Monica Millares: [00:00:00] Hello Edu, pleasure having you here.

Edu Moore (Clara): Thank you, Monica. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm very excited. This is actually the first podcast I participated in.

Monica Millares: Oh, awesome. It's chat. I always say that it's just a chat, which makes it like even better. So given that it's just a chat, I think before we go into the geeky producty and fintech things, I like having a fast, get to know each other type of conversation. So that people know you a little bit.

Can you tell us what's your favorite type of music?

Edu Moore (Clara): Electronic music. So EDM, dance I even did a DJ production music course back in 2015, like in Ableton, yeah. Oh,

Monica Millares: that is cool. Awesome. So then [00:01:00] what is your superpower?

Edu Moore (Clara): Superpower. I can make a plant become my friend, I would say.

Monica Millares: Meaning you're

Edu Moore (Clara): super friendly.

Yeah. I'm too friendly. I would say. Yeah. Oh, that is

Monica Millares: cool. But probably that's a very good quality for leadership and work, working in product. Like you become everybody's friend.

Edu Moore (Clara): Yeah. Yeah. Not everybody. But in general.

Monica Millares: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. And then what is your secret to success?

Edu Moore (Clara): I think just finding something you enjoy doing and working really hard.

No. And self awareness like acknowledging that, acknowledging where you're not very good at, and working harder on that and hiring better people than you on that I would say but yeah, they're working really hard would be my number one, secret to success. Yeah. I'm not a [00:02:00] natural no I failed math, physics when I was young.

I had the worst handwriting. When I was a kid I was the slowest kid in high school in, physical ed courses, but it was just a lot of effort. Yeah. Oh,

Monica Millares: wow. Looking at your CV, I would never ever thought that you struggled when you were a kid.

Edu Moore (Clara): A ton. Like my mother didn't know what to do with me.

So she just taught me math at home. My sisters would help me with history lessons. And then. I just studied a ton. Yeah. Yeah.

Monica Millares: effort effort. Cool. And then this is one of my favorite questions. What is your favorite FinTech that is not yours?

Edu Moore (Clara): I would say right now, Nubank would [00:03:00] be hard to beat given that I worked there, like customer obsession, the work they're doing and their longterm vision and how they executed those building blocks towards that longterm vision, I think it's just unique. World class. They are crushing it. Yeah. But when I joined in 2019, they were not crushing, they were doing well, but they just kept pushing, no?

So yeah, I would say Nubank would be my favorite fintech right now.

Monica Millares: Bullish. And wow. And then this makes the conversation even more juicy because we'll go into all that detail. But before we go into the detail, can you tell us about Purpose? What has been the role of Purpose in your life and in business?

Purpose. Purpose.

Edu Moore (Clara): Purpose. That's a good one. So I think it goes back to college and figure it out what to do. And to be honest, I didn't know what I [00:04:00] wanted to do when I was a grownup, but what did I want to work on? I was growing a house where my two parents were entrepreneurs, right? They build.

Their own world from way below. I didn't have a corporate education, like family example, it was just a couple of entrepreneurs that work together and just work their way through. So I went, I always make options that allowed me to explore what did I actually want to do. So I went into industrial engineering, which opened a wide range of options out of college.

Out of college, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do but I knew that investment banking and analytics and finance would open a lot of doors and it would be a good school. So I did investment banking, [00:05:00] after going to investment banking, I realized like I couldn't find purpose right in investment banking.

To be honest. I didn't see. What is the impact I'm giving? I'm helping companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in deals and M& A, but I'm not actually making a huge impact, or giving back. So I decided to do an MBA get out of Argentina, explore working abroad. During my MBA, I took some entrepreneurship lessons, at MIT's Martin Trust Center.

There's these famous entrepreneurship course, and I met a couple of colleagues and we tried to build a startup to heal mental anxiety and depression my family. We had some cases. So, that's when [00:06:00] I started like thinking about entrepreneurship and giving back and having more impact into the world, right?

We won some fellowships and grants and got close to building a prototype, but the three of us had a ton of depth and everybody was also looking for a side job and a way to hedge, eventually it failed. So lesson number one I would say if you're going to build something, Commit to it, and burn the bridges, right?

