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[00:00:00] All. Melissa, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today. Good morning, Deb. Thanks for having we, your background, I feel like I say this almost every time. It continues to amaze me the breadth of where people come from, but this is a first. So you started and founded a debt collection agency, somehow transitioned over years from that to a senior product role at an indoor waterpark chain, and now you're the CPO over at Green Dot, which is financial services company.

You have been all over the place before we jump in. Can we just take like 90 seconds and can you make that make sense for me please? Absolutely. So I have been in financial services for about 26 years now, and like you said, started in collections, have run pretty much the full gamut of the customer lifecycle journey.

I [00:01:00] was in operations now in product and enjoying a really great career where I've really always focused on building great products for customers on their very complex financial journey and seeking to UNC Uncomplicate that. When you put it that way, it makes complete sense to just jump right in because that's what we like to do here.

Looking at the background in debt collect. I am happy to say I've never had too much run in with debt collection in a systematic way, which I feel like I should probably be very grateful for. But you took, from my understanding of the industry is a non-traditional approach, and it really showed you why empathy and kind of understanding of the clientele is so important in getting things done.

And you said this really smart thing about basically shame is a terrible retention mechanic. What do you mean here? Like what did you learn from this early experience and how does that continue now? Like what does that mean going forward? What I really learned being in collections for so long is people are both unprepared for life moments that will take them into debt or, or take them into [00:02:00] collections.

And also that we just don't prepare people with financial education. I think you have a consumer education requirement that you have to solve in high school, and you could take Intro to Finance or intro to Business or one of the many classes. But to be completely honest, I really believe that if you're not exposed to financial health along your life, you just really don't understand how to do it.

And if you read, you know anything about people and their savings, people generally don't even have $300 saved. They're one health scare away from, you know, complete financial ruin sometimes. So being collections really helped me understand and try to help people prepared for these financial moments. You know, give them the tools and the education to understand how they can be better prepared and, and not face that debt.

They would, they would grow into. I think you bring up a good point, like the world of just thinking about finance in general can raise people's stress and almost cortisol levels, right? There's a biological piece of this. If you're going to go into running product in a financial services product world.

Realizing that is probably a big [00:03:00] advantage in knowing how people think about this At a fundamental level. Do you find yourself applying or like looking back to your time in collections to look at how you think about product now? I do and I feel as though I am constantly reminded that many, many people are ill prepared for the journey.

So, and you can imagine being in this line of business for so long, I am teaching my children or trying to teach them very healthy financial habits. I have a 15-year-old son who is about to be 16, and we keep pushing him to pick out a car. We've offered him money and he is just so nervous about spending money.

He told me the other day, I don't know how much money I'm gonna need when I'm older, so I'm just trying to save it, and then I'll just spend it when I'm older and it's just this. Complete bass, sort of black bull that people just don't know about. And so when I lean on my own situations and I continue to user research and talk to people, I am continuously reminded.

And I'll think that, uh, you know, talking about that nervousness around it, I've been a part of a couple different [00:04:00] ethnographic research studies in the past, uh, with my companies and they, they really all have the same tenants. One is nudge me to a better financial future. The second one is master the fundamentals, and the third one is reinforce connection for the brand.

So nudge me to a better financial future. If I have $500 sitting in a checking account and you have a high interest savings account, just tell me to move my money from the checking to the savings, right? It's really that simple. We're always offering these new products and services. How are we marketing them, but how are we doing it in a way that it helps people to prepare them for their journey?

Yeah. And then master the fundamentals, right? Can I log in? Is my balance correct? Can I see what I need to do? And then reinforce connection through the brand is what do we stand for? What's our product strategy? How are we helping them along that journey? Mm-hmm. Just thinking about my own experience and of one here, but I'd like to think I'm fairly financially literate.

I have a business degree. I work professionally. I run budgets for seven, eight figure budgets. I still, when I get like notification from my bank that I should do something or kinda any of [00:05:00] the financial tools I use, I still look at it generally with either a skepticism of like, well, why is this good for you?

