Episode 230: Structuring Product Teams Around Outcomes with Jose Quesada
Join us this week on the Product Thinking Podcast as we explore the intersection of digital innovation and product management with Jose Quesada, VP of Product Management for Mobile and Web at American Express. With over 15 years of experience, Jose provides valuable insights into transforming digital experiences within the financial industry and the pivotal role of experimentation in fostering innovation.
Jose shares his approach to creating a culture of safe experimentation, the seamless integration of digital and physical financial products, and the importance of developing softer skills in product management. He offers a compelling perspective on how digital transformation is reshaping customer interactions and product strategies at American Express.
Wondering how to drive product innovation while balancing customer needs and business goals? Tune in for practical insights from Jose's experience.
You'll hear us talk about:
11:25 - Embracing Experimentation
Jose discusses the importance of using experimentation as a tool to reduce uncertainty, encouraging his team to innovate and learn from mistakes without fear.
25:31 - Data-Driven Product Strategy
Jose emphasizes the significance of a dual-track approach in product development, balancing immediate business outcomes with future-focused discovery.
33:24 - Building Psychological Safety for Innovation
Jose shares strategies for fostering a team environment where making mistakes is part of the learning process, thereby driving innovation and growth.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Jose Quesada: the context and the timing of transformation matters quite a lot. Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean that you should do it. You really need good timing. Sometimes you may have a great idea to transform your business digitally, but it's not the right time for that. That is a key part when it comes to the success of any transformation. when you do discovery and when you think about the future, it's not all about understanding what you are gonna do, sometimes understanding what you're not gonna do. It's not like every single idea that you come up with it's gonna prove right. In fact, I'd say that probably means that you're not pushing, you know, enough .
You really need to push for experimentation and, and also I, I think you need to be cool with your teams making mistakes. And in a way I'm very happy with sometimes when we run experiments and everything looks red and my team comes to me and they're super worried, I'm like, that's fine. That's the reason why you experimented in the first place. So I really think about test as a way to reduce uncertainty as much as possible. And also there are many times where I see my teams maybe coming up with solutions or strategies that I don't necessarily agree with but I just let them go and do it and make the mistake. Because I just think about when I was starting and that's how I grew as a product manager. That's how I, maybe got the product intuition that I've got right now. And I personally feel quite a lot that softer skills are way more important than hard skills as a product manager, and if you don't let your team makes mistakes, they're not gonna be able to grow.
Intro
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[00:01:23] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:02:01] Melissa Perri: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Jose Quesada, the VP of Product Management for Mobile and Web at American Express. With over 15 years of digital product experience, Jose challenges the norms of digital transformation, emphasizing thoughtful evolution.
I'm thrilled to dive into how his innovative strategies have transformed membership value in the digital finance space.
But before we talk to Jose, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them here every single week. Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what's on your mind.
Hey, product people. I have some very exciting news. Our new mastering product strategy course is now live on Product Institute. I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to product institute.com and use code launch for $200 off at checkout.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa
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[00:03:00] Melissa Perri: Dear Melissa, I transitioned from an SVP of product role with strong growth to a CPO position at a PE owned company managing three B2B solutions, one growing learning business, and two declining mature products, suffering from years of underinvestment and poor product management. The company operates with an engineering led sales driven culture, where the CEO constantly shifts priorities and expects immediate growth while the board focuses on EBITDA for a three to four year exit. Despite having no product operations, discipline, and dealing with constant firefighting from poor releases, i'm trying to implement rigorous product strategy processes, but leadership wants quick wins, presented in just a few slides rather than data-driven validation. How can I successfully transform this organization to become more product led, manage CEO and board expectations about the time and tough decisions required for the real change and survive this challenging transition as other CPOs have done?
Well, this certainly does not sound easy, but it does sound like a common problem.
I think the issue is when you start to take over a company that is in a challenging spot. People wanted to turn around very quickly, and your job here is to sift through the noise and try to set realistic expectations. But a big part of this as well is trying to find out what you can realistically do to help turn it around now if you can, or versus later.
So your job here is to sift through the two businesses, through business lines, it sounds, and try to figure out, are these actually growing or is there any growth potential in them? Are they declining because of things that we can fix? Are they declining because markets have changed or people are moving on to different solutions, or they're obsolete now? You wanna really look into those different things and try to figure out if there are quick wins that you can do to turn these things around.
And everybody's gonna have opinions. So you want to step back from the noise and try to figure out where do we place our bets? Now when you're starting in one of these positions too, it's not bad to have quick wins. Sometimes we say: Hey, let's really focus on this really long-term strategy.
But if you're in a PE-backed company and they are trying to exit in a three to four year timeline, you do need to get some quick wins. We have to see if we can return it to growth or turn it around into a growth product in that timeline to get investor expectations up and to exit for what we want. So that's your mission.
