What if FinTech Product Management started by saying yes?

The first principle you learn as a product manager is simple: how to say no. Steve Jobs famously said, “I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.” Building great products requires focus. And focus is about saying no—not just to the bad ideas, but to “the hundred other good ideas out there.” But what if we thought about things a little differently? What if we started by learn to say yes?

Product management isn’t about solving problems, it’s about understanding them

Having founded both CurrencyCloud and Railsr (formerly Railsbank), Nigel Verdon is almost the Steve Jobs of the Embedded Finance industry. The first (of many) principles I learned from Nigel when I started my product management career at Railsr back in late 2017 were also simple: assumption is the mother of all hell.

Product management isn’t about solving problems – it’s about understanding them. This is especially true in FinTech – and especially in B2B FinTech – where products often have many more stakeholders than in other industries. Product managers not only need to understand the needs, pains, and processes of their customers and engineering teams; they have to work with compliance, sales, customer success, Treasury Ops – you name it. Moreover, in the case of B2B FinTech, product managers must also appreciate that their product serves their customers’ customers, adding a new level of integrated complexity to the role.

To assume that you know what is best for each of these experts is to guarantee that you will disappoint them. The role of the product manager is to listen, empathize, understand. By doing so, you can effectively communicate the nature of the problem to your engineers, who can focus on delighting the people affected by it with a real solution.

Problems are not solved by saying no

What does it mean for a founder or a product manager to say no – even if they do it with a smile? To say no to an insight from a customer or a colleague in Operations? Saying no to an idea from an engineer? Sure, it means they focus fully on what they think is important. But it also means that they focus fully on what they think is important – not what the people who matter think is important.

When your product team culture starts with saying no—when you train junior product managers to say no—you put arrogance, pessimism, and silence at the heart of your organization, undermining the connections between your product and its key stakeholders. You undermine the product manager’s innate ability to be curious and creative. When stakeholders don’t feel listened to, they stop talking – they stop giving you important insight into their pains and needs. If you build your product with the belief that you know what is best for your users, you will soon be the only user of your product.

No one expects you to solve all their problems at once. What they do expect, however, is that you want to solve their problems—to believe in them and to empathize with the pain they cause. This can only happen if you skew your team towards saying yes first instead of saying no by first training product managers to listen, empathize and think pragmatically and ambitiously. Just as people stop talking when they don’t feel listened to, they tend to talk more when they do. A product team culture that starts with yes generates deep, honest insights from cross-business stakeholders competing for engineering capacity. It builds trust and empowers everyone who depends on the product to do their job.

What about the product roadmap?

The capacity is of course limited. Stakeholder issues – especially in scaling businesses, especially in FinTech – are endless. Faced with this challenge, the main reason product managers are trained to say no is to avoid building a roadmap that overwhelms the team, overpromises and underdelivers.

But no one cares if you deliver a product on time if it doesn’t solve their problems, and everyone appreciates that roadmaps are wrong as soon as they’re written down, especially in the complex, regulated FinTech industry. The point of a product roadmap isn’t to communicate to stakeholders when features should be built—it’s to solve the right problems at the right time and communicate your priorities to stakeholders.

Instead of focusing on features, learning to say yes allows product managers to gather the insights they need to focus on problems and build results-based roadmaps that serve stakeholders rather than the product manager himself.

The language of the dinosaurs

Great products that delight customers and solve huge problems aren’t built with arrogance, pessimism, and silence. They are built with empathy, optimism, curiosity and endless, endless communication: values ​​that should be the very essence of FinTech.

No is what you hear when you ask if your bank can help you with invoices in the face of the energy price crisis. Yes is what you will hear if you go to a solution like Playter, which allows you to spread the cost of your invoices over six months.

No is the language of the dinosaur. Fintech should be about saying yes: yes to built-in experiences, yes to affordable credit, yes to good customer service, yes to good API documentation. So why do we build FinTech product teams that start by saying no?