Or I just kinda go like, I don't wanna pay attention to it. I just block it out. How, from a product perspective or like do you like brand perspective, do you kinda look at how do you build people to trust, telling them to move to a high interest account is the best thing for them and that they can trust you guys on that?

I would say the way that we continuously employed that is user research, talking to our customers. You know, you mentioned n equals one. We have to remember that when we are building our products is that most likely we are not our user, or at least not of the entire base. And so there's market research, there's user research, there's talking to our customers.

And a lot of it is just describing exactly the moment that you mentioned. Mm-hmm. So, hey, I'm going to ask you to do this. I'm gonna send you a marketing communication. I'm going to show you in the mobile app. So we're showing those artifacts to people and we're asking them and having a dialogue with them, what makes you trust it?

What don't you trust? Do you know how [00:06:00] to do this? Do you understand it? Is the task easy? Is it hard? What would you do next? And so just having that constant dialogue with them, it truly understanding, using our representative base and our customer segments. I really believe that's the way that we really start to lean in and get jobs from people.

And lastly. Doing it Right, right. Master, that was fundamental. You don't think my balance correct or I have questions about it. I have an issue. You know, you shouldn't have to constantly try to call in and talk to someone and try to make sense of things. We should really be showing it to you in a very digestible format.

It should be correct. I wanna jump back for one sec. You were talking about, I think you said your son, where he kind of was nervous about all sorts of things around finances and I think that's incredibly normal. Like, I know so many adults who have that same reaction. And I dunno if we've been trained by society or if it's just, it's so important.

Like it's how you put food on the tables, how you put a roof over your head. Money at some level comes down to, in finances, comes down to like this fight or flight mentality almost triggers in people. And if you're not careful in how you [00:07:00] build these products or how you look at the ways you're communicating, it can just cause people to, to go the wrong way rather than feeling comforted.

They can feel negative even if they're doing all right. When we're preparing for this, part of what I saw kind of you had written on and talked about publicly before is this idea of like cortisol UI and how do you kind of like design for deescalation and then you got to part of it right there. Right.

Which was also like banks and digital finance companies have done a great job of designing for the transaction, but you also have to design for the relationship. What does that look like in practice? Like how, not just banks, but I guess how can someone at, you know, a B2C services company or SaaS or any kind of interesting usage there, like what does that look like in practice?

Like how do you kind of apply that going forward? Every moment that we have with a customer is an opportunity to either delight and connect with the customer or to E Road from a trust perspective. And over the years we're always gonna make mistakes. We try not to, but people do make mistakes. So how do you own that?

How do you fix that? How do you send the message [00:08:00] of we heard you and we fixed it, or we did this and we fixed it, and now here you are and you can get back with financial services too in anywhere. There's that trust factor. The barrier in banking is slightly higher than the rest. And so if you think about the new innovative technologies that people wanna use, I think they're some type, a little bit more equipped in the beginning for companies outside of banking.

Mm-hmm. And I state that because you think about AI and the way that we all wanna use it and get more efficient and show people that we're innovative and we're using the latest technology, the research is still showing that in finances. People trust AI to do simple tasks for them, but not necessarily complex.

Okay? So, you know, gathering the data, bringing the insights, showing you where you spent your money, maybe where you can change how you spend your money to make it work better for you. Maybe actually paying for things. We're sort of on the cusp moving into agent commerce, but we've really got to make sure that we are still gathering trust, that we're showing people how we're doing things, getting them [00:09:00] an out, you know, can I undo this method of doing it?

And then finally, I would say when we're building things across the board, whether or not you're in banking or travel or, or anything where you're helping people purchase things or folding their money, you wanna make sure that you have the right. Risk controls in monitoring in place. So as I mentioned, we make mistakes.

We wanna be very proactive in ensuring that we're not going to, but when we do, we wanna make sure that we're employing the technologies to tell us when that mistake happened. It should never be customer generated or customer reported. We should see it, find it, correct it quickly and move on. I kinda joke with friends at times that there's a couple areas I really don't want that much innovation or I don't want people to be cutting edge.

