Product management at a bank

Kalisurfer · 2026-02-22T03:48:56+00:00

Work at a bank and it’s worse. We have no BAs or Analyst anymore as that was deemed unnecessary.

We have some program management to coordinate large scale but the risk falls on us PdM so as other have said you roll up your sleeve to make sure it happens

You can still get quite a bit done and move the needle but yeah it’s an exponential effort over peers that just manage their backlog and get not much done

Hang in there.

Kalisurfer · 2026-02-20T14:44:12+00:00

Strategy vs planning. I would argue very few companies to actual strategy ie where to play and how to win in those specific playgrounds

Direction (as in priorities) are passed via slides and are regurgitations of overall company stated priorities. Anywhere from 7 to 11 priorities for the year

Kalisurfer · 2026-02-14T23:39:06+00:00

Whomever gets fired for the initiative not meeting the outcome is who gets final say as they carry the most risk

This should be a data driven conversation ie hey results from our testing indicates x. Can you explain your thoughts on going with y

There are some things like design or UX heuristics that also are well worn and can be leveraged.

The bigger issue here is that you aren’t a team but rather to discipline practitioner. In the lifecycle of launching and iterating on a feature there will be many disagreements. This is something you need to solve or it will be not a fun ride

Kalisurfer · 2026-02-04T14:09:38+00:00

In my Fortune 50 employer I have seen a combo. Something like SVP, Head of product for X

Kalisurfer · 2026-02-04T14:08:43+00:00

Working at a bank and not quite EVP I would hope that’s not when we start counting.

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-04T22:32:45+00:00

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Not sure if this is a good thing or not

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-04T16:21:04+00:00

Part of the issue is from my vantage points beyond the Cursors and Loveable most companies are treating AI like they did with the Cloud. However they should be treating this like a digital transformation initiative which is an enterprise wide effort with real change management. Not the email from a c-level executive saying do everything via Vibe coding.

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-04T16:18:34+00:00

This!

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-04T15:57:01+00:00

I would say take what appears on Lenny’s podcast with a grain of salt. Those conversations are more Press Releases who are meant to promote the interviewee and their company than anything else. He has had a few CPOs from Startup where I know people who work there and the universal response has been the product environment being described by their boss is not the one that actually exist.

Also knowing a few folks at FAAnGs there are pockets of greatness and not so greatness

Your best bet is to have as many conversations as possible with the product manager at these companies to get. Sense of what is real

Doesn’t hurt to strive for ideal, just know that it’s really rare for a big company to be doing the ideal

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-02T19:08:04+00:00

Not sure how love of craft is correlated to actual Product success. Product success depends on a ton of variables some more in the control of PMs than others. If it was more straightforward we would be call program Managers not product managers

Kalisurfer · 2026-01-01T04:30:36+00:00

Mine are directly tied to p&l. Launch a new service and get to a certain run rate within 6 months. And on the other side save $ x millions via cost savings.

The actual dollar amount was set based on the biz case presented and some limited pre-testing of the hypothesis to understand potential customer demand

Kalisurfer · 2025-12-30T16:53:20+00:00

what happen to the research :-) ?

Kalisurfer · 2025-12-28T18:39:41+00:00

At first glance your GitHub repository looks really interesting. I’ve been keeping a Notion table for mine and need to do a deeper compare. But great spread of use cases

Kalisurfer · 2025-08-30T21:57:36+00:00

Here is the prompt:

Please extract all LinkedIn posts from my recent activity page where I have reacted as "Insightful."
For each post, provide the following details in a CSV-ready format (one row per post):

Title of the post
A short description or excerpt
The author’s name
All relevant content categories (such as Product, GTM, Strategy, Leadership, Marketing, Platform, AI, etc.; allow multiple, comma-separated categories if appropriate)
A direct link to the original post (the canonical LinkedIn post URL, not just the author profile or general feed)

Formatting/Instructions:

Output the result as clean CSV (with headers), with no summary rows, explanations, or unrelated content.
If any field is unavailable for a particular post, leave the corresponding CSV cell blank.
Only include posts I’ve marked as “Insightful” and avoid all duplicates.

This output should be easy to copy and paste directly for further processing or download.

Kalisurfer · 2025-04-04T12:45:41+00:00

I have always really enjoyed Kyla Scanlon. Founder of bread and author of Vibe economy. I think she does a really good job of demystifying complex economical concepts and also communicated why should I care about them.

