Leader Spotlight: Aligning around the customer’s perspective, with Jason Mariasis

Jason Mariasis is Vice President, Digital Product Management at Credit One Bank. He began his career as a business analyst at Capital One, where he worked his way up to becoming a senior product manager for the Journey student credit card. Jason then transitioned to product management within personal finance and investing at U.S. News & World Report. From there, he led digital marketing products at Vistaprint before starting his own company, Stratus Intelligence, which focused on making personalized financial advice more accessible. Prior to his current role at Credit One Bank, he served as Head of Product — Small and Midsize Business at Sterling.

In our conversation, Jason talks about how he works to bring all departments together as one team to build a shared understanding of the customer’s perspective. He also discusses his passion for simplifying banking products and services used by the general public, and how that has shaped his career journey.

You currently lead digital product management for Credit One Bank. What approach do you take to ensure that the whole company — not just the product or customer experience functions — remains aligned around the customer perspective?

Everything we do centers around the customer, their needs, and their pain points. Our approach typically starts with customer journeys. Who are our customers? How are they interacting with the bank? How are they using our products, features, services, and capabilities? What’s working and what’s not working?

Our work with other stakeholders across the bank is highly cross-functional. We have talented, customer-focused partners that support us and we support them in return — design, marketing, IT, brand, operations, customer support, analytics, legal, you name it. I try to pull all departments together as one team to understand the customer’s perspective. What are customers seeing? How are they feeling? What are their attitudes and behaviors? Why?

To do this, I like to share, and have others share, the extensive data and insights captured — both qualitative and quantitative — around the customer experience. We tackle this by channel, journey, and segment. Once we build a shared understanding of those customer journeys across teams, we work to identify key pain points to address and solve them collaboratively.

You work with a large number of stakeholders. Even with that shared understanding, challenges or conflicts often arise over the relative importance of different initiatives. How do you handle those situations or get ahead of them?

Inevitably, while we try to align incentives to a common set of shared goals, there are multiple perspectives across teams, departments, and functions. These various perspectives add tremendous value to the discussion. My team takes the various perspectives and focuses the discussion on the overarching company interests, goals, and objectives set by our executive leadership. This is important to do because, with multiple perspectives, we need to shift our focus on what’s in the best interest of the company as a whole.

There will always be teams, functions, leaders, departments, etc. whose perspectives will not be fully embraced. That’s often the nature of product management. We frame those trade-offs in a way that we can create a shared understanding of where decisions need to be made and the logic behind them. We think about them in the short, medium, and long term. We should always be able to justify decisions and priorities made based on objective data and sound logic. In the end, we are all supportive of the path forward and work toward achieving common goals

Iterating a product for small business

It’s one thing to evangelize the product function, but when you can show people results, that’s often when they buy in and get behind it. Is there an example you could share of a successful initiative that led to a significant gain for the company?

In my previous role, I worked at Sterling, one of the world’s leading background screening and identity services companies. They wanted to build out a business line that focused on SMBs as an extension of the enterprise business. There was a large total adjustable market opportunity that they were looking to capitalize on, and to do that, Sterling put a general manager in place who then brought me on board as head of SMB product.

Sterling already offered enterprise-grade, compliant screening solutions, but those services weren’t always accessible to small businesses that could benefit tremendously from them. We wanted to change that and build a solution for this smaller segment. We ultimately built an MVP of a platform called SterlingNow, which was a first-of-its-kind, on-demand, self-service screening platform. We brought that to market and through a lot of research and analysis, determined that the power users of that platform weren’t small to mid-sized businesses. Instead, the businesses with under 100 employees that we were originally targeting were actually franchises.

We dug deeper to learn more about how franchises used the platform and why it was so valuable to them. Turns out, whether from a legal, compliance, or brand reputation standpoint, franchise owners running the business on the parent company’s behalf needed to remain compliant. We started to iterate the solution where the franchise parent companies could set standards that the franchise owners needed to comply with. These were then monitored, regulated, and controlled by the parent company.