Eventually left the MBA, went to consulting, basically wanted to learn more, have more opportunities. And I knew I wanted to go into tech, but from an Argentinian investment banking background, working in tech into the U S it's not a straightforward transition, right? It is not. And consulting in, one of the big threes would open those doors for me, [00:07:00] would also hone my project management skills and would let me enter into industry.

And I was lucky enough to get into the private equity practice at Bain. And within the private equity practice, I was working mostly for technology companies around North America, right? So that's when I figured out, okay, tech would be a great place to work at. And then after a year working in consulting.

My H1B visa was rejected and I had six figure U. S. dollar debt with a passport that would only allow me to work in maybe Dubai, Argentina and Brazil and the Mercosur countries, right? So starting looking around the world on, those, countries and eventually. I just applied to tech firms in the best cities in the world that I could [00:08:00] deliver value and high impact, and at the same time, I can have a sustainable financial life, and then cover the debt I had acquired during the MBA. And that's how I ended into new banking in Brazil, and, from that point onwards, I think that's when work started to get easier. So in M& A investment banking consulting. And I had an internship at Converse, in Boston covering e commerce, but work was hard and I think it was really hard, not because the tasks were hard because I didn't, or I couldn't find a lot of purpose in the work I was doing.

Yeah. And then when starting working at Fintech. Like making products that would lower the credit card interest rates for customers. So that made sense in my mind, right? Okay. So now I'm doing something [00:09:00] that is making sense now in. Now I'm doing something that makes me want to wake up and work harder, right?

Monica Millares: Yes, I can totally relate to that, to your journey, both from Argentina and from Mexico, right? So it's the, I think both of us were, even though we were young, we were very strategic. On the decisions that we made, I probably I, also studied industrial engineering and the reason I studied engineering was because it could open me doors to something else.

So it's so interesting because like we've never met so different pathways but similar kind of thinking of, yeah, what is it that's going to open me doors to more opportunities? Whatever that opportunity may be. Yeah. Super interesting. And then also I felt the same way. I think many people feel the same way.

It's like banking, investment banking, consulting, law. [00:10:00] People have lost that passion or being connected with work. And at least for me, similar to you, as soon as I started working in a FinTech, it was like, yes, we're building a good bank. We are helping customers. There was a mindset shift. And since then you work insane hours as well, but there's a lot of.

I don't know, a nice feeling. I don't even know exactly what's the feeling, but it's fulfillment. It's meaning, it's purpose. It's, a collaboration. You feel part of something that it's even bigger than your own FinTech. It's Oh yeah, we're in this together. It's

Edu Moore (Clara): not anymore about. Trying to impress, trying to feel that you're worth it, that trying to get over the imposter syndrome, like it's actually giving value.

And many people confused yeah, you work in tech, you must work like five hours per day. And have Starbucks coffee. And [00:11:00] I don't think I'm working less than consulting hours, actually maybe hitting 60, 70, 75 sometimes. A couple hours on Saturday, right? But I enjoy it. I am a little bit workaholic.

This is not industry standard. But I haven't met any PMs in fintech, in developing economies at least, that don't work really hard and are successful. It's a demanding job. It's hard, but it's very rewarding and fulfilling. As you said, I think the word is fulfillment, right? And it's not any more about the salary or the credentials or trying to get that, what was like four out of five score or a high performer, you really don't care.

No, it's not validation anymore. It's not validation, right? It's just shipping the product and then you're in amplitude. [00:12:00] Or whatever data tracking tool you use and look. How is conversion going? Are people using the product? Have you launched the channel at least? Are we getting good feedback? So I think, that there's a little of the shift.

What I would, what I will say is that if you can find purpose in, those schools, like investment banking or consulting, it is amazing. And the impact is huge, right? And, I would never, if have, if I had to go again through investment banking or consulting, I would do it all over again. They gave me the skills. That helped me get into tech and, being a good PM I would say. Yeah,

Monica Millares: talking about being a good PM, you've done a very interesting type of work that not many PMs have done that it's growth in fintechs. [00:13:00] For example, I've done a ton of zero to one in fintechs, both in the UK and in Asia, right?

It's like a ton. But you've entered the fintech, like your three fintechs, when they were probably where I am now that it's like the fintech is established. And then, boom, they are about to Going to the growth curve, how does PMing product management changes once you go from let's say a startup to a scale up and the scale ups actually starts to grow, properly, like you've experienced in your brand can be so I know Clara,

Edu Moore (Clara): I would say.

