Peter Bailey: [00:00:00] So you know the decision. Do you launch something that everybody's excited about but you know is not ready? Or do you hold the line and potentially risk disappointment? Put your job on the line even though it's the right thing to do. 

Trisha Price: If you build software or lead people who do, then you're in the right place.

Trisha Price: This is Hard Calls, real decisions, real leaders, real outcomes. Hi everyone. I'm Trisha Price, and welcome back to the Hard Calls Podcast. On today's show, we have Peter Bailey, Executive Director at JP Morgan Payments, where he leads product teams responsible for developer experience, developer portal, and API platforms.

Trisha Price: In other words. Anytime you're moving money electronically, there's a good chance their systems are helping make it happen. Peter and I know each other well because we go way back. We both found our passion for cutting edge technology and product early in our careers in the FinTech industry. Working together at Primatics [00:01:00] Financial during our time together.

Trisha Price: We reminisce on the values and mentality at Primatics Financial and how it impacted our career journeys and product. We discussed how to navigate AI and technology disruption and product innovation in a highly regulated industry like banking. We talked about the surprising role customers play, and then Peter flipped our roles and asked me some hard questions.

Trisha Price: Hi Peter. I'm so excited to welcome you to Hard Calls. 

Peter Bailey: Very excited to be here, Trisha thank you for having me honored to be a guest and looking forward to talking with you in this format. 

Trisha Price: It's gonna be a lot of fun. Peter, as you know, this is the Hard Calls podcast, so I like to start every single episode with a hard call that you've had to make.

Trisha Price: So, looking back over your career, recent or further back. Tell us about a hard call you've had to make. What made it really challenging and what'd you learn from it? 

Peter Bailey: There's always one that really [00:02:00] jumps out to me. It was shortly after I joined JP Morgan. I was hired to be the global head of product for our wholesale credit risk group.

Peter Bailey: And shortly before I joined, we had received some constructive, if not critical feedback from the Federal Reserve about our CCAR submissions. And CCAR is the process that large banks go through to submit. Their stress tests and demonstrate capital adequacy and our ability to pay dividends and kind of execute our plan.

Peter Bailey: And we had received feedback specific to the way that we were providing information and our reporting. And we're at risk of not being able to execute our plan. And so when I was hired, this was the problem I was given and to go and fix that. And what we realized almost immediately was that a lot of the information that we were providing to to the Fed had to do with our customer's financial data.[00:03:00] 

Peter Bailey: It was the vast majority of the information that we were providing, and we had a pretty broken way of collecting it and reporting it across all of our different lines of business. Across our investment bank, commercial bank, private bank, business bank. All of these different teams were doing it differently, and ultimately by the time it got to the Fed, we were not showing up well and the Fed knew that. And it was raising concerns on our ability to manage risk and the information we were reporting. And one of the things we quickly realized was that we have a lot of public clients, publicly traded entities, and a lot of this financial data is publicly available.

Peter Bailey: So let's bring it into a new platform and we can structure it and ensure that we're delivering this information consistently. And while this was not the end solution, it definitely was a huge step forward and it was gonna be able to demonstrate significant progress that we were improving our reporting and.

Peter Bailey: Ultimately it was gonna be foundational to a lot of the risk [00:04:00] transformation that we wanted to have at the bank, and ultimately that I was responsible for delivering. So fast forward, within a quarter, we have a platform that we're ready to launch and everyone's really excited about the capabilities, but ultimately like improving the data and the submission and CCAR.

Peter Bailey: And we've made commitments, to our senior management chain, to our regulators. And as we were approaching that launch, one of the things that really started to become apparent to me and was just not sitting well, is that the vendor we had chosen to provide the data, just was not the right fit.

Peter Bailey: And, no matter how hard we tried. It was becoming more and more apparent that we had made the wrong decision in terms of how we were bringing this data into our ecosystem. And so we had a decision to make of, do we launch and meet this [00:05:00] target, and I think we still would've been able to show significant strides from where we were.

Peter Bailey: Or do we look at it and say, we've this is not the right time, this is not the right. Product and we need to take a little bit more time and go back to the drawing board so you know the decision. Do you launch something that everybody's excited about but you know is not ready? Or do you hold the line and potentially risk disappointment, put your job on the line even though it's the right thing to do?

Peter Bailey: I think so much. 

Trisha Price: Yes. So much pressure to make that call. 

