Thoughts on finance and product management
Everything is fintech is the meme of 2020 in Silicon Valley and beyond. The nerds that we are :), we spend a lot of time digging deeper into this topic in the fintech pm group. The banter back and forth is the reason why I am super bullish on this small curated private community. This post is an attempt to describe my framework.
How should we think about everything is fintech meme? Continue reading “Fintech is dead, long live fintech”
I’ve been spending some time thinking about the long term implications of increasing central bank intervention (primarily the US Fed), and how that changes the landscape of banks and fintech. What follows is an attempt to flush out an idea of how Fed intervention is good for fintech in the long run.
I have a simple framework to think about how banks work. Banks have two sources of profit, user profit, and risk profit. User profit is what customers are willing to pay for services that provide value. Some examples are, charging for managing your investments, the entire process of giving you a loan (origination fee), converting currency, processing payments, etc. Risk profit is what banks earn by the nature of providing maturity transformation and inventory facilities. Some examples are loans (compensated for taking credit risk) and market-making (compensated for taking inventory risk). Continue reading “Access to the central bank, the final frontier for fintech?”
First an announcement. I have jumped on the newsletter bandwagon and am on substack 🙂 It’s an easier way to consume content – you don’t need to come back to the blog week after week, my posts will arrive straight to your inbox. Subscribe here.
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Today’s topic: How should product organizations change due to coronavirus?
Continue reading “PM superpowers in these troubled times – coronavirus edition”
The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has been a watershed moment in everything. Time for some guesses and predictions on what it means for fintech. I’m phrasing these as questions as none of these changes are a given 🙂
Continue reading “Is coronavirus fintech’s watershed moment?”
I’ve often talked about 10K’s as being the perfect way to get up to speed in a new industry. Once a month a few of us PMs get together and do a deep dive on a particular company via its 10k. We call it our “10K a month” club :). Drop me a note if you want to be added to the group, the more diverse viewpoints the better the learnings! Last month we researched and chatted about Zillow. Highlights from our conversation follow. Continue reading “No place like home – A look into Zillow (NYSE:ZG)”
So you are a product person turned GM. What advantages do you bring to the table? What’s your edge in this role? Some of my thoughts below
Great product folks have a structured thinking approach to solving problems. Thinking in systems is a critical skill. This mode of thinking is immensely valuable and has broad applications in other areas like sales and marketing. As described in the last post, sales and marketing have a very quick rhythm, everything resets at the quota end period. This dynamic has a natural pull towards tactics that yield quick outcomes. You can easily slide into just executing on tactics without a reliable and predictable system of making Continue reading “GM Chronicles Part 2: Does a product background give you an edge?”
The difference between strategy and tactics is the most misunderstood phenomenon. 90% of the time the two are conflated. I recently read (twice, its that good!) the book 7 Powers: The foundation of business strategy by Hamilton Helmer. I highly recommend getting the paper copy of the book to make notes on and see the visuals. I plan to write some posts applying some of the concepts to industries I’m familiar with, but for today I’d like to talk about a basic framework, two sentences that illuminate the difference between strategy and tactics Continue reading “Strategy vs tactics – why do we get it wrong most of the time?”
In the last post, I highlighted that SMB’s are mostly a long tail business with a majority of the market at the smaller end of the spectrum. An insight that I did not appreciate going into this market is the amount of sensitivity to price. The statement that “There are three things that are most important in SMB, price, price and price” is 100% true! With most small businesses being small and not really in it to grow this price sensitivity makes a ton of sense. So if you are a startup in this space you come across an interesting squeeze. Continue reading “Lessons learned in SMB fintech”
Small Business is the biggest market in the US and this is the best place to start a company in
This is an oft-repeated quote in many pitch decks, sorry to inform you, dear reader, it depends. After spending a decade in the SMB space, I’ve learned a few things – what follows is an attempt to describe some myths and mistakes. Hopefully, you don’t fall into the same traps!
The huge number everybody trots out is ~30M small business in the USA, the engine of growth, big big market, main street America – AMURIKA YEAAAAAH. Alas in practical terms this is a long tail market. This data set from the SUSB is the best place to start. Just by looking at the distribution of firms by employee size it is clear that this is a long tail market. There are a large number of firms that are <10 employees. Continue reading “Small Business in the USA – myths, and realities”
I’m a big fan of frameworks, they help us categorize and make sense of the world around us. As you are building products, frameworks help you systematically approach the process. I’ve always been intrigued by Reid Hoffman’s quote that mapped consumer social products to the seven sins. This was a great framework to map a product strategy to a core human instinct, in this case, vices.
With the consumerization of enterprise software can we do something similar? can we get derive a systematic framework that represents emotion in the enterprise world? Continue reading “Product frameworks |User emotion and feature tradeoffs”