I've never had the joy of going through these growth scale when I came into Brazil, and then when I joined the Mexican office was like two months old, right? So I had to experience both the Nubank [00:14:00] going from 3 million customers to 10 million in six months, and then to 20 million 12 months later.

And also Mexico's office going from 4, 000 customers to 20, 000 customers, six months later to 125, 000 customers after the first year, right? What I would say would change is, and then just to give some background to the audience, I was hired to join Nubank for their Mexican office to help launch Mexico.

Given that I didn't have experience in product management. Management or FinTech. They told me, go to Brazil, meet all the key stakeholders, learn work with the, Brazilian engineers, product managers, learn about the culture, and then bring the full suite to [00:15:00] Mexico to help the Preem in Mexico that are actually building the, MVP that we're about to launch and help them scale a little later.

So I came into Brazil. Ban was five to six years old. Two products, credit cards, debit card, check ins account. That's about it. Wow. 1, 500 employees. 500 engineers.

Monica Millares: Wow. That's insane. Like, when you say those numbers, I'm like. 1, 500 people in the company, I heard 200.

Edu Moore (Clara): Yeah, but did those early stage new bank, I think right now, I think they're closer to what?

8, 000. I haven't seen the LinkedIn page for a long time. I need, still felt like day one, David Bellis would open up coffee chats, 10 minutes, and you can just sit down at the headquarters, at the cafe and [00:16:00] speak with David Bellis about anything, right? Any employee could just book some time in the Bits Agenda and you could sit down and have a coffee with him and a pão de queijo and speak about anything, introduce yourself, strategy, et cetera, right?

Company strategy was wide open to the whole company. They would even share three year strategy, five year strategy in the PDF in Slack channel, right? And then you would be part of, you would feel part of that momentum and that strategy and that. Where are the companies going? And also there were not so many layers.

It was quite a horizontal structure, right? I was reporting to a product lead that probably reported to the head of product that was like CPO at the time. And he reported to Beliz and that was about it. That was the whole structure. Then Mexico, was even smaller product team were like 4 [00:17:00] PMs engineers were like 15, but many of them were shared with Brazil.

And all the numbers and metrics and the sample sizes were smaller. And and it was like way, way more working, getting it done, shipping the product and see real impact real fast. I felt like when a startup is really old, you feel like you have a lot and a growth and scale have a lot more resources, a lot more people that have gone through a lot of battles and you can find solutions easier.

When a startup is a little bit more early stage, you need to work harder to find those solutions. And sometimes the solutions you find are not the best ones, but you get it done. And you need to wear way more many hats. The smaller the setup is and be more resourceful, right? Like in Mexico, maybe I would write, the research plan.[00:18:00]

I would be way more involved in customer interviews and participate in all of them. Whereas maybe in Brazil, I would have a UX researcher that can handle a bunch of interviews and they could jump in one or two, right? And then what, eventually happens and this happened Nubank and bit, is that the older the company I think the, you need to have more processes.

And some people find it like bureaucracy or it's slows down velocity. The thing is, when you have a large customer base, you're impacting a ton of customers. And then when the tech stack is composed out of a lot of microservices or even a huge monolith. Any minor change you do here can impact something over here, right?

Yep. So you really need to be careful [00:19:00] and you really have to have the right set of processes, to make sure that from discovery to execution, to launch. Everything is really mapped out and follows a sequencing and every stakeholder is aware and you minimize the odds of something going wrong. So I would say like the main difference would be more processes, less availability to that three year strategy plan, coffee chats.

With C levels, forget about it, gone. And then sometimes the strategy is not so open to everyone. No. So unless you're in a leadership position, you will depend on your leader to provide the visibility and to communicate the, that high level of company strategy vision.

Whereas in a smaller company, [00:20:00] everybody knows what's going on, where the company is going, what is the founder thinking? And I think those are like, really things that change. I'm actually interviewing a lot of PMs from big fintechs that have done amazing. And what I feel is that they feel like this, your scope has been reduced.

They feel that their purpose is very limited. They feel like they have little decision on the products they built and why they're building it. And some of them are not even reporting to product managers. Like we big fintechs at some point, like sometimes product managers are reporting to, and that analytics leads or data scientists, or something that is not a product manager.