Peter Bailey: And as product managers we have these decisions and you get to make these decisions and that's the exciting part. In my case, I was very new to JP Morgan and I was in that point where you, you're trying to prove yourself and ultimately, I held a lot.

Peter Bailey: And this was the big decision, that I got to make or had to make early in my career at JP Morgan. And, you know, I think that decision and reflection it may have almost [00:06:00] got me fired, but in the same vein, it accelerated my career and it helped build my career. And I think it's because it, it helped me establish trust that I was willing to make the hard call and not necessarily the popular call.

Trisha Price: I love that you shared that example because. You know, you made the hard decision, the hard call, maybe not the popular one. And especially in a company like JP Morgan in something as visible as a risk process with the Fed, that's immense pressure and it's such a great learning moment for all of our listeners to really understand when you make the right calls.

Trisha Price: That, you know, when your gut is the right decision for the company and not the right decision just for yourself in the moment to feel good, it usually pays back in terms of career. 

Peter Bailey: Yeah. You know, in the moment it's hard to know. Right. What I've [00:07:00] learned and taken from it is really to trust your gut and to be as transparent as you can.

Peter Bailey: Yeah. You're not having to make the decision. It's not just you, right? Yeah. You are collaborating with as many people around sharing the information you have, sharing the perspectives, doing the pro con analysis. And ultimately if you know, it gets down to one person making the decision, you've taken all of those, you've taken all those perspectives into account and it doesn't, it, it feels more like a group decision.

Peter Bailey: And obviously you're working very hard to build consensus. And I think that moment it, you know, was interesting in that it happened so quickly in my career at JP Morgan. But it is one that I've certainly learned a lot from, taken a lot from, and I know when you asked me to think about a hard call, I immediately went to this one decision.

Peter Bailey: I still think to this day, it's probably the hardest call I've had to make as a product manager because of the circumstance I was in. 

Trisha Price: I love it and so relatable for everybody. [00:08:00] Peter, I wanna take a couple steps backwards in our career down memory lane for folks. And like I said in the intro, early in our careers, you and I worked together at Primatics. And Primatics was such an interesting place.

Trisha Price: To work for you and I, because it started out as a services company. We started to build a product, but we sort of had some outsourcing and services around that product. And so the company really went through a transformation as I think we did too. In terms of learning what product was and learning how to be a product company.

Trisha Price: And so I'd love to just talk a little bit about what you learned during that time and how the experience shaped you,and how you ended up, you know, continuing down the path of product and where you are today. 

Peter Bailey: Yeah, so much and I've got a good question for you, as part of this as well. Yeah. I think the first thing is.

Peter Bailey: Like, I never left [00:09:00] FinTech after Primatics. And the interesting thing is I didn't know at the time that it was, it was getting into FinTech. You know, my story and journey to Primatics is I was, you know, had been working in the investment industry. I had been in New York at a hedge fund, and when I moved back to Northern Virginia.

Peter Bailey: And was being recruited to Primatics. I was anchoring around and what I was being sold is we were an M&A company. We were helping banks go through mergers and acquisitions. And so, you know, first couple of weeks on the job, and I'm learning a lot about technology and learning how we were going to be solving these problems was was unique.

Peter Bailey: It was not what I expected. But I certainly, I loved it. And that really has kind of set forth my career. So, as I was kind of, I always think about this term that has now become ubiquitous and FinTech, and I wanted to ask you. If at the time like, was Primatics [00:10:00] a FinTech? Did we even know that we were working for a FinTech at that time?

Trisha Price: I don't think we used that term. Do you? I don't remember using that term. I don't. I don't know that I thought about it in that context. I think, you know, I came from a different background, like almost the opposite of, of you coming in, right? I came from a technology background. I had actually been an engineer and had spent most of my time either working for product tech companies.

Trisha Price: I had that, that, that stint at Fannie Mae as well, but had always been in technology. And so for me coming in, I came into the company thinking I was coming to work for a product company that was in the early stages that just happened to use some consulting revenue to bootstrap creating the product. So it's really funny because I feel like you and I came into the company like from exact [00:11:00] opposite angles.

Trisha Price: I don't know that I would've said it was a FinTech company either, but I would've said I was joining a technology company, building a product, and just using the services revenue to help fund it. 

Peter Bailey: I think we can both imagine which founder recruited us based on those, based on those stories.

Trisha Price: I can't wait for them to both listen to this, Peter. 