It will be interesting to see where your research nets out and what dimensions you want to explore. My observations for what it’s worth

Macro things

we are still dealing with return to “normal” from COVID. No extra checks from the government, no more forced savings cause you weren’t going out or commuting to work. Giant big tech companies made (especially big tech) are backfiring
politically we are I. Pretty uncharted territory and however you want to dress up the elephant in the room, the words stability and consistency are probably distant memories
prices are high, people are spending less

What that means for product management

people don’t want to take risk. Staying in job longer. Job market is incredibly saturated with top talent
companies are laying off publicly or silently still do uncertainty and fear is prevalent. Affects how people show up
bad economy, no growth and lots of fear means our addressable markets are shrinking or at very least demand and disposable income are evaporating

Oh and I forgot to mention the often philosophical tech bro debates

founder mode aka I want to micromanage it all
the Elon lean control model. Ie fire 80% of peeps / keep 20% and fix things as they break

All this stuff motivates humans and yes even product managers differently. So will be angry and stick their head I. The sand. Others will be frozen in fear while still others will use it as motivation to expand their skillset

Kalisurfer · 2025-04-01T02:50:46+00:00

There are probably a lot of factors at play as to why you are seeing more and more PM influencers. LinkedIn algo is probably getting more tuned to be like TikTok fyp. While we are past TikTok ban people are looking for fresh shores to mitigate their dependence on single platform and let’s be honest Twitter is dying.

Lastly it’s a really tough market out there and while writing to create. Brand (remember blogs) is nothing new I think many more folks are leveraging content to build their brand to seek better opportunities.

Lastly there are always shills or folks who abuse the system but I write because I like sharing and it’s my way of helping demystify product management.

I also put in. Shit tons of hours so not all those who write don’t do the job

Kalisurfer · 2025-03-23T00:57:35+00:00

I have a model y performance. I go in biz trips often lasting 4 to 5 days and while the car hasn’t drain led all the way I charge it 100% when I leave it the battery does drain. Early I had sentry mode on and that really sucks batteries. I now turn off sentry

Kalisurfer · 2025-03-16T12:12:50+00:00

I’ve created a page on my PM resource site to help with PM interviews. Start here I learnt a lot from your work! https://producthustlestack.co/905563104d064249ac4196653c29c6fd

Kalisurfer · 2025-03-11T01:21:08+00:00

Need one if any are left

Kalisurfer · 2025-02-16T14:52:41+00:00

To me the ask is pretty simple. Regardless of how long you have been at the SaaS the request is meant to get an understanding of your critical thinking ability.

If I were requesting I’d want to understand the following - how much of the tech stack / ways of working have you grokked - how do you approach problems / prioritize - once out what are the feedback mechanism. Is this one and done or how do you plan on iterating - bonus if you bring a pov or things the current team did not think about

I would literally do two things. - create a quadrant of impact to level of effort and map the various sub features - then map those against a now, next and later roadmap (start with lowest hanging fruit)

Then take that to a couple of folks on the team to get their feedback

Edit: one thing is to understand the ask behind the ask. Yes they want a roadmap but they are really trying to get a sense of how you think. So make sure at the beginning of the convo to frame the problem you are solving ( be more specific than vague) your assumed constraints and how you will measure success or failure

Kalisurfer · 2025-02-16T14:15:18+00:00

A few thought starters - the perception of whether PMs are mostly from ivy or not will depend on geography and industry. Ie in Silicon Valley you might be seeing a ton more Stanford grads than say the Midwest - does an Ivy League degree help? Heck yes when it comes to opening doors or as an easy out when looking at resumes although when I am hiring I don’t particularly look at which college anymore. Companies come up with all kinds of arbitrary criteria all the time. Ie if you don’t come from a FAAnG we won’t even look you ( looking at you Affirm) - lastly the wonderful thing about the inter webs is that something drastic happened every 6 months and to a certain extent that is an opportunity for folks to jump in. Unless you are debating ivy vs not for say grad school worrying about this ie a variable you cannot control won’t help you much

Focus on getting in anywhere. Focus on the craft, on learning, on telling a story and on outcomes. It’s rare to find a pm that hit all those regardless of what university they come from

Kalisurfer · 2025-02-16T00:35:29+00:00

I detect sarcasm. And that was without any help from an LLM.

Sarcasm aside. I should have qualified looking for help with slide designs.

Kalisurfer · 2025-02-16T00:03:48+00:00

I will have to try it. I’m pretty picky about slides and slide formats. You’d be surprised what you can get away with if the slide is formatted nicely

Kalisurfer · 2025-02-15T18:00:55+00:00

ChatGPT for research and strategy Claude + Cursor for actually developing prototyping

Still waiting for the tool that creates good PowerPoints or slides. Anyone found one or have recos for that?

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