And as crazy as that sounds sometimes, versus build a long-term holistic strategy for our product, we have to work within our bounds. So one of our constraints is that we are going to exit in three to four years with a certain multiple. How far are we away from that right now is what you should go and learn from your investors.
Where are we right now? What do these businesses need to look like in order to get the return that they expect? From there, you're gonna work backwards and you're gonna try to figure out what do we do now versus what do we do later and how do we work our way up to that three to four year timeline? Then you're gonna go revisit the product and start to look for the options to do that.
And that might involve, putting together this nice three to four year long timeline of product strategy and your vision and what you wanna do and work backwards from it. That's what you should be doing, but you also have to be realistic. You have to earn trust when you're a new CPO, It's really important that you earn trust from your board and from your CEO.
So you do wanna demonstrate some quick wins. You wanna get some people onto your side. So I wouldn't dismiss that. What can you do that could show some momentum, some quick wins. It also sounds like the team has had a lot of poor releases. You need to turn that around. You have to reset expectations that they can ship.
So can you carve something out that might be meaningful? Maybe it's not the most meaningful thing you've ever done, but little bit meaningful to gain that trust, to show some momentum, to get the team a win so that people can back off and then see your strategy and your plan. That's a big part of this.
Everybody's gonna wanna go faster, especially in the age of ai. Everybody wants to go super, super fast, right? You have to come back with realistic expectations, but you do have to keep in mind that you have to earn trust. So what can you do to earn that trust so that you earn the right to set those realistic expectations, to set that great product strategy, and to be able to move the company more towards a product led direction.
That's really what's going to be there. So one of CPOs that I really admire, he told me about a story where he went to the sales team. It was a very sales led company, and he asked at the beginning. Hey, what's one thing that you've been asking for forever that you think is gonna make a difference in sales, that will help you close sales?
Show me the data that we could do. And when they told them, they said, oh, we've been like looking for this thing for the last five years. We keep asking for it, but the old CPO was going, oh no, we can't do that. Like we have to follow my process. We're not allowed to just throw things over here. We have to follow this process.
We have to look at the long term vision. And what he did is he looked at it and he said, you know what? That makes total sense. Is it the most important thing we could be building? No, but it's pretty quick. It's pretty easy. It'll take a team. Let me just do this to garner goodwill. And he shipped it and helped people close sales.
And the sales team loved him, and the head of sales became his best friend. And then they worked really well together to put together the rest of the strategy that eventually allowed them to exit the business for what they wanted. So that's what you have to look at. Like sometimes we make concessions over what's perfect to garner support.
To help deliver wins and to get that trust. And that's the most important part about being an executive, building that trust, making sure that you work well with others there. So that's really what I would look at. Maybe there is something here on the quick wins. Can I evaluate them and just get that next step to say: Hey, we gotta win here.
We made some money, we did something good for our customers, and it helped the team ship and it made people happy. What's that? Can you do that while you're looking at the long term? That's what I would really focus on. So I hope that helps, and good luck in your mission. Now it's time to talk to Jose.
Welcome, Jose. It's great to have you on the podcast.
[00:08:32] Jose Quesada: Thanks for having me, Melissa.
[00:08:34] Melissa Perri: So I would love to hen I was a hear a little bit about what drew you into the field of product management.
Entering product
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[00:08:38] Jose Quesada: very good question. When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by technology and the important effect that it will have in people's lives. So that drew me into studying computer science. I did engineering for a number of years. At one point the iPhone came along the app store, social networks, et cetera.
So that was a pivotal moment for my career and really businesses around because they had to face what it was called at the time, digital disruption. So I didn't really know it at the time, but that really picked my interest. I found a job looking after to strategy and all payments for bank in London, and that was really my first attempt at being a great product manager.
[00:09:14] Melissa Perri: And now you're running of, uh, web and mobile at American Express. What led you to becoming the vice president there? What was your journey?
[00:09:21] Jose Quesada: So right now I lead the product strategy for mobile and web. Really what that means is my team accelerates the vision that we've got for the two channels. So that is american express.com and the AMEX mobile app that is available globally. We also create the frameworks, tools, the standards for everyone at AMEX to create great customers experiences. I've been with Amex 12 years now. And really the big focus of my career at Timex for the first 10 years was the Amex mobile app. So I really brought the Amex mobile app from one to a hundred. And one of the things that we realized during that time is. It's not just about continuous delivery, obviously that is important, but you also need to think through the future. So from a very early part in our journey with the app, we realized the importance of investing in product strategy and that really led me to the role I've got today and not just looking after the strategy for the app, but also globally for the website.