Peter Bailey: Yeah. Well, you know, I was. Reflecting. So, you know, kind of the learning perspective. I think first and foremost, like meeting you, being, having this opportunity, You know, meeting Mike, like many of my best friends, my mentors came from that experience.

Peter Bailey: And like I said, I never really left the industry while I now work in a much larger company. Almost everything that I'm doing, I feel like grew out of, or I learned at Primatics and working together.I think that maybe the, the two biggest takeaways back to kind of your point of, of services in the product.

Peter Bailey: One, just the customer empathy. That, [00:12:00] again, not in the moment, was something that I was consciously thinking about, which I now all the time think about and everything that we're doing in, in product. But there's certain moments that I reflect on frequently at Primatics where in my early days of kind of like starting to adopt product, we were very focused on like, "Hey, customer, do this yourself."

Peter Bailey: Right. We, we built an interface. You can do this. It's self-service. And I distinctly remember many conversations where the, our clients would, they weren't interested in doing it themselves. Like that's not what they wanted. I don't want your product or your software, I want it to achieve the outcome.

Peter Bailey: Like, I wanna actually acquire the next bank, or I want to complete this integration so we can move forward. And that would, that was really interesting. And I think something to always think about of like, what is your customer trying to achieve and what is the outcome that they're looking for?

Trisha Price: I love that. And [00:13:00] you just made me think about like today's environment. How we would've solved that versus then. Like I think in today's environment, we would've immediately jumped to like, what kind of a agentic interface could we create? So they could just ask questions and we would produce results. But you know, this was not that time.

Trisha Price: Right? This was a lot longer ago. Mm-hmm. And at that time, you're right, the answer to have come customer empathy and solve their problem was let's create an outsourcing team that does it for them. And it really doesn't matter. What the solution is, right? Solutions change based on technology and what's available to us, but what mattered is that we solved the customer problem in a way that worked for our customer base, which was great.

Peter Bailey: Yeah, and I think that approach is kind of the second learning that I've spent a lot of time thinking about in my career, which is just the, the value of building really good product. And where you need to invest [00:14:00] in, in technology and product experiences versus services. The Primatics experience was one where, yes, we had started with services, we had very talented consultants, we had very smart people.

Peter Bailey: And my, you know, opinion is that it's easier to solve things with services. It's easier to solve a problem. Yeah. You know, you can put smart people on it and, what I think we started to learn, and if you reflect back, is it's very hard to scale that model. And it's much harder to build a product that can be dynamic enough to solve all of your customers different problems and make it flexible enough or configurable enough.

Peter Bailey: And so, as I've grown in my career, I spent a lot of my time thinking about the first principles and. Is this a problem that can be solved at scale within a [00:15:00] product, within technology? And really think very critically before signing up for a, you know a launch or a strategy that would require people or would be signing our operational teams up to have a lot of manual intervention.

Peter Bailey: And not to say you should never do that. I think there's an age and a stage of a company and, you know, a product that you're launching, where you may need or want to surround it with people to ensure its success. But I think that's definitely something I'm much more conscious of now based on the experiences that we had at at Primatics.

Trisha Price: Mean, it's fascinating when you talk about it because you're talking about some of the problems we had that limited scale at a fairly small company, you know, startup. Basically to mid-size. And now here you are at one of the largest financial institutions in the world building, you know, an experience that's complicated and absolutely has to scale.

Trisha Price: Right? And so how did [00:16:00] you make a transition like that? I mean, it's literally. As opposite. I mean, you can't surround what you're building a developer experience for payments with lots of services and almost band-aids as I would say. So how'd you make that transition? 

Peter Bailey: Yeah. You know, I think that challenge that you're laying out is probably what really brought me to JP Morgan initially.

Peter Bailey: You know, it wasn't as if it was a complete 180 in that we had been trying to sell our software into the largest banks. We had been trying to sell to JP Morgan, and we were almost just too early, right? The big banks had to learn how to adopt the cloud and data privacy, and sharing confidential information.

Peter Bailey: Which led to kind of us spinning up almost a bootstrapped advisory practice. And so I had the opportunity to lead that and work with some of these larger banks and see firsthand some of the challenges that they were experiencing. And so I think that the challenge to really come in and say, Hey, am I at the point of my career where I [00:17:00] can solve these problems, where I can deliver this at scale is what to me was really exciting.