Right. The answer in a lot of these utilitarian things are just such a fundamental part of our lives. It's like a referee, right? If you notice the ref too much, it's probably not that they're doing a really good job, so, right. Like you said, you guys wanna discover any problem. You want to bring it to attention.

You want to fix it. You don't want the customer to be finding stuff and bringing it to [00:10:00] you and saying, Hey, this is broken. The more they have to think about these problems and be like always monitoring for it, that's really negative. If they kind of just don't think about it and things just get kind of quietly fixed and they get notified and they look, oh, great.

Okay, that's fixed and you move on. That's a great experience, but at times you almost miss those things because they just become expectation. Is that something conscious that you guys think about, or is there a way you wanna bring that forward? Like, Hey, we're fixing this for you, or is that the right way?

Is it kinda sits in the background because you don't want people to have to worry about it too much? Yeah, I would say it's a very delicate balance. We really take a lot of care to make sure that we're very risk averse, that we're mitigating it where we can. I think it also lends its hands, you know, you mentioned if you're noticing it's probably not a good thing at a game.

It's the same way within a digital experience for banking and as much as the chief product officer and the rest of the product team would love that people are just launching our website and mobile app and coming in and perusing and, and looking at all of the great, what new features do they have? Like, again, all the great things that we offer them, you know, they're very task based.

They have a life. Yeah. And they're looking for us to [00:11:00] accept their life, not to dictate their life. Years ago at a a previous company, we redesigned the entire homepage of the website. We spent a lot of time on user research and understanding what are the top three activity that people wanted to do. And it's across the board for all companies.

They are all financial institutions. They wanna check their balance, they wanna check their transaction, they wanna see it, their payment posted, or if their money is in it's banking and. That's it. And that is what they'll do. On an average, it's three to 20 times a month, depending if it's a lending experience or a deposit experience.

Now, people were averaging about two minutes in our website on the homepage, which means that they are not able to find what they needed. And once we redesigned it, once we learned the top three activities that they wanted, and we arranged the content hierarchy to show them that. They were spending a few seconds in it.

The company got a little nervous and said, well, there's something wrong here. They're not spending a lot of time. And we said, actually, they're spending the right time and we need to work smarter on how we are increasing engagement still and having people come [00:12:00] in and seeing the new things that we're offering them.

But it's not always of that thing when you don't notice the rep or when you're coming in and just spending a couple seconds in there, it's actually a good thing 'cause we're giving them what they want. It's interesting that you kind of bring that up 'cause that's been a really big discussion in a lot of circles.

Here at Log Rocket, what we do is basically, we started out in session replay, but at one point success was people coming in and spending a lot of time watching session replays. We always kinda knew though that that was not a wonderful experience and probably not the best way to get what you need out of it.

So over time, as we've kind of leaned into this, we've built agents that watch the sessions for you, just tell you what's important. Push insights about what's going wrong on your digital experience, and the joke has always been like the perfect iteration of Log Rocket has almost zero MAU, you know, monthly active users because we just pushed to you what you need to know.

You just have it and you know that everything's good, unless we tell you you need to look at something. And so it's like minimal, minimal interaction and that's the best outcome. It's not spending an hour or two a day in it. It's just finding what you need. And same with banking, right? This has been one of those [00:13:00] things that continuously also comes up as we're like at these networking dinners we do across the country with product leaders.

They kind of bring up, like in a world of ai, how do I start to look at and message to my board or my CEO, you know, engagement time is dropping precipitously. But like you said, that's a good thing. That's not a bug, it's a feature because they're getting what they want and they're building confidence with us just so much faster.

No, it's very true. And even it's sort of looking at as the operations and the call center of average handling time. Yeah. The lower the better as long as the call is resolved. And that was one way that we actually were able to use AI and to implement it. An operating efficiency is when a customer calls in and the agent is working with them after the fact.

In, in parallel, while they're having the conversation, we now have AI transcribing the call and writing all of the call notes. We're having AI look at the call sentiment and understand. Did they start off with a complaint and was it resolved and was it resolved in its entirety? Employing those technologies to again, speed up the time that we're interacting with people.

