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From Corporate Towers to FinTech Startups: Henri's Zepto Adventures

Welcome back to Startup Life: Unscripted! We're delighted to shine a spotlight on Henri, currently steering the product ship at Zepto, a real-time, account-to-account payments infrastructure innovator.

Emerging from a varied background in technology and innovation, Henri's foray into the FinTech realm has been nothing short of inspiring. Seamlessly marrying his experiences from corporate innovation with the high-paced, disruptive ethos of startups, Henri is a beacon of adaptability and strategic thinking. At Zepto, his vision plays a pivotal role in pioneering transformative solutions in the FinTech sphere.

Key interview takeaways:

🚀 The Shift: Henri recalls his compelling shift from corporate roles to the dynamic world of startups, focusing on how Zepto emerged as the perfect fit.

🧭 Navigating the Zepto Experience: Dive into a day in Henri's life and discover the intricacies of product management at an evolving FinTech startup.

📖 Zepto's Product Philosophy: Henri shares valuable insights into the art of building products that resonate, and how a balance of day-to-day tasks and long-term vision is key.

🌟 Advice for the Aspiring: For those with their eyes set on Product Management or diving into the FinTech startup space, Henri offers a treasure trove of advice on skills, mindset, and more.

Hey Henri, great to have you on Startup Life! So, I've been super curious about your career journey. With all your tech and innovation experiences, what lit the spark for you to dive into FinTech and land at Zepto as a Product Manager?

Thanks Hao, lovely to chat. Honestly I never saw myself working in Fintech. But, after an awesome start to my career working in corporate innovation, I started thinking that if I really wanted to be a part of and experience innovation, I should be trying the world of startups.

At the time, I was looking for somewhere that was growing at breakneck speed, was expanding internationally and was working on really interesting problems. Zepto ticked all of those boxes for me (after a bit of research, it turns out payments is an incredibly exciting and rapidly changing space).

After meeting and immediately clicking with the team, I joined Zepto and never looked back. Now I've been able to be a part of an organisation that has doubled in size, raised a Series A, expanded internationally and broken a lot of firsts in the world of fintech.

Before Zepto, I saw you were with Australia Post wearing a few different hats, like Product Innovation Associate and Technical Business Analyst. How did those roles shape and gear you up for what you're doing now at Zepto?

Building software products certainly changes wherever you go, but there's some common practices which can be applied anywhere which help to move the needle quickly and effectively. Big enterprise is often slowed down by too much process and bureaucracy while startups are often the opposite, lacking a lot of these elements.

Working at both ends of the spectrum I think allows people to try and bring the best of both of those ways of working. Everyone's always trying to find that sweet spot between getting things done quickly and getting things done well. I don't think anyones nailed it but diverse experiences can hopefully help us get closer.

Walk us through a day in your shoes at Zepto. As a Product Manager, how do you juggle the daily grind with keeping an eye on the bigger product picture?

I hate to be cliche but there's definitely no typical day. Across a typical week? We're working along all the different parts of the product lifecycle to make sure we remain best in the market. This can be anything from spitballing new ideas at their earliest stage of conception, to working with engineers to deliver more mature ideas to the current product (or new products if you're lucky).

We try to take the classic build measure learn approach to everything we do and apply that mentality to every stage of the product life cycle to make sure our customers are getting the best value possible.

I don't think I'd say that day-to-day needs to be balanced with long term thinking, I think they serve each other and I'd be lost without both of them. A big part of a PM's responsibility is to communicate the long term vision to the team to ensure it's clear why we're doing the smaller pieces.

How does this upgrade to a parameter in an API contribute to transforming the world of payments? Without the small improvement, you wouldn't be able to create the vision but without the vision, the small improvement would seem pointless.

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Working in a startup means wearing multiple hats and constantly collaborating, right? How do you vibe with teams like engineering, design, and marketing at Zepto to make sure everything syncs up for the product and the users?

We take the cross functional approach to these teams within Zepto. A Product Manager is embedded within an engineering team to deliver value. We then work as tight as possible with the Customer Experience (Zepto's version of "design") team to make sure we're understanding what the customers need, and the Product Marketing team to make sure that we're communicating how we're solving their problems.

We tinker around the edges with how this model is delivered, but largely, embedding these teams together means everyone understands the customer problems together and everyone is working to solve them in the best way for the customer and Zepto.

Can you spill the beans on some of the unique challenges you've tackled at Zepto, and how you've steered the ship to keep the product on track?

Definitely scaling. We're not the first, nor will we be the last start-up to have problems scaling and it's been fun to learn as a team how to approach the problems that come up through this process. Moving at pace and trying to scale processes always brings its challenges.

While there isn't one silver bullet that will help us solve all the problems, I think we've had the most success by approaching each problem with empathy, promoting a blameless culture and making sure we learn from each problem as quickly as possible so they don't happen again. It makes sure we stay away from finger pointing and get to the root cause of issues, making us a more cohesive and well oiled team in the process (think 5 whys etc etc).

For all the budding Product Managers out there itching to dive into the startup scene, what's your insider advice? What skills or experiences should they really double down on to shine in the role?

There's a litany of product thinkers that can outline this much better than I'm sure I can (shout out to Lenny's Newsletter and podcast as the central archive for this). But, if I had to name some key skills, I'd say that the biggest thing you need in a startup is the ability to take some initiative to get things done (again, cliche, but true). There's often 100 things happening at once and people's ability to provide guidance at every hour of the day is limited.

Besides that, empathy and clear communication I think are critical for PM's. You have to have a solid relationship with all other functions in the business to be able to empathise with what they need, as well as communicate clearly what you need, what you're doing and why you're doing it will allow you to be successful. I could go on but I definitely think these are the top three (highly recommend this podcast episode with Ian McAllistar to dive into this more).

Last but not least, Henri, any golden nuggets of wisdom for those with dreams of stepping into Product Management or joining the FinTech rollercoaster at a startup like Zepto? What’s that one thing they should always carry in their back pocket as they start this journey?

Product is hard but super fun. If you like the intellectual stimulation of new technologies, but still want to be talking to people and customers all the time, think about a career in product. Also, when you're trying to break into the discipline, make sure to think about which of the PM skills you're good at and have a clear way to prove that you're good at it (a side project, work example, life example etc).

Startups will often hire you if you can show you've got the initiative to build out the relevant skills, so think about your own Unique Value Prop and prove that you've got it. Also, don't be afraid to reach out to other PM's for a chat, people often find themselves in this career path in weird and wonderful ways and are happy to provide the advice that they probably received themselves at a point in time.

From the Startup Life team

And that's a wrap! We hope you've enjoyed this edition as much as we loved putting it together. Stay curious, keep learning, and above all, enjoy the rollercoaster ride that is Startup Life. Catch you in the next one! 👋 Not subscribed yet? Do it here and don't miss out! Subscribe Now.

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