Peter Bailey: And ultimately why I said yes to coming to JP Morgan. And so I think some of the principles that we learned earlier in the, in, in our career at Pried and just at smaller companies in general, I tried to bring with me. And speed to is certainly one, right? I think our, our biggest differentiator, at Primatics was around being able to, one, being first to market with a relatively niche offering and being able to continue to launch and ship quickly.

Peter Bailey: And there's, you know, many times we talked about like, why aren't the incumbents. Catching up. And, it's, you know, because we, we continue to, you know, bring, you know, just chip fast and kind of stay ahead of the curb. And I think that's certainly a principle that I still try and instill and myself and our [00:18:00] teams.

Peter Bailey: You know, JP Morgan, it's a little bit bigger. You constantly have to be thinking, very big thinking at scale, but delivering small. Right. I think the, the you have the risk of like becoming paralyzed by trying to boil the ocean. If you're trying to solve the biggest problem that is gonna work for every JP Morgan customer and work in every region and at every customer size.

Peter Bailey: And so, you know, I still try and encapsulate that, those concepts of, of speed, for sure and to my day to day. I think the other, and maybe the biggest one was just when you work at a small company, and you and I used to talk about this is just the ownership thinking. Like, you have to think like an owner.

Peter Bailey: And I don't know, you know, that was, I was conscious of that, but it's kind of like you're just gonna do what it takes to be successful. Which means some days you're selling, some days you're solutioning. Some days you're a product manager. Some days you're on the floor with a technologist. Like you have to do all of those jobs to build a great [00:19:00] product.

Peter Bailey: And I think that was one of the things I just loved about working at a small company and it's, you have to be conscious of bringing that mentality to a larger company. Because we have functions that are at scale for all of those things. We have a design practice and project managers and sales and business development, product managers and engineers and qa and those are, functions that exist.

Peter Bailey: But if you, if you rely on just, I'm gonna stay in my lane, you're likely not going to be successful at having the impact that, that you wanna have. And so applying that ownership thinking, which doesn't mean you're necessarily doing all of the jobs, but you are consciously connecting. The people and the functions, and collaborating and building that comradery and just thinking, like, thinking like an owner, is love.

Peter Bailey: That is something that I brought from, from JP Morgan to or from Primatics to JP Morgan. 

Trisha Price: I love that ownership [00:20:00] thinking, and it is so critical as we move up in our careers and become leaders that regardless which function we're in, we can take that ownership mentality. And I think you and I did do pretty much every role that was possible when we were at Primatics and so.

Trisha Price: Kind of being able to have empathy for all the roles around us, and then use that in the ownership thinking. I love that as a big piece of how you've been successful as you've transitioned, into the banking industry. And, you know, the banking industry did. Industry is incredibly, highly regulated and you work for one of the largest, most complex ones in the world yet.

Trisha Price: You are innovating and you are doing new things and there are disruptors popping up all over the place, and you have new technologies, ai, blockchain, crypto how do you approach innovating in the space of payments [00:21:00] with all of the new tech coming up yet still balancing the importance of. Of this regulated large institution?

Peter Bailey: Great question. I think the fact that there is so much innovation in particularly the payment space is actually what brought me to the job that I'm in now. You know, we started the conversation, I joined JP Morgan to lead our risk practice and really enjoyed it. And had a great had a kind of a great role, great team, and that.

Peter Bailey: Brought us into COVID and you know, during COVID it's like the height of when risk platforms, are these companies gonna go under, is the airline industry gonna fail? Is the hospitality industry gonna fail? Like you talk about stress testing, this was. A everyday exercise for us. And, it was really gratifying and satisfying to see a lot of the hard work I had done, you know, get, really put and stress tested in its own, in its own way.

Peter Bailey: But at about the same time, you know, looking at what was happening in the [00:22:00] industry of just, the amount of apps that you're downloading on your phone to send money, Venmo, PayPal, square Cash app, Stripe, like just on and on. And with blockchain and some of these, these new you know technologies and crypto starting to become, you know, a bit more ubiquitous is what brought me into the payment space.

Peter Bailey: And, I think that really is kind of my, my own ethos. So I'm gonna answer this question like twofold. I think me personally. It's learn, learn, learn. Like I spend probably 10 to 15 hours a week listening to podcasts, reading, taking online classes through Udemy and just training myself on these technologies that are going to have a big impact.

