Oscar Godson, the current CTO of Quil, and a product management veteran joins us to share his invaluable expertise on building a company culture that's centered around solving customer problems. Devon begins the conversation by sharing an experience of her own, where she had placed an order at Best Buy and was promised a one-hour delivery, only to find out after five hours of waiting that his order was not ready. Oscar believes there is a disconnect between the product team and the customer support, leading to companies overpromising in their product and service offerings. He suggests that executives have a vision of what the company should offer, but this does not always match up with the reality. Through this conversation, the audience learns about the importance of embracing customer feedback and creating a company culture around solving customer problems in order to scale a product effectively.
Oscar and Devon are discussing product development and management and how it has changed with the introduction of the internet. Oscar explains that companies didn't move as quickly to update their operations as the technology was advancing, and are still operating on a waterfall-type method. Oscar suggests that if there was a feedback loop and information was cycled up, the executive team could still get their dream vision without top-down management. Devon suggests that there is a disconnect between what companies promise and what they can deliver, and proposes that there should be some functionality built in to recognize this. Oscar concludes that you can no longer just move fast and break things as you used to do when shipping out physical CD ROMs.
Oscar and Devon discussed the outdated product development cycle, which involves interviewing a few people in a boardroom and then releasing the product after months of development without getting any more feedback. Oscar no longer tolerates such a long cycle and instead advocates for an MVP approach, where the goal is to perfect one outcome that a user wants to accomplish and gradually add more features. He suggests mapping out the now, the next and the later in order to create a product with customer experience in mind.
Oscar emphasizes the need to build a culture that values customer feedback and to always focus on solving customer problems. He also speaks about the importance of small teams in product development, as they can move quickly and efficiently. To avoid becoming the next Juicero, it's important to do research and talk to customers. Oscar shares his experience at Quil, a financial wellness membership that helps people pay bills if they become unemployed. He emphasizes the importance of empathizing with customers, as they may be dealing with a stressful situation. He also mentions the difference between a product strategy and a UX strategy and the importance of focusing on the user experience.
Timestamps
00:03:00 Conversation on Product Development and Management
00:05:00 Discussion on Road Mapping
00:06:00 Conversation on Building a Culture of User-Centric Product Development
00:15:00 Conversation on Outsourcing Financial Stress, Internal Tools, Growth Hacking, and JIRA
00:16:00 Outcomes Over Output: A Discussion on Standups, Calendar Blocks, and OKRs
00:18:00 Disrupting the FinTech World with Layoff Insurance
Quote Highlights
My background is heavily in the financial FinTech world and you shouldn't be breaking money, movement and screwing with people's money.
I think it starts with building a culture of "I think we can solve this customer's problem by building this feature", rather than "this would be a cool feature to build".
And then from then on over the course of 12 months of development, where you never get more feedback. All of these assumptions are built on more and more, and then you release oh, the world has changed over the year.
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