[00:10:14] Melissa Perri: When you think back to building the app, which I use, by the way, I'm an Amex customer and I think it's awesome. you know, going from zero to a hundred with that, what was your process for really understanding, you know, your users? How did you think about testing and bringing everybody into more of this new digital age.
[00:10:29] Jose Quesada: So I will call out two things. The first thing to call out is we've always looked at 3M areas. So customer needs, our capabilities and really the marketplace context. Those three things over time they have really evolved. So if I remember when I first started. It was all about transitioning or mirroring what we had in the website into the Amex mobile app.
So that was the first thing that we did. We then moved into, okay, how can we establish the channel to really drive engagement when we drove the engagement and we have customers there, how we could get the channel to really be a growth asset for the company et cetera. But one thing that we've kept using time and time again, I'd say is very important for a new product manager out there in the product toolkit is experimentation. And not just experimentation for the ongoing enhancements of your product, feature, whatever you look after, but actually really as a very good tool to prove and disprove your product hypothesis.
[00:11:25] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think experimentation is so key and it's great to hear that you're using it too. When you were thinking about your philosophy on digital transformation, having seen a lot of this evolve at amex, how has your take on it changed over the years? What have you learned?
[00:11:39] Jose Quesada: So I've learned a couple of things and actually my philosophy hasn't necessarily changed that much. But let's start with the things I've learned. I've learned that transformation is different everywhere, and it's different because every single industry is different. Also, the context and the timing of transformation matters quite a lot. The other thing I've learned is just because you can do something, it doesn't mean that you should do it. So it's not as simples as just build it and they will come. So you need that customer demand. You need the enablers, and you really need good timing. Sometimes you may have a great idea to transform your business digitally, but it's not the right time for that. Now, the things that have not really changed, and I guess those are my principles when it comes to the transformation, data is super important. So you need to have insights driven. Strategies to have a clarity when it comes to the vision and that alignment with leadership, communication with stakeholders and partners. That is a key part when it comes to the success of any transformation. I've mentioned experimentation before, but truly, I really believe that you should be proven that disprove your hypothesis all the time. Yeah I always go back to those four or five principles.
[00:12:51] Melissa Perri: I think those are super strong principles too. So I've worked with so many financial institutions going through digital transformations, and I think one of the hardest parts kind of where, where you sit across web and mobile because there's so many different parts of the business that have a stake in it, right?
Like when you open the mobile app, it's like, I wanna see my different credit cards and my rewards and everything around it. And found that that's been so challenging for companies to think about, like if you you know, a mobile app or a platform, how do you think about like, balancing stakeholder requests and how do you still also maintain like a strong long-term vision that's in the interest of the customer?
So it doesn't become like a piece piece, piece everywhere. how do you think about that philosophy?
[00:13:31] Jose Quesada: So we've come a long way at Amex when it comes to that. So we are very much aligned with business outcomes and really business partners right now. But the two things I would share, one is we enable through that the structure that we've got. So we are really organized around journeys, not around channels, so people have got value streams and they're responsible for a value stream across two channels that is mobile and web. Those teams are more focused on, Short to midterm business outcomes. But we also realized that we need to have a team that sits horizontally who's really responsible for the overall product strategy and is more focused on the future and really keep pushing the envelope when it comes to the experience, the framework that we've got et cetera.
And, that happens to be my team and I'd say that ultimately it's not really about balancing product long term needs with the business and outcome needs. I think those two need to become the same thing, Really. And you can do that through co-creation, alignment of OKRs and really outcomes, which I think that's been an area where we've improved quite a lot, the way in which we do product development by focusing on outcomes rather than outputs.
[00:14:42] Melissa Perri: When you're talking about the co-creation part so many people struggle with setting goals how to manage that across teams. How do you think about the co-creation of goals, the co-creation of outcomes and bringing people into the folder.
Outcome-Driven Teams
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[00:14:53] Jose Quesada: So you need to start with a vision that needs to be ambitious and something that you may want to get to within the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. From that, you probably need to imerse yourself and your team in d ata and anyone around you who's got a stake, uh, on what you're trying to achieve. And from there, really come up with some hypothesis on what you want to drive. And ultimately start with, we want to drive this outcome rather than we want to do this thing.
And when you start with the outcome and we want to drive, for example, I don't know, let's say acquisition revenue, that really drives the set of things that come after, which is how do we get there? I think the problem in many organizations or many teams is they start with the what they're gonna do rather than the why and what they want to drive to start with.
So I'll start with really the vision. What is the opportunity or what is the challenge that you want to, address or really exploit, really look at data and come up with that joint statement when it comes to, these are the outcomes that we want to drive. And we start thinking through how you're gonna solve for those, how you're gonna drive them. Just bring your partners along, they need to be there.
