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Rob Seidman: My name is Rob Seidman. I’m the Chief Product Officer of U.S. Bank Avvance, which is the newly launched point-of-sale lending solution by U.S. Bank, also called BNPL, that we favor our POS lending moniker. I was at a couple of startups before I joined U.S. Bank a couple of years ago to build out point-of-sale lending, buy now, pay later solutions. Prior to that, I spent 25 years in banking at B&A, J.P. Morgan, Goldman, and Lehman. I have an extensive background in fintech and general banking, but I’m excited to talk through our experience here at U.S. Bank.
Product-led transformation & growth – Setting the stage
Rob Seidman: Let me just set the stage for what the problem was that we were trying to solve, or what I was brought in to do, I should say.
Before I got here, the bank had realized that there was an opportunity for us to take advantage of a market opportunity that we thought we were undersized in, which is point-of-sale lending. When we were formed after some strategic discussions at the bank level, the issue or problem we were solving at U.S. Bank was launching a brand new business, and in our case, it’s point-of-sale lending. It’s not a new business; it’s a business that’s been around for, I don’t know, 120 years, if you look at layaway. It’s the best, most akin idea going back to the 19th century about how lending happens at the point of sale, but then we’ve modernized it for the modern economy.
Our bank believes that we have a right to win in this business, and we’re going to walk you through our thought process and the process I undertook to launch the business with a lot of really talented people.
The institution that I am now a part of was started in 1850. So for those who think old dogs can’t learn new tricks, we’re trying really hard. I think we’ve succeeded on one level, so we’re going to keep on trying. The key thing to know about our bank for those in and outside the U.S. that don’t know anything about banking is that we’re a top five bank with just under $700 billion in assets. We operate across the country in multiple businesses.
Forget the size for a second; every institution of any given size always has lots of priorities. In our particular case, we had two major external events taking place. One is we were acquiring a bank called Union Bank, which was a multibillion-dollar institution, large, and we were integrating it at the same time as we were trying to launch.
Then externally, the regulatory environment from a banking perspective has tightened up, meaning that regulators take a much deeper look into all of our businesses and how we operate, rightfully so. We just treat it as an input into how we build. Lastly, when I walked in the door, our bank had no experience in B2B2C, which is what our business is. Those are strategic decisions about how we formed our business and the operating model we’re going to work under. But the core thing to know is even as a top five bank with a top five credit card issuing business and a top five acquiring business, we had no point-of-sale B2B2C lending experience. So this was brand new.
Product-Led transformation & growth – Starts with strategy and OKRs
Rob Seidman: I think for those who were on the panel discussion, I think Dickson and several others hit on this: it’s got to start with the strategy. I’ll lay out the framework that we thought about as we were developing our strategy. There are a ton of frameworks, but needless to say, developing the “why” is everything. If you don’t start with the “why” and enroll people in your vision of what you plan to build and bring to market, it’s very tough to execute.
We talked about getting senior executives on board. The good thing for us is that I was lucky to have top-down support. Our division executive, the vice chairman who sponsors our product, and the CEO were on board. We have 70,000 people across multiple countries and states in the U.S., so I didn’t have to fight upward first. That’s good. But convincing a lot of people sideways is really hard.
The first thing we did was create the strategy and started to talk about it ad nauseam with everybody. We needed a lot of partners and help to get this up and running. After getting through the strategy work of the OKRs, we focused on who the user was, what problem we were solving, what value we bring to them, and how we differentiate in the market. Not net new, right?
There are two other pieces that we had to work through. One is it had to align with the bank strategy, specifically the P&L. We had to come up with a business case that articulated why it mattered that we were doing this business, which has value to the bank for several reasons. The bank, meaning my employer and the broader organization, was carving out funding to stand up this brand new business line.
Lastly, for a longstanding institution, unlike my startup time, in startups you don’t go for more funding. Either you hit your business case, make money, or you leave; it’s pretty binary. Similar to how startups work, if you don’t hit your growth curve and start making money, you can’t raise more and you’ll be out of business. I had the exact same set of drivers: a little bit of paranoia, a little bit of objectivity, and a whole lot of single-mindedness to launch.
On the path to product-led transformation & growth
Rob Seidman: When I was evaluating how to do this, we had to do a lot of things. We were carving out a niche from within multiple existing businesses. That took a lot of convincing of business line executives to give us pieces of their backlog, investment dollars, and expertise to help us. That convincing process of our vision started with, “Here’s what we intend to do for these users, and here’s what we think it’s going to add to the bank in terms of value.”
For us at a large institution, we have huge groups with thousands of people, so everyone has many priorities on their plate. There’s not excess capacity for people to pass stuff to you. So you’re constantly pitching about why this matters to them as individuals, as a group, and to the bank overall.