Peter Bailey: I think it's fair to say they will have an impact. Now how big? We can talk about that. But being able to be conversive and understand how I might be able to take advantage of them. Has been something that's [00:23:00] I've really enjoyed just growing personally on the professional front. And you know, I think as a product manager, we should all, maybe the number one trait we need to have is be curious.

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Peter Bailey: Right. Think about how could you use blockchain in your platform or in your product? How could you use AI in your product? Is there a role for these innovative technologies? And if you're, if you're not thinking that, I think the disruption part of it feels threatening, but if you are, it feels really exciting.

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Peter Bailey: I think the second piece, certainly for me in my role that I have now is being really intentional because it's not easy, right? To incorporate these new ideas and new technologies, some of which. You are, can be a little bit scary, or in our case, we have not yet fully positioned around how we want to use AI, or, [00:24:00] blockchain or crypto.

Peter Bailey: And so you have to be very intentional about how do you go and explore the art of the possible. And I think the third is going with that, of collaborating with the experts. So there's not gonna be a defined path that says, Hey, here's exactly how you should incorporate an AI agent into your website yet that we'll get there.

Peter Bailey: But if you wait, you know, you have that risk of really falling behind and being disruptive. And one of the things that's always kept me at JP Morgan, I'm now going on my eighth year here, is how innovative of an organization we are. And, that, you know, starts at the top. But all of our leaders are constantly talking about innovation and investing heavily in new technologies.

Peter Bailey: And so, you know, I think that trickles down and I've really tried to embrace that and build a lot of kind of my own career and that [00:25:00] curiosity and exploring the art of the possible, to go and build a great product and to go build great experiences for our clients.

Trisha Price: I often talk about innovation with, you know, the industry conferences and customers, and I talk about it just like you did Peter. I talk about the fact that innovation requires. Inside out thinking and outside in thinking and inside out thinking, meaning you've gotta learn, you've gotta go play with these technologies.

Trisha Price: You've gotta take classes, you gotta get your hands on, you know, all the different models, all the different AI tools that are out there and figure out which ones work. And it's not just like which ones work, which ones work in which situations. But then you have to combine that with, okay, like it's great that new technology is coming out, it's, but.

Trisha Price: What's the customer problem you're trying to solve? And so I call that outside in thinking and it's like you really can't innovate until you can find sort of that [00:26:00] perfect intersection between the inside out thinking and the outside in thinking. And you know, that's what you were just articulating. And it's so great to hear that's encouraged at a company like JPMorgan and not just at.

Trisha Price: You know, startups and tech companies because I think that's important to serve our customers and to do our jobs well as product leaders. And you know, for you in part. You know, you are trying to innovate. You are, you are innovating your shipping product and you're doing that to attract new customers and also you have existing customers.

Trisha Price: And a lot of times when it comes to different banking products, well any product really, customers can be resistant to change. So how do you handle that trade off of, you know, taking advantage of innovation and some of this inside out thinking that you're doing and investing in yourself. Yet making sure that you are putting customers first and thinking [00:27:00] through their experience.

Peter Bailey: In my experience, it's always easier to build something new. Right? Green field, brand new idea, let's go and attract new customer segment. You know, it's a lot of fun doing that. And it, it probably is, it's quite a bit easier than, you know, building for your existing customer base and taking the complexity into consideration.

Peter Bailey: You know, one of the things that I think I've gotten better at in my career, and I've learned so much at JP Morgan. Is, I think the earlier that you can start talking to your customers about your ideas, the better. Yeah. So if you, if you are building something new, there's no harm in going and talking to your customer and saying, we have an idea.

Peter Bailey: We want to be great in this space. So we wanna be, we wanna have the best developer experience. We want to make all of our APIs publicly accessible. We want to deliver self-service digitally native capabilities to you, but we're not there [00:28:00] yet. But we would really love for you to collaborate with us and bring you along for that ride.

Peter Bailey: And if you're open to it. Like maybe even try it out or join an advisory panel or participate in a beta. And there's a lot of different softer ways to bring your existing customer a lot closer to the innovation. You're not breaking anything that they're doing, you're not forcing them to migrate. And I think that approach builds a lot of trust.

Peter Bailey: It builds a lot of very strong relationships, and you're getting really great feedback and kind of pressure testing your ideas and what you're building. But if you do it right, like there's an opportunity to create this shared accountability and kind of a, almost like a pride where your clients are participating in that journey and eventually are, Hey, I want the new thing.