[00:16:02] Melissa Perri: I like the way that you're thinking about involving them. So, uh, when you mentioned data as well, that's a huge piece of what the hot topic is around these days, which is AI. Can you tell us a little bit about the evolution of the AI strategy at Amex and, you know, how did it start and where are you at today? How do you utilize it?
[00:16:20] Jose Quesada: Sure. I'll probably start with a little bit of context there, in terms of some of the strategies that we've put in place for digital channels and AMEX mobile app, in particular. Also, we've got a long story of innovation in the company. So we are 175 a year old, but we have evolved our business quite a lot from freight forward into travel checks, to credit cards, To banking products, most recently. And that is really to say that when that last thing happened in terms of the company looking to go beyond the card, we saw that as an opportunity to do two things. One, to evolve the experience so it can enable those products for customers, but also to prepare the experience for future. And also it was a good time to try and fix some of the challenges that we had. And one of the challenges that we had was around discoverability, which I think is normal. When you've got an experience that just keeps growing in complexity, just think about many different features on piece of functionality competing with each other in terms of the outcomes that they're supposed to drive. And that's where we figure that gen AI and AI could help us. Because we thought that one area that we should invest in is search as a tool because we figure that action-oriented discoverability could be achieved through search. And that's how we started really the journey of using gen AI for the AMEX Global app.
[00:17:39] Melissa Perri: And how does that work with search? Where do you apply it? How do people interact?
[00:17:43] Jose Quesada: So the way in which it works is as a company we are very committed to servicing excellence and also customer focused innovation. So we figured that was a very good technology to make the servicing experience for our customers better. As I said, think of it as that is something that consumers use day in and day out.
So it's a bit funny interface that we are very used to use. You can use it from the Amex mobile app, and what we do is, you input a query, whether by typing something or using your voice, we will use your intent. And this is where AI will come into the picture. So truly understanding what you are telling us. And the other place where it comes in the picture is we've got a model that really looks at historical data when it comes to your behavior across digital channels. Or the customers of American Express, the key questions that we get in the call centers et cetera. And you put all of that together.
So when you go to the app and you type, I lost my card, we are like, okay, what you need is actually to freeze your card in case someone has taken it and you need to get a new card. And, I think what we are very pleased about is the very quick success that we've seen for search, in the app. We've got 14 million people who has access. To where we see an excess of a million customers using it. And more importantly, we are now virtually able to answer every single question that you've got.
[00:19:08] Melissa Perri: Wow, that's really cool. Um, And I love that so many people are actually engaging with it too. What have you Yeah. Which is fantastic. Um, What have you been able to understand like, user intents and, and how are you learning about your customers through these AI interactions?
[00:19:21] Jose Quesada: So I personally love this feature because a very simple reason. It is the one feature where you don't have to make assumptions about what customers want. They're telling you. And I really wish that, throughout every single customer journey that we've got out there, customer will be telling us this is what I want.
You always have to make assumptions, but this one that you can go back to data and see what people told us. So we've learned things like customers don't think of certain needs the same way that we think about them in terms of the language that we use, the terminology that we use as well. We've learned that search is temporal. And what I mean by that is it's not just about meeting your needs with American Express, but what is going on in the company also influences what you're looking for. And what I mean by that is. We're a company that really goes beyond car products. And I'd say that's one of the piece of our value proposition.
So when we've got big bands, um, going, we see a spike in people searching for our member week or shop small. So I would really call those two. So the fact that sometimes you think that customers think of features the same way that you think, but they don't, that they use a different language altogether and either one of the fact that the search terms, the things that are being searched for those change over time as well.
[00:20:45] Melissa Perri: That's really neat. And it also shows like how your experience too goes across all these different parts of Amex. And I like that this search bin kind of brings it all together. 'cause it's the different business lines, right? The different, you know, banks versus experiences like you're talking about. It sounds like it bridges it all together. It makes it very easy to navigate.
[00:21:03] Jose Quesada: Yeah, so what we really try to do is, and I'm going back to my point around the strategy that we put in place for the Amex mobile app and really planning for future growth. Two big changes that we made along many of the things obviously was search. And this is where we are reactive to our customers because they tell us what they need. And we give it as a tool where you can just ask for anything and we'll try to put in front of you the content, the features that we've got available to you. But another thing that we did as well is we created a customer overview. And this is where we have been very proactive and we try to bring on one screen the whole value proposition of the company and really try to anticipate your need every time that you're logging.
[00:21:49] Melissa Perri: When you're thinking about those proactive strategies versus reactive strategies, what's the difference in the way that you think about them conceptually, how you build them and test them?
