Fintech Product Management Construct

A product manager's daily work is to collaborate with different stakeholders, carefully documenting their requirements and transmitting them to the developers in a way that the developers understand the ask clearly.

At times it is also to design testing strategies and use cases.

A good product manager also works with the stakeholders to support them with UAT testing so that there are minimal production bugs.

At times there is a need to work with 'shared services'.
Shared services are platforms that provide services to different business segments in the company, however based on the size and complexity of the product/project there could be dedicated resources assigned to the project.

The product manager needs to work with these shared services reps to get their product/project prioritised, arrange for funding and understand system limitations so that any enhancements if required to deliver the product in hand can be put under the roadmap.

Typically in a fintech company there is a boarding platform, an API connecting the customers ERP with the fintech company's ERP, there are gateways to trigger posting any transactions, card hosts that directly communicate with the card brands in order to capture authorisations and finally a settlement engine that completes the transaction.

There are some backend operations teams as well that take care of any refunds,rekeys, collections etc. They need proper system support in order to reconcile items and they need to establish one to one match.

One very important team that needs all the enablement from a product manager and that is support. Support needs a clearly documented list of issues, their troubleshooting steps and escalation matrix in order to continue delivering the results that were promised to the client.

Another interesting aspect comes when the same product/program is implemented in different geographies. It is not necessary that the elementary requirements will be same. From a credit, compliance, risk and legal point of view there could be vast changes which defines different requirements and hence room needs to be kept in order to incorporate those requirements so that the product/program functions successfully.

There could be some technical limitations as well.
Some processes could be manual in some geographies vs some can be automated.
When we go automated to manual there are operational challenges, since a new set of resources need to be found that will close the gap of these manual steps in the absence of automated steps.

Hence, a proper study of geographies need to happen before inception of a multi-geography project rather than after. Lack of proper planning can lead to loss and incompetence to the company as a whole.