Peter Bailey: I, how quickly can I get there? And can then be an advocate for the next wave of customers who maybe didn't go on that journey with you. [00:29:00] But can be advocates for the products that you're building. So that's, you know, certainly one approach that, that I've really tried to employ and really encourage, you know, my teams and you know, the people I work with to spend as much time as possible sharing the vision and sharing the intent and sharing the strategy, not just sharing the product.

Trisha Price: I love that. I love your concept of one building trust. To bring them on the journey. But equally important to building trust is getting their feedback, getting their buy-in, getting them excited about it. So they're obviously sharing their feedback, they're helping you build a great product. You have more confidence in your product because customers are giving you that clear feedback and helping you design what works for them.

Trisha Price: But then they're there, they're excited and they can, you know. You know, be your biggest cheerleader and advocate with other customers and talk about why it works for them. And I think [00:30:00] that's such a great approach for sure. 

Peter Bailey: I think that there's also a huge piece of just, by sharing the vision and the art of the possible, you are in a very collaborative posture early on.

Peter Bailey: Yeah. Oftentimes I think like a lot of the strategy of launching a new product is like, let's launch an MVP. It truly a minimum viable product, and you're bringing that to a customer. And all you're gonna hear is all the new things. What are the next set of features? Where's this, where's that? I need this.

Peter Bailey: I want that. And you're in a bit of a defensive posture and you're playing catch up from the beginning versus this is where I like to go. How does that sound? Do you want to go on that, that journey with us? Is that the right journey to go on? Do we have the right roadmap to get there? You're also indirectly saying, I don't have all of that right now.

Peter Bailey: And, I think it's been really successful to helping [00:31:00] us with adoption. So when our customers are adopting our newer products, there is a understanding of this broader roadmap and commitment to continue to be great. And I think that's where a brand like JP Morgan and the investments that we've made over years into our different platforms really helps because there's a higher level of trust that, hey, what I'm getting today is gonna get better tomorrow and the next day.

Peter Bailey: And by, you know, a year from now. Should be really great and my voice is gonna be heard and will be incorporated into into the experiences that, that I'm adopting. 

Trisha Price: I love that. And, you know, it's clear in your prior roles and then. In your current one as well, you've been really successful at this balance of innovating, investing in yourself, investing in your team, and learning new technology, whether it's AI or blockchain or crypto, and all the things that relate to payments and and beyond.

Trisha Price: Right? And [00:32:00] that's not easy to do when you're balancing what you just talked about, which is building customer trust and bringing customers along for the journey. There are lots of listeners out there today who haven't been able to balance those two things who are struggling. At their institutions, especially ones that are highly regulated or moving slower than others to do what you've done.

Trisha Price: What advice do you have for product leaders who are struggling to sort of get over this hump and transform and take advantage of some of the newer technologies and concepts? 

Peter Bailey: Yeah, I think it's invest in yourself. Learning in this environment because of all these new technologies is not an expensive proposition.

Peter Bailey: Right. It's a priority conversation that you need to have with yourself around am I going to carve out time to go and learn about these new ideas? And [00:33:00] everybody learns differently, but because of all of the different formats, whether it's watching YouTube, listening to a podcast while you're working out, doing some hands-on experimenting with, you know, an Udemy type platform.

Peter Bailey: There's a lot of different ways to go and educate yourself. But I think it's, you know, putting down,you just letting yourself be okay with not being the expert. certainly I had the moment of feeling pretty threatened, not too long ago where you're like, man, like I don't have a background in computer science or artificial, you know, or data science and everything's AI and LLM and everything you read is that, you know, working in technology, there's gonna be efficiencies.

Peter Bailey: And so I really just took it as I think an opportunity. Said, Hey, like, I'd love to just go and learn more and understand how this works and understand how it could be applied. And particularly with, you know, my case and I think we should all be thinking about this, is as product managers, I think [00:34:00] we have different strengths ranging from, you know, creativity, strategy, down to actually execution and, you know, hardcore delivery.

Peter Bailey: How do you take these technologies and apply them to your strengths? 

Trisha Price: Yeah. And I think no matter which of those strengths you are and how technical you are, there's an opportunity to do exactly what you just said. 

Peter Bailey: Yeah. I had a question for you, 'cause I thought you were gonna go in a slightly different direction, which is,as a product manager, this differentiating between being a subject matter expert and the domain that you're working in versus being a expert product manager.

