The life of a (squeezed) Product Manager

Very often when I meet clients and prospect clients, my counterpart is a Product manager. They often have the same problems as I used to have, when I was a product manager for payments at a bank:

• Meetings all day
• Responding to e-mails all evening
• Squeezed between Operations, Sales, Risk&Comliance, and new competitors

I decided to write a series of blog posts, called “The life of a (squeezed) Product Manager". 0% AI, 25% (?) humour, 100% truthful.

The first post: Operations.

You know the feeling when the Process managers and line managers at Operations chase you, to complain about:

• Why do you allow your clients to fill in whatever garbage they want in the payment initiation screens, allowing for obviously erroneous payments be be accepted and sent out, just to be returned with a fee deducted, resulting in unhappy clients?
• Why can’t you let your clients see the status of cross-border payments in the apps or online bank, when we at Ops have the Swift GPI tracker? The clients call us all day, every day, asking “where is my payment?” or “who deducted the fee, the beneficiary is complaining!”.

Very often, banks have many different online channels and apps for different client types, built in different decades, with different technology. Most often it’s different screens for different payment types, creating a very complex landscape of channels and payment types, leading to a very difficult verification process.

I wish there would be a unified Payee Verification service that could be integrated in any channel, for any payment type!

(Hint: Read about Movitz’s unified Payee Verification service here!)

I wish there would have been a way for me to introduce a payment tracker in the customer channels, that doesn’t mean heavy development work and knowledge about APIs for the 10 different tech teams that would need to be involved!

(Hint: Read about Movitz’s Payment Tracker here!)