Collecting feedback from various inputs

That’s a great example of uncovering and filling a market need. Often opportunities for iteration come from customer feedback. What’s your process for integrating customer feedback into your projects?

Whether at Sterling or in my current role at Credit One, customer feedback is critically important. We constantly strive to make data-driven decisions. We need to uncover consumer insights and acute pain points to address needs in a unique, differentiated, and compelling way.

At Credit One, we have tons of feedback mechanisms and loops. We focus on where our customers are experiencing challenges and how we can help them more effectively. Our goal is to understand who they are, why they do what they do, and what’s top of mind for them. We have several feedback streams in place, including surveys, regularly held interviews, focus groups, and analytical tools, among others. We’re also closely tied into our call and contact center — whether that’s taking anecdotal feedback through our agents or talking with supervisors to identify trends, themes, and insights.

On top of that all, we also leverage lots of external research and benchmarking studies, and frequently run controlled experiments to determine whether new features and functionality resonate and move the needle for the business.

The rise of mobile and digital banking has disrupted a lot of traditionally in-person banking services. How has that affected your methods for collecting feedback?

In addition to analyzing call transcripts for sentiment and theme detection, we focus on how we can effectively help customers through digital self-service tools. As you mentioned, we’ve found that customers prefer to interact with us through our digital channels — specifically web and mobile.

We see a lot of channel switches from digital to phone when customers can’t complete a specific task digitally. That’s a problem and an opportunity. This is where our contact center has become a huge source of information. We survey our customers and track NPS, CES, CSAT, etc. We also look at the individual customer journey or task level to understand what’s working and what’s not, and where key areas of opportunity lie.

Beyond surveys, we look at the quantitative components. We have significant data and analytics at our company — it’s a treasure trove as a financial institution. We know who our customers are, where they spend, how much they spend, how frequently they spend, the actions they take on our platforms, and the outcomes of those actions. We’ll pull that data together too to paint a picture for each of our journeys and expose friction.

Leading successful digital transformations

You’ve been involved in several digital transformations. There’s a statistic from McKinsey that around 70 percent of these initiatives fail. In your experience, what have you found to be the most common reasons why this is the case, and what are some things that you have done to manage those risks?

Digital transformation is sort of a buzzword to me now. Many companies use it and we read about it a lot online. I’ve had the privilege of being involved in many small companies and large companies alike, and I feel that there isn’t a common or universal definition of what digital transformation is.

Ultimately, it starts with the definition of success. What is the company looking to achieve? Why, by when, and with what level of investment? In the successful digital transformations that I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of, it starts at the very top — all the way to the CEO. The right or appropriate expectations are set at the board level, and communicated consistently and frequently throughout the organization. What are the business problems or the business challenges the company is facing today? And how do we solve those by leveraging new and emerging technologies — and, in almost all cases, introducing more of a disciplined stage-gated process and a ruthless customer focus?

Is there an example you could share of a digital transformation you were a part of and consider successful?

One example that comes to mind is from my time at Capital One. The founder and CEO, Richard Fairbank, wanted to evolve Capital One and position it for outsized growth. His stated goal was to future-proof it in a way, and historically, the company was focused almost exclusively on traditional business levers. So, he chartered Capital One Labs, the innovation arm of the company, to explore and use these emerging technologies to deliver service to customers. The idea was to help differentiate Capital One and position it to fully capitalize on future growth opportunities.

As Capital One Labs evolved, it built strong working relationships with a line of business owners.

Whenever there were disagreements among stakeholders on the most critical project components — goals and objectives, processes, etc., Mr. Fairbank, or a senior executive on his team, came in and helped facilitate the conversation. They’d essentially say, “Look, this is a bet we want to make. We understand and recognize the risks involved. But taking this risk offers a tremendous long-term opportunity to help our customers and our company. We’re going to go down this path, and here’s the compelling case why.”