Peter Bailey: Your career of working at Fannie Mae, the largest loan institution in the world to come into Primatics, we were working at the intersection of risk and finance, but ultimately building awesome loan accounting engine and then reserving. Taking that expertise to nCino where you continued to kind of build upon a similar set of [00:35:00] expertise.

Peter Bailey: Yeah. And then go into Pendo. Where the domain is not important, based on my understanding and more the experience that the consumer or the business is having. I'd love to hear your thoughts around like that intersection of what makes the great product manager and how much of it is truly the domain versus the function and some of the things we're talking about here.

Trisha Price: You know, I love that question, Peter, for me. I felt, you know, there's obviously certain pieces to all of our success that are sort of, our attitude and our aptitude, our willingness to learn the questions, our engine, you know, our drive. And I think a lot of what made me successful was that right. I'd always be the one who was willing to outwork everybody and ask a lot of questions [00:36:00] and learn.

Trisha Price: I did become an expert in a lot of, I'll just call it the loan domain lending credit risk lending, loan accounting, through those experiences, and I certainly think that that was a really important part of my success at nCino in terms of getting customers to trust me. To your earlier conversations about getting customer trust, and I think that expertise in something as important when you're building and selling a commercial loan origination system to some of the largest banks in the world, they wanna know that the person in charge of product understands what the heck they're talking about.

Trisha Price: And I think that expertise and that knowledge, earned me the right for customers to trust me and earned me the opportunity for the role. But I think what ended up separating our product at nCino from the others and why we got the Black Turtleneck Award for innovation and best product and [00:37:00] why we snuck up on our competitors and outperformed them and out executed it and won that market, I think was because of my product craft.

Trisha Price: And I think that, you know, when we did things like auto spreading, which is for people who don't care about banking, basically taking a financial statement of a company and extracting, using AI all the information out of it and categorizing it, no one else was doing those things, right? This is well before the LLMs, and I think that was the innovative mindset, and that was my product mindset that helped me execute and win.

Trisha Price: And so when I decided it was time to do something different, I decided that honing that craft was what was critically important for this next piece of my career. And I knew there'd be no better place to do it than coming to Pendo where I'm surrounded by the best product managers. I get to spend time with the best product leaders all over and really understand what tools they're missing, what problems they're trying to [00:38:00] solve.

Trisha Price: And so, just like you talked about, the ways that you're investing in yourself by listening to podcasts and listening and learning, that is truly why when I was leaving nCino and figuring out my next opportunity, I wanted to come to Pendo was to really learn and hone that craft, and then I know I can apply it to anything.

Trisha Price: And so, I think that the craft of product is. The only way and the most important way to win if you're building great product and execute. But I think when you're working in a highly regulated industry like I was at nCino and you are at JP Morgan you can't earn people's trust if you don't know what you're talking about.

Peter Bailey: That's great answer. I've always wanted to know that. 

Trisha Price: That's funny because you and I have known each other for so long and I don't think we've ever really had this conversation. 

Peter Bailey: Yeah. I mean, go, going back to, you know, what you were asking me and as product managers like that's an area of investment, right.

Peter Bailey: And it's an area in building your own confidence and knowing that the things that you've learned [00:39:00] in one area can be applied to another area. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. Great advice for all of our listeners today too, right? You don't have to feel pigeonholed or trapped. If you've always worked on, you know, a horizontal platform like Pendo, like anything you know of that nature, that doesn't mean you can't go work in a highly specialized industry and take what you've learned.

Trisha Price: It just means you're gonna need to invest to learn that. And if you have been in a highly regulated or specialized vertical, and you wanna apply that. You have those product management skills, be confident in 'em, but be willing to invest in 'em as you, as you try something new. So I really like that. 

Peter Bailey: Yep.

Trisha Price: Great. Well, Peter, I thank you so much for being on Hard Calls today. Thank you for taking me down a little bit of memory lane and sharing a lot of your experience and expertise with our listeners. We really appreciate it. 

Peter Bailey: Oh, it's been an honor. Thank you for having me. It's been a lot of fun. [00:40:00] Wish this podcast the best of success in the future and look forward to seeing you soon.

Trisha Price: Thanks, Peter. All right. Bye. Thank you for listening to Hard Calls, the product podcast, where we share best practices and all the things you need to succeed. If you enjoyed the show today, share with your friends and come back for more.