One thing you [00:14:00] hit on when we talked about, I just wanna bring on NI think it kind of makes topical sense. The idea that I don't think product is always just going to be feature, feature, feature. There's this guy we've had on the show a couple times, his name's non you. He's the head of product at linear.

Which is this very hot work planning kind of ticketing tool that, like our development team uses it here and our product team uses it here. But he has this really intelligent way of looking at what your org structure and what your structure of how you phrase projects really has an impact on how important things are and what the reality of how your product is going to reflect.

What you want to do. You said something when we talked last time that was really interesting on this that I didn't pick up on until just now, which was you guys moved compliance from being kind of a backend call center thing. Into a key feature set or part of like stability and confidence for customers, and that has really allowed you to move the needle on reducing issues and stuff, which I have to assume partly goes into kinda what you were just saying there too, is how you're reducing customer support [00:15:00] volume in general and speaking that up and just making those things faster and better.

And the best way to reduce those is to get rid of the core issue, right. Definitely. So we are first line of defense, so we wanna make sure that we're building compliantly, I should say. And originally when I had started, the risk and broad compliance product team sat outside of my organization. And as companies mature, they change their org structure, they change their methodologies.

It's how we mature that is going to make us more operationally efficient. And so moving that team into the product org structure, they started to take more direction on how we should be building things instead of just always what we should be building. In my team now, that team, they're both a vertical and a horizontal, so they intake their work from the fraud risk and compliance teams.

We have regulatory items. We just have things we wanna make sure are ticked and tied and, and that we're building them stronger, but they also actually manage sort of their own consulting firm internally. And so everything we build, whether it's money movement, whether it's a new embedded [00:16:00] finance capability.

That team has office hours and everybody is required to bring their new feature there and have a discussion with this product team to understand how they either can build compliantly or how the engineers on their team are going to help them do it. And it really helps permeate a culture of responsibility of compliance and not just keeping it within one organization.

It's kinda like a lot of companies, when I guess two years ago now, AI was kind of like ascending. People were realizing, oh, I need to start looking at this. I feel like we saw so many places where they just had this like little ivory tower center of excellence of ai, and then that team was expected to really like.

Push out these learnings or figure out how they're gonna apply AI across a million different product things. It was just on like these one or two or three people if you were a big company. But as companies have matured, I feel like I've seen a bigger trend of, of, you probably have a couple experts still who really focus on it, but it has become much more of a central to the product.

And how do you kinda distribute this across the whole team in a smarter way and get people [00:17:00] thinking about how do we build with this just as a core piece, not just how do we like sprinkle it on at the end. I know probably in a lot of people's minds there's nothing more different than like in innovation wise.

As one end you probably have AI and at the other end of of not innovative, you have compliance. But in reality, that model of how you distribute these key learnings and build a culture of innovation and trust and all these things kinda fits either one of them in an interesting way. Yeah, I think it's important what you said about building that culture of it.

I talked about compliant, permeating, but we wanna make sure AI and innovation is permeating through it as well. And it's hard to just say, go use ai. Go figure out how. And people don't know how to start. They understand problems. They understand opportunities. Then if you can permeate that culture, if you're starting at the top and saying, we encourage safe uses of ai, we want you to go explore them, we have this forum for you to then come and bring this tool, or we can vet it quickly and make sure that it's safe for us to use.

And then we want you to go use it. And that is what we are trying to do [00:18:00] at Green Dot, to make sure that our teams know that when they have an opportunity, when they have a problem, when they have a new product, they're very encouraged and it's very safe to explore those use cases. We also have existing vendor partners that we work with, like Figma.

So I also lead the product design team and they use Figma to build all of our creative experiences. They've got AI plugins, we can create a prototype and send it to user research much faster than when designers would actually have to code it. And so there's all of these use cases that we can do to speed up what we're doing, however it, you know, permeate that culture and let them know, hey, it's okay for you to do this.

We're dead the water. One thing I wanted to bring up is we kinda jumped from like debt collection to Green Dot, but in there you've had a lot of different roles and one was at Discover, which I think everyone probably knows is a giant financial company, but the rewards program there is really, really big.