[00:21:59] Jose Quesada: So the way which we build and test them is not that different really. And I think it's important to be rooted on a framework that you trust, that you keep going back And maybe the things to share for people around that framework that we've got is we are very big on always having a north star vision in terms of where we want to get to. We spend a lot of time not just as a product organization, but also with partners looking at data and really understanding opportunities or challenges, right? Sometimes you've got opportunities, sometimes you've got challenges and once that you've got that you need to come up with your hypothesis, you need to come up with your hypothesis, you need to test them et cetera.
And when I say testing them, you need to do testing in the context of user research. As more like qualitative in nature, but you also need to make use of what you've got available, which is just, just testing with real life customs. So I don't think that we do anything differently when it comes to the actual development process.
It's more like when we do the thinking and the strategy and maybe the team comes up conceptually is more like, okay, we're gonna come to customers from this angle, which help you get there even though maybe you didn't want to get there in the first place, or that's not what you came for in, in the first space.
And that's more like an overview versus search. It's okay, you come to us, you tell us what you need, and we're gonna make sure that we can answer that question and we're gonna get you to where you want to get to.
[00:23:31] Melissa Perri: It's like the whole first part is kind of like, you don't know what you don't know. You're not trying to solve your own problems. Let us understand your needs and flip it back out there so that you can navigate this more easily. when, When you're looking at your AI strategies too, going forward, a big topic of conversation these days as well is, uh, you know, with gen AI. Does everything into like a chat? Does it all turn into prompts? How do we think about with other workflow experiences? How are you taking the ways that we interact with our products and with our screens into account? When you're thinking about your AI strategies and your experiences?
[00:24:01] Jose Quesada: So I, I'd say that's one of the biggest strengths that we've got right now in industry, which is not just the fact that gen AI is here to stay, but how much it is influencing the expectations from people, and also how much is in a way really pushing user interfaces. Will chat interfaces become the norm in the future?
We'll just use agents in the future. I dunno, but I think what that shows is you need to keep looking at what's going on outside in the marketplace. You probably need to have in your product development process, the ability to play around with those ideas as well. At AMEX, what we do is we've got this dual track where we always have at any point in time running discovery and delivery.
So delivery is very much like what the next 12 months very much focus on shot middle term business outcomes versus discovery is about trying to understand the future, right? And, working on the new user interface for the app, that may be something that, that we look at. And probably the important point to make there is when you do discovery and when you think about the future, it's not all about understanding what you are gonna do, sometimes understanding what you're not gonna do. It's not like every single idea that you come up with it's gonna prove right. In fact, I'd say that probably means that you're not pushing, enough your thinking. So yeah, that's the way I think about it.
[00:25:31] Melissa Perri: Yeah. Discovery approach, you said that it's running in parallel. It's looking at the future, like what does that track do, activity wise? What are they experimenting with? What kind of cadences do they work on, compared to the delivery?
Making Data Work
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[00:25:41] Jose Quesada: So the difference really is the delivery track is very much set in so far as you may know, the outcomes that you want to drive for the next 6 to 12 months. And there are a bunch of initiatives that have been aligned, planned for, et cetera, and you've come to a point where you've finally gonna do them because of X, Y, and Z.
So you just need to go and deliver, Versus the discovery track is about, okay, we've got this vision for the product and really for the business. So let's keep pushing that vision forward and let's try to figure out what comes next. So I mentioned the big, Redesign a big strategy that we implemented for AMEX Mobile app when we, the company decided to go beyond car products and going into banking. The very interesting thing, and what makes me very excited to come to work every day is when you've got discovery track going all the time, job is never done. Because are always looking at what's next. So for example, you are mentioning what's gonna happen to your interfaces with the rise of gen AI, agentic bots, et cetera. So, those type of ideas is what you need to be testing out or really looking at in your discovery track.
[00:26:58] Melissa Perri: And uh, part of this too, when we look at AI and the way that user experiences start changing comes back to personalization. I hear people talk about that all the time. How do you think about incorporating personalization for your users at AMEX?
[00:27:10] Jose Quesada: So we are very big on data in the company. I then go and say that it's part of our DNA before digital age, we used to use, uh, credit bureau's data to reach out to customers and really target them via direct mail. There are probably two examples I can share around using data for personalization.
And let's not forget that data is really one of the company advantages that we've got in the company because of our closed looped model. Now we've got a program called Member Gap member I think of it as a referral program where you go and you recommend an AMEX car product or a product to a friend of yours.
So we really use data and personalization to personalize the incentive that we give you. So you go and recommend that product to a friend of yours. And that varies in terms of whether you get points, cashback, and really thinking about you as a customer and what you're interested in a Member Gap member is one of the most efficient acquisition channels that we've got in the company. Now an example more customer centric in terms of a digital experience, per se, and is very sticky with our customers is Amex offers. So Amex office is the program that we've got that is linked to your cart. It is, and it gives you offers from many different merchants that you may be interesting.
