Interview with Nick Norcross — Career Lessons in FinTech [Product Mayday, EP.01]
All views, opinions and statements are my own.
This post debuts a series of interviews I’m leading with successful Product Managers, founders, and entrepreneurs out there. It’s a core element of the vision and MVP for Product Mayday, my most recent project focused on giving my time and experience back to the world. Read more here.
My guest today is Nick Norcross, Director of Product at Tala, a financial technology company on a mission to build a financial system that works for everyone.
Nick is a former colleague who has recently joined Tala to lead Product for Account products e.g. savings. I spotted Nick’s transition on LinkedIn and invited him to share his thoughts on evaluating career opportunities, getting to and through the interview process, starting (and succeeding) in a new role, and a few other topics. I want to thank Nick for his time and invite you to learn from this great conversation between like-minded Product folks.
Enjoy!
Quick Bio: Nick Norcross
Let’s start with the basics. Tell me more about your career trajectory?
My career has been split across core financial services analytics and fintech product management. And, as a consistent theme along that journey, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a for-profit, sustainable business can also do good for its customers.
I started my career joining a small bank and learning the ins and outs of banking. Soon after, I moved to Capital One, working in the business analytics job family. There, I always found my way into projects that had an operational or sales component. The strategy piece was fascinating, but I would often be more interested in questions surrounding what customers were experiencing and what was happening on the ground. As product management became a function that mattered more and more in financial services, it felt like the perfect fit — strategy and business paired closely with building customer experiences.
That direction led me to an opportunity to go join a start-up in Los Angeles, CA that offered mortgages for small business owners and self-employed people. I led Product and Partnerships, and though I honestly knew very little about good Product Management, I dug in and learned a lot from trying to sell the product as we built it. It was wild and a lot of fun!
After that, I moved to Austin, TX and worked on ideas in the real estate space. I learned a bit of coding, knocked on a bunch of doors, and got a lot of insights. I found that the direction I was thinking was really good on paper, but when I tried to get customers to use the product, there were many emotional hang-ups and barriers to get them over the line.
After some time doing that, I had an opportunity to rejoin Capital One and start leading product teams. I worked on home equity loans origination, and then shifted over to the consumer-auto, building products targeted at making the customer-dealer relationship work within a digital-first experience approach.
About a year and a half ago, I had a chance to join ScaleFactor, a start-up that was working on Small Business Accounting automation. That was the first part of their business, and there was a thesis that once you have most of a company’s financial data available to you, you should be able to deliver the best financial products as well. As is the case in start-ups, my role shifted quite a bit over that year and half, ending with leading the product and design team.
Finally, about a month ago, I joined Tala, which is an international micro-lender that is looking to grow into a true full-offering Financial Services for the unbanked across the world. Tala offers a core loan product, but we’re beginning to expand that offering to include products that help users build savings — I’m working with an awesome team to get that product to market.
Evaluating Career Opportunities
What are the key things you keep in mind when looking at new career opportunities?
I have taken a lot from the product vision approach that we learned so much about as a Capital One product team to think about my career— basically, defining a target end state, and then iterating as quickly as possible to get there.
When I think a career vision, I try to image what I would want to be true late in my career. For instance, I want to have experience in bringing products to life and then growing them through a full life cycle to understand what each part of the cycle takes. I want to build products that have had a big impact on customers. I also want to learn what it takes to build amazing teams along the way. Finally, I want to be at a point where I can coach product leaders as they go through these journeys. It was the approach that ultimately led me down the path of working in the fintech start-up space after some great experiences in a larger company.
I have also learned a lot about myself as I’ve gone through different transitions. Early in my career, I had the idea that I needed to make it to the top or my career wouldn't be a success. Basically, I thought I needed be a founder or a CEO to be satisfied. At this point, while I don’t think that those things are completely out of the question , I learned that new and challenging problems are what get me excited, and I could be very happy continuing to learn new things and tackle new spaces without worrying as much about the ultimate title.
So again, starting with a vision is important, but then, quick iteration is key to test and learn what the best path towards that vision is.
In joining Tala to work on helping customers save, I’m excited both about bringing a full product to life and the bigger driver of helping millions of people get into the financial system. In addition, the role includes something new to me, working on fintech product internationally. Until now, I hadn’t worked internationally and across markets with quickly evolving infrastructures and unique financial rails.
It seems that you are excited about diving into the international challenge. How do you believe that will change how you see things and approach problems from today on?
International fintech is interesting in a couple of dimensions.
First, it’s been fascinating to see the differences and similarities across markets. Tala currently operates across four markets that are pretty different in a lot of ways, but once you get into what customers are saying about savings, holding money, and what they would need in a core account, there are also key similarities. It’s one those things that don’t have a great handle yet, but I’m excited to learn.
Second, working in the US, you have years of financial infrastructure that has been built on top of each other. What that means is that even newer fintech products have some really old clunky pieces that are still there. Emerging and international markets seem more dynamic in a number of ways — in many cases, they’ve jumped ahead on the adoption of mobile-first wallets and newer financial rails, but there are other parts that still are being built out.
Getting To and Through the Interview
How did you come across your most recent role? What was the interview prep like? Any particular insight you can share?