And there's an interesting story there about like limited choice, too much choice and how you can kind of almost lean into what users say and still not give them what they really want. Can we dive into that for a sec? So [00:19:00] I have a great example for that. So as you mentioned, discover. Giant company. Really the pioneer of cash back rewards and what we implemented many, many years ago was.

The idea of having these rotating categories every quarter you get 5% cash back on top of what you normally earn, and you sign up to do it. And so the idea was you've signed up, you understand the program where you can spend, and that we would get an incremental lift and spend out of it. After many, many years and, and many, many customer write-ins and, and you know, conversations of how they'd like to see the problem of the ball, they actually wanted to be able to pick their category.

So we offered home improvement in the spring because that's when people do a lot of home improvement activity. We offered gas and shopping a Q4 because that's when people are traveling and, and buying for the holidays. But they wanted to be able to pick their own category and we spent months and months user research getting verbatim.

Showing digital experiences and doing usability, and we launched a internal friends and family program to just [00:20:00] a select view of us to be able to pick your own category before we sent it out to the wild. And what was interesting is all these people who know this program in and out, who are in banking, who are probably rewards gamers because we know the ins and out of what to do, they were completely paralyzed by what to pick.

And the problem was, is they started to add themselves to questions because they didn't wanna miss out. They were afraid that they wouldn't be able to maximize that 5%. It was very easy when we picked it for them. We let them down the path. He knew exactly what to do. It's a wide open space. They were asking themselves questions like, well, what did I spend last year?

Well, am I gonna do the same things? Am I gonna spend in that category this year? What if I don't choose the right category to choose this one? I end up spending here. What if my plumbing breaks and I should have chosen home improvement after? And it was a really interesting use case and case study from our internal brand.

And, and we did not launch it, but it was the right thing to do. Mm-hmm. And I'm glad that we did because I think we would've complicated a program that truly was, uh, not [00:21:00] complicated from the start. It kind of goes back to early on what we were talking about where people kind of intrinsically get nervous or their cortisol levels raise when they're looking at, or talking about just going through financial stuff.

Here's an example where you picked probably the people who were gonna be most literate and most able to take a dispassionate look at this. And even they got into the, you know, what if, and the FOMO and all these things. I remember, like in business school, one of the core things they tried to impress upon us was that people are always way more worried about potential loss than trying to optimize for potential gain.

Like if you tell someone, oh, there's a 5% chance you'll lose $10. A 95% chance that you'll get $5 people are gonna really optimize around not losing that $10. So was it just you scrapped it or did it go anywhere else? We scrapped it. We went back to our original program and it really led us down the path for myself.

Just my always takeaway was user research before you launch a product, when you are dealing with people's money, very [00:22:00] different than when you launch it. So we build new products and services all the time. We're trying to understand. Will this work? Will you use it? Can you use it the way we built it? And while we feel like everything is ticked and tied when it's new and your money, it is a very different experience.

Mm-hmm. And so at Green Dot we put a methodology of always having a friends and family test so that we can truly understand where we're gonna get pinched. That we couldn't in the upfront user testing. 'cause what? It's your money and, and it's not play money. It is a very different experience. This just came up recently when we had, I wanna say it was Ben McAllister from CrossFit, but the net net.

Was at heart, people usually probably just don't give a shit about your product and not in a bad way, right? Like not any people don't care, but it is rarely the core number one thing in their lives that they're worried about. And this is the problem you run into with like any kind of dedicated user testing.

You are putting someone in a studio or in a place, or even just giving them a proactive experience going, Hey, use this, try to do this. You're [00:23:00] like, it's an unnatural environment. Almost always. It's really hard to make a natural environment. And so. People can do the thing at that moment, and maybe it works fine when you're saying, Hey, like in this case, pick which benefit you want.