So the way in which we use data there is really to personalize the offers that you get to see. So we think about the whole universe of offers are available and we'll put in front of you those that we believe are more relevant to you at any point in time.
[00:28:40] Melissa Perri: That's really cool. I definitely use Amex offers all the time.
[00:28:43] Jose Quesada: Yeah, you're not alone. Let me tell you.
[00:28:45] Melissa Perri: Yeah, and I love that you make it simple with Uh, There's a lot of other credit card portals I know that you have to go to the page and remember to do that and then click through and then go check out. you can really tell, like user experience has been thought about where it's just added to your card and go shop as normal. But you might be able to browse and see if you get something extra. I think that's like a very delightful experience compared to what I've seen in other places.
[00:29:06] Jose Quesada: It is, it's, it is a one tap to save an offer to, to your card. And I'd say that simplicity is one of the key traits of a great customer experience.
[00:29:15] Melissa Perri: I agree, definitely. So when you're thinking about this digital transformation, especially introducing AI, you've been on this journey for a while at AMEX. What do you look at as the capabilities that you need to build internally to be able to successfully navigate both of these things? Like one that shift to AI, start to incorporate it well, start to think about how do we actually use it. And then also the digital transformation in general, you know, move a, a company that's been around for 175 years, which is really cool, right into a more modern software age. What are the things that you really focus on? The pieces that you wanna build out.
[00:29:49] Jose Quesada: Okay. I'm gonna say something that maybe is a bit unexpected because the technological piece, everyone will look at and they'll probably focus on, but I think it's very important to the data that you've got available. The reason why I say that is this technology is only as good as the input that you provide in the first place.
So if you don't have a very good input, the output is not gonna be great. So I think what we need to start is you have a strategy around content and data, make that available. You may even think about cleansing some of that data and content, as well. That would be one thing. The other thing is about the enterprise mindset. And also the mindset in terms of many of the things that you've got around you are all of a sudden become an asset, right? So I think really going back to, a summary of key things to focus beyond, the importance of models, the technology you're gonna use, et cetera. I'd say having a very clear data and content strategy.
[00:30:49] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think that's huge. And the companies that have all this data too, they have such an opportunity to do the personalization, do AI on top of it, all of this stuff. Uh, and I, I think it's neglected in so many legacy systems where it's just scattered all over. How, How do you think about like bringing a company together or like your teams together to actually focus on that data?
Because I also see, besides the legacy systems, I've seen many product teams where, you know, tagging things, for example, so that you can actually watch the customer journey and learn from it. That's an afterthought, right? It's like, oh, we don't have to set up you know, customer engagement systems or data out of different systems and pulling them together to unlock it so product managers can study it.
Not just that we can't use it in our products. All that kind of goes by the wayside. What have you done to unlock data, both from a technological perspective, but also from a, how do we use it as product managers and make decisions perspective?
[00:31:42] Jose Quesada: So you've got to embed in your process, to try and make it as simple as possible for your teams. And what I mean by that is you need to go as far as saying things like you you can launch anything that is not gonna have the ability to report on performance. And you're gonna launch anything.
You're gonna be able to look at the data. So I think there is one part of, especially in very large organizations, as your product team or your product discipline grows over time you need to think about the processes and really the ways in which you can enable that at scale. So one thing that we did many years ago was tagging. Is paramount, it needs to be there, nothing launches without that also said as much as possible, you need to experiment literally with anything that you're gonna launch et Et cetera. The other thing is, it's probably about how you're structured. And what I mean by that is if you structure your teams in such a way where you'd give them ownership and accountability, you also give them continuity in terms of what they're focused on. I think it's a lot easier for them to really know their data, their performance and just make it part of the way in which they operate as a product team. If you are just checking out teams and they're changing focus all the time, et cetera, I think it's difficult to build that expertise.
I also think it's difficult for them to feel attached to what they're working on, versus if you say, Hey, this is your value stream. This is your outcome. New product, design, analytics, engineering come together and you drive that. I think you create something very special that not only, applies to how they use data, but I'd say the overall quality of the product.
[00:33:24] Melissa Perri: Part of, uh, what you're talking about too. I think gets into a little bit of psychological safety. How do you make it, especially with experimentation , how do you make it safe to fail for your team and how do you encourage 'em to innovate and like push boundaries?
