Interview with a Product Manager: “Spending time around performance has sharpened how I communicate complex ideas.”

You’ve only been in the product manager role for a few months. How does your background as a business analyst help you in your role as a product manager today?

My time as a business analyst taught me to look beyond individual requirements and understand the bigger picture. Working on large banking transformation projects meant balancing business needs, customer expectations, and technical constraints all at once.

It also gave me strong analytical and problem-solving skills, as no two days were ever the same. I learned to thrive on complex challenges, and that’s what ultimately drew me to product management. Today, that experience helps me connect strategy, customer needs, and product delivery to solve problems in a meaningful way.

What does a product manager actually do day-to-day at SBS?

My focus is currently on Product and Pricing, one of our SBS Digital Core modules, helping banks and building societies bring products to market faster with more flexibility. Day to day, I spend my time identifying opportunities for new features and enhancements based on market needs. That comes from attending industry events, speaking with clients, and staying close to the challenges banks and building societies are facing. Alongside that there’s demo prep, client presentations, and commercial proposals to bring those ideas to life, plus increasing work scoping how our SBS AI capabilities deliver real return on investment for clients.

According to you, what makes a good product?

A good product solves a real customer problem. It starts with understanding a genuine need in the market, not just building new features for the sake of it.

One of the key lessons I learned at SBS is the importance of being pragmatic. The best products are flexible, create value for customers, and help businesses achieve their goals. If you’re solving a real problem and making life easier for your users, you’re building a good product.

A product manager often sit between banking experts, customers and technology teams. What part of that role do you enjoy most?

The part I enjoy most is acting as the bridge between different perspectives. Banks, customers, and technology teams often speak different languages, so a big part of the job is translating complex requirements or frustrations into something everyone can understand and act on.

I particularly enjoy taking a real customer problem and turning it into something concrete that engineering can build. At the same time, I like taking technical capabilities and explaining them in terms of the business value they create. When you can help different groups align around the same goal and see how a solution will make someone’s day-to-day work easier, that’s when product management becomes really rewarding.

What’s a common misconception about product management?

That it’s mostly meetings and specs. In reality, a lot of the challenge is dealing with real-world constraints, tight timelines, competing priorities across markets, legacy systems that don’t always behave the way you need them to. It’s less about writing the perfect document and more about navigating all of that while still moving the product forward.

What’s the biggest challenge of building products for the banking industry today?

Legacy complexity versus the pace banks and building societies now need to move at. They want the flexibility to launch new products quickly and respond to rate changes or competitive pressure, but they’re often sitting on decades of accumulated complexity and product proliferation, one product per rate, one product per channel. Untangling that without disrupting live operations is the hard part.

Can you tell us about a project you’re particularly proud of?

Building the scope for SBS AI Foundation is a project I’m particularly proud of. The aim is to embed AI capabilities across our banking solutions in a practical and scalable way, helping clients automate everyday tasks, improve user experiences, and work more efficiently.

Taking it from an idea to concrete user stories with a clear link to client outcomes has been genuinely rewarding. It’s exciting to work on a project where you can already see how the capabilities we’re building could help customers work more efficiently and deliver better experiences.

Outside of work, you’re involved with Shakespeare’s Globe. Has anything you’ve learned there helped you in your role as a product manager?

Absolutely. I volunteer as a steward at Shakespeare’s Globe, a reconstruction of the original 1599 playhouse on London’s Bankside, where I welcome visitors and help audiences during performances. It’s a great way to switch off from work, meet people from all walks of life, and be part of a unique atmosphere.

What surprised me is how much it has helped in my day job. Watching a company take a dense, four-hundred-year-old language and make it land with a modern audience, in real time, is a masterclass in storytelling. Whether I’m talking through a pricing model, a product structure or a system capability, the task is the same: know the material properly, then tell it in a way the room can actually follow. The subject matter doesn’t get simplified, it gets made clear. Standing in that theatre a few times a month has taught me a lot about clarity, pacing, and holding an audience’s attention. It might seem an unlikely connection to banking software, but those are exactly the skills you need when you’re bringing a product proposition to life.

What is one piece of advice you would give to someone interested in product management?

Get close to the real, operational side of the industry before you try to build for it. Understanding how things actually work on the ground will always make you better at shaping what comes next.