Be like, yeah, that, that's great. I'll pick this one. Like, that sounds wonderful, but A, if it's like actual, just kinda a test environment, there's no actual consequence to picking wrong, and B, you're kinda putting in a fake. Experience in reality, they have to remember to do it on their banking app and they actually have to, like you said, think about, well what happens if I have a leak and I need to call a plumber?

You get into all these real life things and people are much more worried about that than whatever your or my product is. And it's so interesting to see kind of that come up again and again. It's very true and I think we've gone from bank centric or product centric. You, you mentioned we enhance people's life to life centric.

And I think that's why you see a lot of rise in embedded finance opportunities, which is really at the core of what Green Dot does, is to provide financial solutions where people are at when they wanna do it. You go to Walgreens, you can put cash into your account. And [00:24:00] so what we wanna do is continue to push on that life tric.

I think what we're also seeing now though, is the birth of. Consumer centric. If you think about ag agent commerce and how it will also like the level, the playing field of brands, we're actually gonna go, we were products, we word bank, you walked into a bank, you did your activities, or then we moved to digital.

You launch the digital app, you get your product opportunity. Now we're in your lives. Then we're gonna go to this, you know, a consumer-centric where ag agent commerce and tasks are done for you. And so we just have to ride that wave. We have to understand the morphis and the maturity of how we spend, of what people expect.

Continue to talk to them. Move along in their life with them. An interesting thing maybe is to look at the discover example, forcing people to make choices. It ended up being not the right path to go and I can applaud you guys and oftentimes when you kinda sink that much working cost it, people are hesitant to pull back in their mind.

But you know, the whole sub cost fallacy is pushing forward with that when the best answer is like, oh, we are wrong. Let's move on and try the next thing. But previously, you know, [00:25:00] aforementioned indoor waterpark chain that you worked at, which. I dunno about others, but that spiked my interest and my kids would probably kill me if I didn't ask you about this.

You were at Great Wolf, which I don't know how big Great Wolf is, if it's regional or national or what? I'm in the Northeast and I see commercials for just all the time. It's just a big thing that kids are always begging parents to go to. But this was an example where you helped people make these decisions and you moved it just into a digital venue so that people still made a bunch of decisions and that was the right thing to do.

So kinda a little bit different than previous. We talked about. Can we jump into this 'cause because like I said, my kids will, you know, slap me if I don't ask you about Great Wolf. So my entire. I feel like purpose for being at that company was to build a great guest experience, and the user research that we had done said that the person who booked the trip, whatever vacation it may be, but the person who had booked the trip at Great Wolf, they had the worst time.

They always worried if they picked the right place, if people were gonna have enough fund, if they had enough money, if it was morphed and, and [00:26:00] so the entire guest experience was important to me, but it was also important for that person who had booked this trip and was trying to make memories with their family in this incredibly busy lifestyle that we all have.

And so one of the things. Not just building an online experience so people didn't have to call and spend 45 minutes on the phone with someone, but they could actually launch the mobile app and see this experience, focus, see pictures and images, and you know, people like that and doing the things that they wanna do.

What I also wanted to do was solve the problem where once guests got to the lodge. They would stand in line for an hour or an hour and a half because the interaction with the agent was so long where they would have to talk to them about dining packages and we had many. And so which one? And drink packages.

And do you wanna buy what we called the Paw Pass, which had numerous tiers of excursions throughout it? And so. As you mentioned, you know, the cortisol UI with the cortisol, you know, in-person experience, that just continued to stress them out. And so how could we take that offline experience and just give them everything up front?

And so when [00:27:00] they arrived at the lodge, they picked up their key, they picked up any cop pass item that they needed. They went to their room and they started making memory. That spoke so much to me at the time. I had kids who loved Great Wolf Lodge. They've since aged out, but they loved going. And so I could take them and I could have my own experience and see, you know, what can I do to make it better for these guests?

Was there pushback on that or like, were you brought in specifically to do that? Or was that something you kind of diagnosed was important to do? I would say something that I diagnosed, but not me alone. You, my boss and the rest of the team. We were always looking for ways to improve the guest experience and so just kind of kicking the ones that we felt were super solvable.