[00:33:38] Jose Quesada: So going back to my point about how you structure your team, something that we do is we've got people, structure rounds, Value streams, journeys, however you want to call it. So you need try to drive autonomy and accountability. You are they're solid leader to provide direction more than anything. So I think you need to be comfortable with that. I need to give people that autonomy and accountability, that's the way in which they grow. That's the way in which they feel more confident to make mistakes, et cetera. You really need to push for experimentation and, and also I, I think you need to be cool with your teams making mistakes. And in a way I'm very happy with sometimes when we run experiments and everything looks red and my team comes to me and they're super worried, I'm like, that's fine.
Embracing Change
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[00:34:28] Jose Quesada: That's the reason why you experimented in the first place. So I really think about test as a way to reduce uncertainty as much as possible. And also there are many times where I see my teams maybe coming up with solutions or strategies that I don't necessarily agree with them, but as long as, you know, they're not gonna be detrimental to our customers or the business, I just let them go and do it and make the mistake because I just think about when I was starting and that's how I grew as a product manager. That's how I, maybe got the product intuition that I've got right now. And I personally feel quite a lot that softer skills are way more important than hard skills as a product manager, and if you don't let your team makes mistakes, they're not gonna be able to grow.
[00:35:11] Melissa Perri: One of the terms that a lot of people like to use is intelligent failure about this. How do you think about some real world applications of intelligent failure that you bake into your work at Amex?
[00:35:21] Jose Quesada: So we don't really do in intelligent failure actually at AMEX. We look to do all the time, especially for big bets, and by the way, I know that I've mentioned experimentation many times today, and the way in which I think about it is you've got experimentation for ongoing optimization of of your product.
So think about uplifts. But you also have experimentation when it comes to trying to 10 x your product. Or your business, right? So what we do quite a lot in the company is we use experimentation at that way where we can come up with big, bold areas, right? Not only we put that in front of customers and we do user research, but we put it in front of customers like, real life customers and we see how they react to it.
And that's how we promote it, right? So get out there, experiment. Make mistakes and I personally, I'm very comfortable with my team making mistakes. I dunno if it is the norm out there but I am, and in a way it makes me happy because I know that they're learning.
[00:36:24] Melissa Perri: one of the big topics too, as we talk about AI and, and what we do to get our teams ready for that. Experimentation around it is how do we enable our teams to go out and do that type of discovery, to play, to understand emerging technology? What are some things that you're doing with your team to give them the space to do that, to, to learn about those things?
[00:36:45] Jose Quesada: Okay. So I'm lucky in a way because I look after product strategy. So a big part of my team's role is really think about the future and really push the whole enterprise forward when it comes to achieving that evolution. We are a bit of an accelerated team as well. Having said that, What we promote is every time that we've got a team meeting, we've got time where we think about product strategy, innovation. We also have enterprise wide, a product lab where we sit at a forum where we can get people to develop new skills. We bring third party speakers sometimes other companies, et cetera. And that's how I guess we get people to think about other things, how the companies do innovation et cetera.
[00:37:32] Melissa Perri: when you're thinking about, we're also talking about how AI helps product managers, Are there any things that you're excited about to see in the AI realm to help you as a product manager or your team as product managers?
[00:37:43] Jose Quesada: We will have to see. So I use AI quite a lot on the personal front and it's just amazing how much, it keeps evolving. I'd say every other the day. So I just need to see how that translates into maybe some of the tools that, that we'll use and how it's gonna help us do our job even better.
[00:38:01] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I think we're, everybody's waiting to see which ones shake out.
[00:38:04] Jose Quesada: Yes.
[00:38:04] Melissa Perri: I know there's also this, kind of like overwhelm out there about, oh, there's so many like great things we could try and like a new tool pops up every single day. I know, I noticed so many product managers are like, where do I even start?
How do I evaluate these tools? So I think there's like a big waiting game here.
[00:38:18] Jose Quesada: And I think the problem with many tools and also to digital transformation that is the topic of today's conversation is change is difficult.
[00:38:28] Melissa Perri: Mm-hmm.
[00:38:29] Jose Quesada: If you are gonna commit to a new tool, you need to be very clear certain that is the one. Because you're gonna get, If you are gonna migrate many people to use that new tool, you need to be, very certain and people are very resistant to change. Maybe they're not when it comes to AI tools because that's the new toy around. But let's see.
[00:38:47] Melissa Perri: I think No, I think they totally are from what I'm hearing. And I love that you said that, 'cause I, I do think a lot of leaders, especially at large companies are, even small companies, honestly, like they're, they're taken for granted that change management piece you're talking about, especially when it comes to ways of working or the tools we use or anything like that.
Developers I think got it a lot with Jira and switching different tools like back in the day to all these things. But now I think we're in the, the product management phase of it. And if we're like, Hey, today we're using Figma and tomorrow we're moving to this.
Yeah, exactly. and I do think we, we sometimes like.
