Fintech & Capital Markets
Product work in financial services, where a compliance officer can stop your release, your users sit behind a relationship manager, and the data you want to display may not be yours to show.
Compliance is a design input
Not a gate at the end. Bring second line into discovery, when changing direction is still cheap, and write the control into the acceptance criteria.
Ask which rule that is
Plenty of "we can't do that" turns out to be internal policy or unexamined habit rather than regulation. The question is cheap and the answer is often yes.
Reversible means something else
Software rolls back easily. An executed transaction does not. That changes how much validation belongs before launch rather than after.
Guides in this track
Common questions
Is product management in fintech really different?
The craft is the same — discovery, prioritisation, delivery. What changes is the constraint set: someone outside your team can veto a release, experiments that alter pricing or credit access need review, and the audit trail is a product requirement rather than an engineering detail. Teams that plan as though those do not exist ship late and blame compliance.
How do I do discovery if I cannot reach users?
Mine what already exists first — support tickets, implementation notes, churn reasons and usage logs are unusually rich in institutional businesses and cost nobody an hour. Then go through the relationship manager with one named person and a specific question, rather than asking for open-ended access you will not get.
What is the most common expensive mistake?
Designing a feature around market data before checking the licence. Display versus non-display, internal versus redistributed, real-time versus delayed and per-user versus enterprise are all separately priced — and derived data is frequently still licensed. Ten minutes with whoever owns those agreements saves a sprint.