Absolutely. This is going to be common piece of advice, but every job I’ve ever gotten has been through a connection. I’m not a great networker, in the traditional sense of going to events and proactively meeting people, but as I’ve worked with so many awesome people throughout my career, and those relationships have been incredibly valuable.
Right now, in fintech, there’s demand for folks that understand the complexities of finance, the business models, and the key customer problems. It becomes a pretty small world very fast, and the connections you’re making right now and the connections that you’ve built will end up spreading out through the ecosystem. We’re all much closer than you might imagine.
The other thing I often get behind on, but is valuable is to stay on top of what’s happening in the fintech space — particularly young companies and the shots they are taking. That helps you understand where investors are putting money and what kind of problems are being solved next. These days, you see a bunch of financial infrastructure work. I think it’s very interesting. Same for business back-office automation. I didn’t end up in either of those, but as I looked at the things I considered, those were in the mix as well.
In terms of preparing for the interview, it’s very helpful to have a story for your career around where you want to go and why you’ve taken the steps you’ve taken so far. It doesn’t have to be a long story, it’s about having the narrative. Here’s how I’ve progressed, here’s what I’ve learned, and here’s why this next opportunity is really exciting.
I would also make sure you understand the fundamentals of the business that you’re considering joining — product management is really just building businesses that have technology as a core differentiator, so it’s important to understand the core economic drivers and how you might build a roadmap to solve for them. I’ve heard a number of times that companies (particularly in the fintech space) wish their product team had a deeper understanding of how their business makes money, and I think that showing a deep understanding here sets you up for success in interviews and in the job itself.
Lastly, and after having gone through interviews a bunch of times in my career, my perspective has definitely shifted. Early in my career, I viewed interviews as something to win (right?!). I wanted to go in, get the offer, and feel proud about the interview-to-offer ratio. Over time, I've gotten better at remembering that if you get and accept the offer, you end up working with those people, and it’s so important to be excited about who you work with. That shifted my focus to being myself and listening carefully to figure out if I liked and wanted to be part of that place.
Was there an aha moment during the interview? Something that you didn’t actually prepare for or that has changed how you see the world these days.
There were certainly moments like that. One of the things I would say is that having all the right answers is not an important part of being successful. If you’re working on hard problems, you inherently won’t know most of the answers, so having frameworks to find the answers and being able to work with people to find answers is the most important part.
Interviews are like a discovery process. If there’s something interesting that you hadn’t considered during your preparation you can either freak out and lose confidence or acknowledge that you haven’t thought about it, and have a conversation. The latter is usually more impactful than having a packaged answer for each question, and has led to some genuinely interesting conversations in interviews along the way.
Starting (and Succeeding) in a New Role
How do you approach starting in a new role? Do you any playbook in mind for the first 30, 60, and 90 days?
It’s an interesting time to start a job and be remote. I think it just emphasizes some of the things that are important.
This will sound obvious, but I do think the speed at which you can make connections with the folks that you’re going to be working with is critical. Ultimately, stuff gets done because people choose to collaborate and work together, so have a strategy on how to build relationships quickly. Be bold and get calendar time to get to know folks. Either leverage an existing onboarding process or figure out the key people that you need to know or engage with.
Again, it’s also really important to understand the fundamentals of business you're working on. More often than not, you join a place with people that have been part of the many evolutions of the business, and the same people assume or take for granted the fundamentals, since this has been part of their daily lives. So just ask a lot of basic questions and have your back-of-the-envelope assumptions to compare against. It’s ok if you think they are too basic or dumb. How does this make money? Why do customers care about this? Why does the funnel work this way? Why does this cost so much?
Another one is that I would bias towards diving in as fast as possible, finding things and little questions that need to be answered or strategic goals that you can frame up. You might not have all the right answers, but getting your hands dirty gets you up to speed faster than sitting back and thinking about things over and over. This is especially true if you join a start-up, which usually has a bunch of fires to put out quickly.
Lightning Round
What’s something that everyone should be learning right now?
In the fintech space, make sure you understand the underlying rails that your products run on and what’s happening with the rails. At a bigger financial company, it can be easy to take it as a given and never actually understand how money moves. There’s an immense value in understanding this and how it's changing and will change in the future.
What are you reading these days? Is there a book that you would like people to know about?
I’ve recently gone back to Hooked by Nir Eyal, as I’m thinking about getting people to save money, which is a basic but important one. I enjoyed Range by David Epstein quite a bit — made me think about my career that has been mostly finance-related, but covered a number of unique experiences. Finally, it’s not business-related, per se, but I’m reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris right now and finding it really interesting!
What’s the one productivity trick that only you know about?
I’m a big fan of having a rhythm during the week. I have purposes for different days and I’m actually trying to structure some of that in my new role. For me, Monday is planning and de-risking, Tuesday and Wednesday are getting things done, Thursday is editorial and review, and Friday is people and looking ahead. It’s very hard to get a week like that, but the closer it gets to it the more I can get done.
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That’s a wrap! Thank you again for your support and looking forward to continuing my journey with you on Medium.
Cheers, Romulo
