In Product Management, The Product's Never Finished

In product management, it’s easy to feel like your product is never finished. Arun Mohan, Director of Product at Credit Karma, describes the constant process of moving products forward. Matt also asks Arun about driving innovation, building the right work culture, and how to embrace the quick and constant improvement of the product world. 

Arun has spent most of his eight years at Credit Karma building the home and mortgage business from scratch. He’s a people-first product leader who thrives on building and inspiring cross-functional teams to create impactful products.

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Key Quotes:

“I think from a mindset point of view, know that there is no finished product and it is actually the continuous process of improving your product, that is the art. And I think embracing that and appreciating that is half the battle, I think, to have the right culture within the team.”

“Pick one problem and really go deep and really try to give it your best shot and focus all your energy towards that. That is one key element to building, to reducing the time to successful product.”

“You can always make a product better. So you have to keep enjoying that process of continuously improving your product. That is product management. And I think you can ask any PM like, do you like your product? And most of them will say, not really. It could be better. Right? And it never ends.”

“Make sure you have an outcome oriented culture and not a milestone oriented culture. I think it's gonna be really important. And this is where the role of the PM comes in. Your ability to set the context of what's the North star, what's the ultimate outcome we're driving towards, break it down into chunks and have specific outcomes for each of those chunks. And then how we get there is a team sport. Creating that sandbox for the team and setting the right outcome structure and learning structure is the PM's job.”

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Time stamps:

00:53 What Credit Karma does

03:44 Building successful products

06:45 What does a good MVP look like?

15:23 Balancing security and user experience

20:51 Build vs. Buy

26:02 Driving incentives across teams

31:33 Future thinking

38:01 Quick hits

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Links:

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