And that's something that can demotivate you as a PM, depending on the company you're working on. [00:21:00] In the end, you want to be able to, you want to be. You're never the ultimate. Yeah, you're ultimate, never the ultimate decision maker, but you definitely wanna be somebody that has a strong influence on the decision.

Right.

Monica Millares: That is super insightful. It's you are me in the future, . I was like, that is so cool. I haven't lived with that and we're on the way. But that is cool. And I think many of the fintechs have not experienced that because there is not that many fintechs with. 5, 000 employees, 1, 000 employees, probably it's less than 20 in the world.

So it's a very unique place to be. That's super cool. Just building on that was there, I think many fintechs we focus on delivering the first few years because we're building functionality and at some point we need to do a [00:22:00] change of mindset when it comes to now you've got the debit card.

Now you've got the credit card. How do you. Make that like in Brazil, like how do you make that card to reach millions of customers, right? Rather than just build another, you cannot build another credit card you can, but it's incremental value. Was there a shift in mindset?

Edu Moore (Clara): So I can speak of, I had the two experiences, like in one company, I built like a zero to one crypto card with my team. And another company I joined when the card was already

The way I thought about it was,

and I really Airbnb's modus on permission to build is that do you have a product that is already satisfying customer [00:23:00] needs and is enough right before you can actually jump into building another product, another card or an extra. Yeah. If we take, Nubank was just a credit card for

five years or four years since, since inception. And debit card, came as a result of reducing funding needs, and accelerating growth, at some point you cannot give credit to everyone, but you could get the debit. Yeah. And that was the one thing that, that really made the hockey stick in, in growth.

But what I would say is you don't necessarily need to jump from one product to another. If the one product you have is working well, it's attracting new customers, it's gaining traction, you've got retention, you've got engagement, [00:24:00] then maybe you should focus on the core, build the key functionalities that customers want.

And, the ones that will actually help your business grow, right? Because, think about building what customers want is that. Many customers do not know what they want, right? And you need to build that intuition, right? And then you can jump into new products, right? But again, until 2019, NewBank only had credit card, debit card, checking account, right?

And then 2019, they introduced a beta for lending. 2020, they launched insurance. launch Mexico. So you can do very well in a big enough market with just one product or just a couple of products. If you serve your customers better [00:25:00] than your competitors and you actually understand what you need to build around them, right?

What I see a lot of things it's trying to do is going or chasing behind the table stakes. All the time. This competitor has launched this new feature. This competitor has launched this other feature. Yeah. We're way behind. We need to have whatever B2B fintech. We need to have 10, 15 year piece APIs for our customers.

You actually don't need to have 15 year piece, right? Maybe you just need a better. Analytics tool where an accountant can download and make a super easy cash flow analysis with the data, that you can provide them. And that's good enough. And then eventually you can build one year PAPI two, three, four [00:26:00] based on, what your customers want or needs.

Eventually, right?

Monica Millares: Yeah, I really like that because then it's like going back to the basics. And this reminds me of my times when I was not in fintech, but in banking and in Barclays. This was like so basic, it was like the core, we would talk about the core all the time and being good at the core. And probably that's what, I think you're right.

Like many fintechs are like, Oh, so and so just launched and it's so fast paced and everybody needs to launch everything. It's wait, let's step back.

Edu Moore (Clara): Yeah, and a great example for me in the cards space is Google pay, Apple pay, right? Yes, in some countries like Brazil is like table stakes and depending on the income level, like it's almost mandatory, right?

But actually if you're [00:27:00] if you're serving middle income or the underserved and banked. You don't really need to prioritize on shipping ApplePay, right? Or because they don't even have iPhones, right? Or GooglePay, right? You should prioritize on getting and investing on great data sources for your credit risk model, right?

Because you will have less information on those people. Yeah, so you can increase your credit lines so you can serve them better. And there's where you should put the money, right? Because, Apple pay, takes four to five months if you do it right. And if you do it fast, or you can go through a banking service provider, but even so it will take you two to three months, a couple of back end engineers.

We're speaking about anywhere around 40, 000, which like SG& A salary is. Some [00:28:00] licenses from your flag and text time, And maybe it's not, it's more nice to have than the mass hub, right? Yeah. But because somebody else has it, then you go, we need to catch up when it's catch up, let's stop, and you're giving like 50 credit lines.