The first thing we did was start with the UI. It’s much easier to describe if I say, “I’m doing a point-of-sale lending business that’s B2B2C, and I’m going to sell into these merchant groups because we think they like what we have to offer.” But when you show people a UI that illustrates the experience we want to bring to life, it cements the idea of what we’re doing.
Finding a way to relate what we’re doing to who they are and what they do as professionals inside our institution is a big deal. This was hit on in the panel discussion: communication is critical. When you’re coordinated across many teams and groups, getting everyone on the same page is really hard. So I’ll just talk about how we did it.
So the first thing we do is plug our objectives and key results. We use Dragonboat for this. This is one of the key things we use to say, “Objectively, here’s what we intend to do. Here’s the experience we want to bring to life for our customers at the bank, our merchants at the bank. Here’s what we think it’s going to look like, and here’s the impact to you.” And then, talk about the end game a lot. When we’re successful, we collectively, not me, but we are collectively successful, here’s what we will have achieved together. And we just get on message as quickly as humanly possible.
For those building inside big businesses, you have to convince a lot of people. It’s about human relationships, and those matter. As much as there are naysayers, you need them. I needed several hundred people to step up and help me every month to deliver a set of code to sign off on a policy, and we needed those people. So you really want to keep everyone close.
Measure, measure, measure
Rob Seidman: As we got into it, we realized that measurement is critical. The beauty of a launch is that going from zero to one has simplicity in one specific manner: it’s all about the launch. You set a date, and the goal is to get live.
We approached this in a linear fashion: setting up the OKRs, putting them in Dragonboat, and aligning every bit of work from JIRA. We linked JIRA to Dragonboat, allowing us to constantly measure progress. And we measured it by objective. For example, in our case, we’re B2B2C at checkout. One of our objectives is to win checkout, which has underlying key results, like the share of checkout.
In retro
Rob Seidman: We launched in nine months, completing thousands of epics. On our launch day, we had 500 stakeholders on the call. It was an immense effort. We had a ton of painful trade-offs along the way. Our original design is not what we went live with; we iterated in the first three to five sprints, constantly upgrading and updating. We communicated the entire way, sending out weekly updates to all stakeholders, monthly summaries, and then as we got to launch, it was every other day, then daily.
Three months later, we looked back to assess what we got right and wrong. All the baselines, hypotheses, and KRs we set up had to be revisited. We got lots of stuff wrong, and we’re iterating and fixing those as we speak. I
In retrospective, be ready to pivot, take an honest assessment of where you are, reset, and keep moving forward.
3 takeaways
Rob Seidman: So I’ll just say like we use Dragonboat extensively. My point of view was I track everything. I think about it as an asset allocation model, right? I knew what was most important to us and I was making sure that we were spending time, energy, and dev dollars on those most important things. And that’s what we use Dragonboat for most pointedly in the launch process.
And be ready to switch lanes pretty fast. Once we launched, the MVP stage was over. The zero-to-one phase was completed, the launch happened, and we were successful. We need to keep moving because going from one to growth is different and harder. One of the objectives changed, and all the key results changed the day after we launched. You reset and bring in new stakeholders once you’re live.
Audience Q&A
Alisa Vaz: Great. Thank you so much. Let’s look at some audience questions that are coming in. I think this one is interesting and maybe speaks to some of what you said about whether that’s an OKR structure or a different governance model. How do you balance innovation with risk management in a highly regulated industry like banking? I suppose this could be a question outside of banking, but I feel like you’re a great person to answer that one.
Rob Seidman: There are lots of highly regulated industries. We are definitely highly regulated; it’s part of the requirements. Don’t do it after—that’s the best advice I can give. Bake it into your requirements. I’ve been a banker a long time, and I understand deeply the requirements as do my compliance and risk partners. They are brought in as early as possible to evaluate our approach. We definitely push a lot, right? We had many debates and disagreements during the process. Bring them in early and make it part of the requirements. It’s not separate, and it’s not pushed through after. Bake it in.
Alisa Vaz: Wonderful. One more question: Is the product operating model and culture generally adopted at U.S. Bank or just within your special group?
Rob Seidman: I had the luxury of being split off from the rest, which helped, and I also got to hire and build my own team. This allowed me to bring a culture with me that I thought was necessary to build from scratch.
I’d say the bank is on a journey to the product operating model, but making big strides. I know Marty Cagan was brought up before. The bank is moving to that model. If you don’t have fully enabled teams, it’s much harder in a matrix environment to bring value to the end user quickly.
If you are constantly in somebody else’s backlog managing across, you know, look, we sit on 50-plus platforms. Managing backlog on 50 platforms is not efficient. But when I have empowered engineers and empowered product managers that bring to life an experience and a user outcome that I can affect on any given platform. Now there are shared platforms that we’re not going to write code on, of course, but generally speaking, the more empowered you are, the better off you’re going to be when you do something like where we took off.