Take for granted how to actually do the test and learn on our own processes and our own tools, you know, internally uh, that we do with our customers. And say like, Hey, let's make sure this is right before we go tell everybody to adopt it or use it. So I love that you said that.
[00:39:35] Jose Quesada: absolutely.
[00:39:35] Melissa Perri: So, um, getting into the fun personal questions on what advice Jose, would you give to your younger self looking back at your career?
[00:39:44] Jose Quesada: My younger self, I would probably say to him, be curious. Change is actually an opportunity. It feels scary, But usually good times come out of it if you can really find way. But I think ultimately what I would say to my younger self would be actually focus on your softer skills. What I mean by that is ability to build relationships, storytelling, communication skills, et cetera.
I think most people are very much focused on the harder skills. So how to be more technical, how to understand a new technology extra. Don't get me wrong, those are very important, right? The reason why I always make a call for softer skills is they're more difficult to attain. And actually they're more of a differentiator for you as an individual versus hard skills.
You can just go and, do a training course or read a book or whateverand you will get them. I don't think you necessarily can do that for some of the softer skills. So they require a lot of practice, experience, mentorship, et cetera.
[00:40:46] Melissa Perri: Yeah, I could not agree with you more. And I think also when we're looking at AI, That's gonna become more important ever. Everybody's talking about what happens in a world AI can just write the specs for you you know, solve this technical problem. And I think a lot of these are gonna come back to the human element. That's, that's super important.
[00:41:03] Jose Quesada: that's where people should be comfortable in so far as to me, product is very much about understanding context. That's why we exist in the first place and really bring it together. The business context, the context of the product that, that you run with, and also marketplace. People should feel confident about the feature because there will always be a role for us.
Which is really understanding context. I'm putting that for companies.
[00:41:26] Melissa Perri: And AI is not great at that.
[00:41:28] Jose Quesada: No,
[00:41:29] Melissa Perri: At all.
[00:41:29] Jose Quesada: not. Now we'll see.
[00:41:31] Melissa Perri: Yeah. One day. You know, I'm not, but not today. And my last question for you Jose, when you're looking at how digital transformation's gonna evolve in the future, what are you excited about? What kind of trends are you looking at?
Future Of Digital Products
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[00:41:44] Jose Quesada: I think we've probably mentioned a couple of them already. So obviously we've mentioned AI quite a few times, and really how user interfaces are gonna keep evolving the expectations that is creating for I think for us in the financial industry. One trend that is also here to stay is how, let's say the physical products of, let's say banks, credit card companies, et cetera, they're no separate from digital experience, like they're one at the same.
So you get the whole package. So when you are an Amex customer. Yes, you get our car products and the benefits, but you also get a great AMEX app and you get a great chat service and you get a great website. So I'm personally very happy about that one because that's something that, you know, back in the day I saw as a bit of a vision, um, really, and it's great just to see, to see it coming to fruition, um, everywhere. So I'll probably call out AI. For sure. I guess something new will come in the future I'm sure. But the other one also is, especially for the banking industry, how products are now really merging with digital expenses and they're one and the same in terms of the overall value proposition from those companies.
[00:42:57] Melissa Perri: I think good for for people to hear out Uh, I know there is still a lot of places that are fighting the war between the software part and the banking product part, let's say, and trying to figure out how to bring those things together. If you have any advice for those companies to like how to start thinking about them as one product or a whole, or how it's entwined, what would you say?
[00:43:15] Jose Quesada: I would probably say that it's 2025 and customers or consumers are in digital channels. That's where they are. That's where they're gonna stay. Probably the interfacesgonna change over time. But the whole world is into it, probably on a more serious note, what they need to look at is they'll probably realize by looking at data, that when their customers engage more frequently, deeply they're more engaged with the products, they probably spend more with the products and make so they become better customers. And I will go as far as. sooner that you get your customers to use your digital products the sooner that you get them into this virtuous cycle, I'm gonna call it, as soon as you've got a great digital experience, um, obviously, but one is this inevitable. We're already in 2025 and there are, many all things coming along the way in digital space. But the other one is if they spend a bit of time looking at data and customer expectations, data's gonna speak by itself for sure.
[00:44:17] Melissa Perri: think that's a great takeaway for people listening too. Thank you so much, Jose, for being here. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they go? Where can they reach out?
[00:44:25] Jose Quesada: They can reach out to me in LinkedIn. So that is, Jose Quesada, and yeah, happy to talk to anyone about, all things digital mobile apps, whatever's in your mind.
[00:44:34] Melissa Perri: Awesome. And we will put all of the links to Jose's LinkedIn, and also Amex, on our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com.
Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are.
I answer them every single episode. We'll see you next time.