And customers are complaining about that and you're working on Apple Pay, right? Yeah,

Monica Millares: so it's guys, let's step back a little bit and think before we put everything in the roadmap, basically, that's the key takeaway. So one of the very interesting things about your career is that you've worked in FinTech, B2C and B2B, both.

And it both in very successful Fintechs as such, what are your insights on how are we doing product different in B2C and B2B or just like Fintechs, how are they different as [00:29:00] such?

Edu Moore (Clara): So I've been there a month or so in B2B. I just joined Clara as a product director. And I think the main difference that I've seen around the ways of working in B2C against B2B is that.

Number one, in B2C, you don't have a sales team, right? And you didn't have a post sales team. So you need to do secondary research on the sales team, right? And understand what are customers thinking about doing interviews, sending surveys, and collecting data from prospects or non customers, right?

And then doing interviews on your current customers to know what they need, right? In B2B, but, the trade off on the good ends on B2C is that you do have a huge sample [00:30:00] size, right? There's millions of people that you could target, interview and do a potential pitch, right? Yeah. In B2B,

I think the biggest struggle is to collect feedback and build that customer intuition on, what the customer needs, right? To help purchase the roadmap. So I think number one, sources of truth and how you collect feedback, right? B2C, surveys, do quantitative qualitative research. In B2B, you actually interview your current customers, and then what you need is really strong CRMs where you can collect feedback on the sales funnel, right?

I really understand people that are not closing a deal with you. Why are they rejecting you? Who are they using? Why are they choosing them over you? And what is lacking? Within your [00:31:00] product, within your position, both sales, what are your current customers complaining about? What can you do better to serve them?

And then in between, you cannot fall in love with either your current customers or your prospects, because if you only focus on your current customers, then take an example of Brazil, right? You will have a hundred thousand employees. Employers, right? Or that could be your target segment, right?

You're aiming at SMEs, right? So SMEs, let's say you got 70, 000 SMEs around Brazil. I'm shooting a number, right? And you're a startup and you're just starting in Brazil. So you hit 500 customers. Is that sample representative of the whole market? So if you only bill for those 500, maybe you're missing the whole [00:32:00] bill, right?

Yeah. Also, if you only focus on the people that are rejecting you, then you're not serving well your current customers. So you need to balance that, I think the, second biggest difference is product prioritization. So in B2C. We have many books and playbooks on how to prioritize, right?

You have impact versus effort. You have the rise, you can do it in any way that you want, and you will have enough data to actually size, measure it, and actually define if it's a good way, to, put it up or down and you can have your, strong data sources or intuition, but I think it's a bit easier to prioritize.

In B2B and in B2B regional. Companies, you have [00:33:00] different things that are competing with each other. And different variables you need to take into account besides impact and effort. What do you need to think about is, okay, so what customer ask for this feature, right? Because features come directly from the customers, from your sales team that are serving them.

Yeah. Okay. Or they come from prospects that have rejected your offer. And they have stated that the reason they rejected was this. So the first one strategic account tells your sales person that they want this feature. So you tell the product manager owning that journey of the value proposition Hey, we need to build this.

So that, how does that compete with the rest of the backlog? So now you need to think, okay, is the customer that made the request a strategic account, for example, and that's one way of optimization, right? There are [00:34:00] many, but so number one, is it a strategic account? Is it a high potential account? We see that, a startup or a low potential account that will actually.

We will serve them, but they're not actually generating additional profit or revenue to us. They're like breaking even and they're just compensated for our costs to serve them. Yeah. But we're happy to serve them, but I don't know if we would build something specifically for them. And that could be one way of looking at it.

The second factor is of course, like you need to size the engineering, effort of it. But an impact is it a strategic? So if I do this change, will they increase their usage? Will they be more eager to use us? Will the, will they be prompt to actually. Purchase, like a SAS subscription if we develop this new feature, right?

Yeah. [00:35:00] And then the other important thing in B2B is will the feature I am building impact all the rest of the customers or a big majority of them and benefit my whole population? Or will it be something super specific for this customer, for this specific industry? That will have no impact on the rest of the customer.

And then you have the regional, PSE, if the B2B FinTech is regional work, am I building something that is country specific or will this be also helpful for other geographies, right? And these trade offs are usually more on the ops and onboarding side and sometimes some payment methods. Or ERPs, than on analytics, experience, UX, UI, dashboards, [00:36:00] et cetera.

