If you are a product driven company, hiring the right Product Manager can make or break your company. It can 10x the velocity of your engineering team or grind them to a halt. It can help ship incredibly delightful features or complex interfaces that you can’t sell. It can help you innovate or simply follow suit. If you are a founder or manager looking to hire your first PM, or an aspiring PM trying to understand what it takes to get the job, this article is for you.

1. The scorecards —what to look for
2. The role — who to look…

I recently was discussing with my partner the role that hard work has played in our lives. We had worked hard all throughout our lives to get to a point of mild success. Yet, through the conversation, it became clear that while I attributed my success to hard work, she attributed hers to luck. This feeling, called “Impostor Syndrome” — the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills — plagues many in the workplace, especially women and minorities.

While reflecting on this, it became…

Software is eating the world. The SaaS (Software As a Service) market is growing by 10% annually, expected to reach $157 billion in 2020.

Today, teams are working exclusively in software applications to be more productive and grow their businesses faster. This is especially true for areas where the ROI for investing in SaaS is clear — most notably communications (Slack, Zoom, Calendly), software development (AWS, Twilio, Figma), and sales/marketing automation (Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo).

When it comes to finance, SaaS adoption is only just starting. In a recent survey, 88% of CFOs still relied on spreadsheets for budgeting and forecasting…

Expense reports are the worst. We all know this — and many are still forced to submit them. Finance teams often leverage the fact that employees hate filing expense reports in order to prevent reimbursements. After all, if filing expenses was fun, every employee would be doing it, right?

This article outlines why this way of thinking may do more harm than good for your company. It also provides an alternative to expense reports: issuing cards for employees with the right permissions (disclaimer: I work at Ramp). Let’s dive in…

10 reasons to kill expense reports

1. Wastes time of highly paid employees

It takes on average 20 minutes to file an expense…

FinTech lending today leverages data, technology, machine learning, and digital marketing to better target, underwrite, and serve customers. These capabilities are now table-stakes.

A new wave is coming: FinTech Lending 2.0. These FinTechs focus on finding innovative ways to de-risk borrowers to offer cheaper and more customized products. 7 strategies stand out that will define the next generation of FinTech lenders and leave the rest struggling to stay relevant.

FinTech Lending 1.0 — what was once disruptive is now table-stakes.

Just yesterday, “alternative data” and “digital lending” were all the hype. An onslaught of online lending companies started lending billions to consumers and SMEs. Today, FinTechs make up 38% of the…

Myanmar is in a boom. While seven years ago, financial services were largely unused, today many consumers use their smartphone to make payments. Over the course of only a few years, over 40 million Myanmar people have come online. From no banks to digital currencies, from no computers to smartphones, from no internet to 4G — everything in Myanmar is moving fast despite the relaxed atmosphere. The reason? No incumbency.

The fact that consumers are 4x more likely to have a smartphone (80% penetration rate) compared to a bank account (23% bank account penetration) has paved the way for mobile…

How should regulators and investors determine whether a lender is “inclusive” or “predatory”? Should regulators limit the interest rate lenders can charge? What should investors look for when making socially conscious decisions?

Digital credit options for the underbanked around the world are now more accessible than ever, but for a price. The rise of FinTechs delivering financial services to the masses has left regulators and investors scrambling to distinguish responsible lenders from predatory ones. …

Define your Balance Scorecard

Defining, tracking and reporting on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a critical process to review the health of a business. One common method to do so is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) which organizes KPIs across 4 focus areas:

1. Financial: How do our shareholders see us? This perspective views organizational financial performance and the use of financial resources.
2. Customer: How do our customers see us? This perspective views organizational performance from the point of view the customer or other key stakeholders that the organization is designed to serve.
3. Internal Processes: What must we excel at to satisfy our customers and shareholders…