And if I'm standing in line and my kids are pulling at me and wanting to go, you know, seeing all the other kids having hot, you know, I, I would probably not eat in thinking that I should speed that up. I also think, and you know, not unique to Crate Wolf, not unique to baking, is we get very stuck sometimes in the way that we do things because we know how to do that.

And even if our process is held together with bubbled on the toothpicks. In ours, and we know how to [00:28:00] navigate the pitfalls and the issues and how to move around it. And so sometimes it can be very hard to change. I am a big proponent of change. I immensely enjoy transformations as long as the outcome is making us stronger and more efficient in providing a better customer experience.

So I would say collectively, you know, great wealth, especially at Green Dot, we just embrace change in, in how we can pick at those things and, and fix them for people. This is probably really applicable right now, to be honest. Right. With the rise of ai, how do you look at change management and how do you look at kind of like bringing people along like that, whether it be at a really easy to understand shift like Great wolf or maybe banking or just general like I, I think there's an often overlooked area that people need to focus on.

So we are actually in the middle of a very large transformation right now in our operating model. And product always has to focus on, are we supporting the business correctly? Are we supporting ourselves correctly? And. I also have to know that even though I've done mass scale transformations across a few company, not everything works the same depending on the business model and [00:29:00] the company and the people that are in it.

So when I got to Green Dots a few years ago, I spent the first couple months just talking to people doing my own sort of grilly user research, right? Just asking the question, you know, are you getting everything that you can from my. Are we supporting you in the way that you would expect? And generally, more often than not, people are very open with telling you actually, you know, I, I have this problem, or, or, I see this as an opportunity.

And so as I sort of gather all of those together and determine what are the most important, what's going to make us stronger and more efficient, have a better operating model, and ultimately drive customer experience and business goals. One of them was to live sort of a very antiquated way of working, which is the project methodology and to be product delivery team, methodology.

And so sort of all the things that we talked about today with compliance, with risk, with user research, with customer experience. This truly is the today's version of taking all of that, putting it together to define what are the outcomes that we want to have to be successful with the products that we're building, with the data that we get from [00:30:00] implementing those product.

And then how do we continue it to improve to make that better? And it's hard, you know, you mentioned change is hard for people, change management is hard for people, and so. A lot of what I had to do was find my evangelists, find the people who worked at other companies who have either done transformations or moved into this product delivery model.

Have them also be telling my story. Tell people, you know, here's the problems that we have defined here. I've uncovered with you. Here's the way that we are going to fix those problems in this new way of working. And sometimes that conversation is very different. You know, between my CEO, who I need to be an evangelist or my GM who really just wants me to build things f and faster and better for the partners or my team who'd be like, I can't do everything and I need to find roles and responsibilities.

And so I have to take all of that together and decide what's the best. Sort of a massaged product delivery model for Green Dot, and that's what we're in right now. Nice. It's interesting to hear kind of how this has been working and evolving over the years and kind of how you take experience from, you know, as far back as debt collection and bring it [00:31:00] forward and really seeing how there are these kind of.

Often couple intrinsic kind of indelible qualities about how humans act, how we as people leading some of these products and solutions and kind of trying to solve these problems need to look at them to be successful or common pitfalls you can have. Where it goes the other way if you're not careful.

There is green dot that you still have to go back to and continue to drive change and lead product forward. And I think probably we're getting close to time when they're gonna get mad at me. If I keep taking your time. I just gotta say thank you for coming on. It's been a real pleasure learning about this stuff.

If people want to reach out, learn more or ask you more, learn about Green Dot or kind of any your experiences, I have to assume LinkedIn is probably the best place to say hello. It is and I am completely open. I love learning from other chief product officers. Love talking to people about the embedded finance fee.

It's an ecosystem. We're all on this journey together, so I, I'm an open book when it comes to having those conversations. Nice. Well loved having you on. Thank you so much, Melissa, for joining and yeah, we'll have to follow up in a bit to see how kinda some of the active change going on right now maybe winds up.

But appreciate you [00:32:00] coming on with us. Thank you so much. I would love that. Thank you all. Have a good rest of your day. See ya.