implementing this we're going to apply agile to our world and make things much better This was it. It's like wow Okay, what does it mean he means that you have to do this PI planning so increment to decide everything every quarter They are the portfolio image. It's like, oh, that's interesting. This is I'm not really convinced. I think it's more like a waterfall with an agile stuff, but Let's try to make it work Let's go back to the journey. So as a every story once upon a time We are told six abs all those development teams What did you do brilliant way to start with lots of a lot of lessons learned? We started with one of one agile team all the countries all the locations at the same time working all together We had our first PI planning session across six days Basically never stop. You could have people at 4 a.m. 5 a.m. Working across the world It was just not sustainable. So we regroup to say, okay done. That's it. We tested it next phase What should we do? Brilliant idea and that's worked much better split the trains into two So we have one that is called super bullet super fast UK India and then another one more relaxed Pacific Lider Australia Bondi Beach. Yeah, I'm busy in UK. I've become a product owner You'll become a product owner one of the of the two trains. Yeah, which one this one Not great for the work life balance, but amazing opportunity to see a lot of people and especially when you fly over there for PI planning in Now we intern that's amazing. I would say some burnt, of course So you start an experience. It's a different app. I was coming again from labs. I'll stop saying it You find a different culture different platform different ways of working So the first problem I seen it was like there was no alignment between what the regions the customers were Asking and what the global product wanted to do. So the problem managers working anything would like What should we do? What are our priorities as I'm pointed? But just start to write down as many features as they could just getting ready for the next PI planning sessions. I Found like a structure where there was just two engines to architects that were basically wanted to review each single feature of the entire train And do the solution in advance of everything Like not really a giant Weeks and weeks and then the moment today to find the solution Then it would give it to the product owners and the product managers to break it down in for the features in the stories You lose weeks in the meantime. You're still working on the previous PI. What happens that once you go to the PI planning You're not really ready for it. You go into it. The development teams is the first time They're looking at the features They just rush to the wall to grab the future the positive that of the future that they like the most if you're more confident Still the architects trying to those two architects trying to jump there and make some issues Product owners that were like trying okay. I'll work with this team a little work with the other one in terms of leadership We were like micromanaging. I still remember like one PI I was in the in the conservatory here in London for a amp writing up features Trying to solve like some like some debates. So we were asking was our train heading to not really well So We've had two things to do one was the process I like to use processes to remove any kind of conflicts and funnels and of course like in the industry There are a lot of models that we can just copy paste and we said like let's try to implement the squads model a lot of work On trying to convince the other peers and the other stakeholders So how did it change the model? So I mean squads tribes kind nothing nothing new product managers product owners development teams working Working on features that are linked to their capabilities. So defining remits So that they could have like clear roadmaps that they could manage they could work on ongoing base no more funnel Getting to the PI planning getting ready. They started to share create collaboration They create a gang of squads that is basically a community of practice I discovered it like half a few days and was like, yeah like it. Let's do it And what what what's happened is like in terms of in better feature writing as bottlenecks were removed Certainty to the development teams engineers were happy more engaged They understood the products because they were working on the same products Of course as the squads want to work. It wasn't enough. We had to do also a lot in terms of culture And this is the where I try to use again safe. You're not a fan of safe. You understood that Going back on the website you can see from a cultural perspective. There are some things that you can use and that's like, yeah I like it. We are talking about we're going from fixed mindset to a growth mindset And so I said, okay, we're doing this as a corporate The other corporate is telling us we need to go to safe. These are the new rules. So no more Behaviors that aren't can't be accepted like in terms of finger pointing. We are one team Now the best thing I've learned in all my life is like product and engineers need to be one team You really need to work together Learn from mistakes and near misses another important thing the near misses. They're not successes You just need to learn from them because maybe the next time you will screw up entirely your your product Finger-pointing every time someone came to us like an entire leadership like someone Finger-pointing this went wrong because of product or engineering. Sorry go back work together and try to fix it Diversity and equality. I think you've heard during the day a lot about diversity. This is super super powerful We incentivize a lot diversity and equality Push and then don't hire people that just look like you talk like you maybe better than me Yeah, and that think like you because the more you use the diversity the better you have that growth scenario so What happened? What happened? Did we live happily ever after? Yeah, I would say kind of yes Future readiness went up from 50 to 80 percent people finally collaborating PA plannings risks