The products that came out of Capital One Labs, as expected, had a range of success. Some were a great success; others less so. But, that was OK because Mr. Fairbank and his leadership team were focused on factors beyond the level of success. They were looking at the people and culture dimension. They wanted to change the way people work and think — to reshape that core DNA and drive a greater customer focus throughout the entire organization. Particularly in that respect, Capital One Labs and the digital transformation efforts were enormously successful.

A passion for shaping financial outcomes

How have new technologies and innovations changed the mindset around product management?

From my perspective, digital tools and solutions are enablers. They will help solve customer problems and address the use cases that we identify. Far too often, at least at the onset of digital transformation initiatives, I see companies position the initiative to first identify new and emerging technologies and later figure out how to leverage them for business needs.

Are there operational efficiencies to gain? Absolutely — there always are. But in my experience, those aren’t where the biggest opportunities lie, especially for lower-cost, highly efficient producers.

The real opportunity is revenue upside. What are the drivers of that aside from upsell and cross-sell engagement? Loyalty and retention. As I tell my team all the time, our customers should never have a reason to go anywhere else. And if they do, we need to understand why and address those issues.

What predictions do you have for the future of digital products?

Everybody’s talking about AI and the technologies, mathematics, statistics, and modeling underpinning AI.

First off, I think it’s going to be great to see how AI centers around big-bucket efficiency operations within financial services, like fraud detection and risk management. The industry has already improved immensely in both of those areas, which lowers costs and enables companies to invest more in consumer experiences.

Second, I think we’re going to see a major impact to service quality. For example, agent training and real-time coaching is now individually-tailored due to some of these new technologies. AI through predictive analytics and modeling can identify a series of next steps that agents should consider as paths to go down to better assist customers.

Third, pattern detection and strategy shifts that result from it. Our ability to process and make sense of high-dimensional datasets, and even assemble new datasets through technologies like computer vision, has never been greater because of what AI is unlocking.

Lastly and most importantly, I’m extremely bullish on the impact hyper-personalization can drive through AI enablement. With AI, we can tailor experiences and recommendations to each individual customer to better meet their needs in close to real-time. This can eventually lead to things like higher quality and fully autonomous money management.

The time is right to start to leverage some of these new technologies and algorithms at scale – of course in a safe, controlled and compliant way. I think it will be game-changing.

You describe products as being reflections of your commitment and vision. Do you have an example of how your personal values and vision shaped a product?

I’ve been passionate about every product I’ve worked on. Growing up, my father was a banker. Our typical dinner conversations were, “Did you read the Wall Street Journal today? What do you think?” We were always talking about the economy, stock market, fiscal policy, etc. Fast-forward, I went to school, majored in economics, and joined Capital One as my first full-time job.

When I started working, I tried to pull my finances together and make sense of the money that I was now earning. I wanted to track my spending and savings and make sure I stayed on track to hit certain financial goals like travel, family planning, and retirement. I realized that was actually very difficult. As I got more ingrained with Capital One by conducting research and seeing data, I realized that there were tens of millions of people in this country living paycheck to paycheck, and that struck a chord with me.

Understanding money was tough for me even though I had an economics degree and grew up in a family of bankers. That’s when it hit me — money is a universal pain point. It’s incredibly difficult, complex, overwhelming, and intimidating. And I felt it didn’t have to be like that.

I wanted to do more to help people and simplify finance; to help people succeed at every point in their financial journey. That’s why I joined U.S. News & World Report after Capital One. Don’t get me wrong — I loved Capital One, especially the people and their values. But I wanted to focus fully on helping people make better financial decisions by building financial advice products. Eventually I broke out on my own to start a mission-driven fintech venture with two passionate and extremely talented cofounders.

To this day, I continue to be committed to helping others succeed as I seek to tackle the big financial problems for everyday people. That’s why I get up every morning. I truly believe we’re making strides.