that at the end of a PA planning you need to roam in terms of accepting them or Mitigating them and resolving them they went down from a board of 60 risks that took us three hours to to assess just less than 10 risks and We were also able because it happened also during the COVID pandemic to do these PA plannings online Really smoothly 300 people connected all together going up resolving everything three days done it That's it and then we rolled it out to all the other the remaining development teams So this was one part of the journey one part of the challenges then other challenges in terms of prioritization Everyone in product needs to prioritize What do we do and we have different layers because of course we also White label so it means like this customer wants everything about this Should I do too much of the most my stop my top customer? Or should I try to push my global roadmap and what's the straight-off and also build versus partner now? We talked about squads of course quads. They have their backlog. They can make the side But if you do too much give too much autonomy we seen you create almost a multiverse of gateways And that's not really what you want. It's kind of madness, right? So Where where we want to do I really like this chart is like I really want to define like I need to cross the river Go figure it out, but you need to cross the river not build an hotel. So this is where I want to be What we did is like of course Again, nothing new but in trying to implement it it changes a lot So starting from the leadership team and the communities So you create like a level where there's a corporate strategy and the impacts you want to drive at a corporate level And then you discuss in terms of leadership of those two areas What are the outcomes that you want to achieve to get to those impacts? Once these outcomes are defined then the communities have kind of the ability to work by themselves They find what is important discuss with the regions like yeah, okay? I understand the need from customer A B and C But we need to build it in a way that we can scale if we go too much for just one customer Then it's a nightmare to manage all these valuable solutions. I mean you've seen we had 180 acquires Fuzzles of merchants. It's impossible to manage. So I Also like to say on the top level we define who we want to be the why revenue Opportunity whatever its impact and where do we want to go and then the communities work on what how and when like how We drive it. What are the things that we need to do to stop doing and hence and have that kind of ownership? Another thing is like also build as a partner I said it before that's super important for us also try to define like a lot of frameworks So we can enable unlock the ecosystem work with other partners. We are master cut So we need to not only look from our perspective also of a business as a gateway But we need to look into an ecosystem that we need enabled and test and trial and Last part of the challenge is working on the corporate end process. So You've seen I usually say that the gateway inside the payments industry I believe is probably the most difficult complex product area. I've worked in the issue and I worked in acceptance I work in a lot of areas worked in PayPal We are kind of several platforms one platform if you're lucky or if you're a startup or starting from scratch But in that platform you could have at some point like hundreds of products and services The rest of master cut most of the products are monolined So you have a debit card a prepaid card a fraud solution and the moment you have us as a corporate You're trying to define standards and processes Please look at all the products lines and the business units because if you try to implement something that works for a monoline It probably will work for all the other ones. So that's the part of us A challenge that we had and then we try to find our way Flexibility how to influence it and make sure that we can survive there The other part global versus regional so We have a global product. We own our product we own our area in the regions Like if you work in companies like these then usually you have experts that are not really experts in your area But they need to work with the customers and serve like have a knowledge that is across several products Like as an example all the mass like a range of products now how to address them I Mean product school will probably teach you that first thing as well managers you enter you need to understand the customer needs But hey the regional teams are my customers. So what did we try to do it? But you need to try to do the same thing you would do with your customers talk to them understand the pain and needs Create the decade personas at some point I had like personas for each single regional representative with what were the needs Well, how can I help them to be successful with their other personas that are the final customers and create a value proposition for the regional teams? So as an example I created when I was at time of lamps I created a lot of demo solutions for our account managers I work on creating storytelling solutions that they could easily use I Would go in road shows together with them do the first presentations in front of the customers Where you don't start of course from the product you start from the pain point the needs you create a link And then it's easy to sell the product and then the product started to sell So really look at if you're in a situation and you end up in a situation like this one Feel that the sales team the regional teams the account managers are customers in the same way as your real customers Okay, so this and I've saved like a Lot of time. I think I was going to ask the three minutes that Ben spared I would use them know and don't so I have a quick quiz. How many times did I use my photo in the in the slide? two times Three times. I mean, I think that is just a silly question. Just to save some time and make you you can remember me Okay, thank you. Thank you very much Feel free to to reach me LinkedIn Twitter not that much able for a coffee as I said any question