Monica Millares: It changes. It's like a different type of conversation altogether.

Edu Moore (Clara): Exactly. So sources of truth on what customers need. How do you prioritize what customers need? And then stakeholders. Involvement in product decisions, differs, right? Depending on the company, what I would feel is that in B2C product might have most of the power in decision making, whereas in B2B, it's a hands on collaboration, decision making with a lot of trade offs, right?

Because you have the sales team, you have the finance team, you have the product team, and you need to merge. The three should actually provide something that satisfies your key accounts, delivers value to the [00:37:00] customers in a way that flywheel sequencing, engineering wise, product team wise, makes sense. And also impacts the business in a sustainable way, right?

Because in B2B, the thing is that

any investment you make, it usually takes time for you or a little bit longer to see the results. And actually see the impact on your P& L, right? Yeah. Whereas in B2B, like you launch something immediately. Wow. 1000 customers, 10, 000 customers. So exciting. People are using it, et cetera. And in B2B the return investment can get lower, right?

Yeah. The return investment could be higher, sorry. But the time to see the investment could be slower.

Monica Millares: Yes. This is so interesting. I could keep talking with you for two hours, but I'm very conscious of time. So as a product director, you work with a lot of PMs. [00:38:00] How do you keep your people happy and high performance and motivated?

That is key for a FinTech and a successful team overall.

Edu Moore (Clara): Yeah, that's a good one. So what, I would say is.

What makes a PM frustrated?

Number one, feeling they cannot deliver at the pace you would like to, right? I cannot speak for all PMs, but at least many of the PMs I have worked with have high standards for themselves and they don't like to fail, right? They have a high bar, right? And they're mostly overachievers or they really want to make it right.

The other feel, the other thing that makes them frustrated. Is, lack of clarity ambition on [00:39:00] what do they need to build. They usually dislike when you go back on decisions and they made the team work on things that are not going to be shipped or, and they have to face the retaliation of the engineering team, design team that work on something for months and then someone above told them.

Yes, exactly. And the other thing that frustrates a PM a ton would be lack of clarity and career path, right? Where am I going? How am I growing? If you join a FinTech, especially a startup series, A, B, C, whatever, you're looking at the upside. You're looking at the salary, beyond paying your bills, but you're looking at the equity, the upside.

How can I grow? How can I make something? How can I build impact, build my portfolio and actually get something better eventually, or grow with the company. If you understand the pain points and what gets a PM [00:40:00] frustrated, then the way actually tackling is number one on delivery. So that, and that's the beauty of banking and consulting.

What I would do is workload management, best practices from consulting and banking, right? So any PM that works with me, I would help them with their backlog management. So every Monday. They would tell me what are the key priorities for the week on a Slack message or a synchronous, right? Then I would align those priorities.

And then on our one on one that Monday, we would not spend time on what you're working on, what are your priorities. It will be only on how can it be helpful to you. Are there any blockers? Do you see anything that could stop you from hitting your weekly priorities this week? Yep. And then [00:41:00] by doing that and telling them like, organize your agenda on Sunday, schedule the meetings, you help them build that muscle on, you need to be the owner of your own workload and backlog, right?

As you purchase the product backlog, you need to have your own personal backlog. And then they start hitting the key priorities and objectives, and they get less anxious because they know what to focus on in which order, right? And as a leader, you can help them on that. On clarity ambition, I would share to them the strategy that I ambition that I received from above, right?

So things that they don't necessarily need to share to the team and because it could derail the focus, but I could tell them, okay, so we're building this product. I think that the potential flywheels could be, I don't know. We'll build in a technical account. So flywheels could be a [00:42:00] debit card, or we could even use customers deposit to collateralize them and put them as a guarantee as a warranty to extend the credit line cards.

But that's something that we need to work forward for now. I think the most important things for us to focus on delivering a wallet where you can deposit money, et cetera, and they can also share that vision with their teams. If they believe it's worth it or not, but they at least have clarity on what's the idea, what's the goal, why are we building this right career path?

I'm a big promoter on monthly feedback sessions, so I pushed them to set up feedback sessions with. Their engineering pair, their design pair. And if there's any business analytics pair, like just have that one on one. And I myself set up one on ones with them so they can give me feedback on how I am.

Am I doing as a leader, right? So setting the example works a [00:43:00] ton on, promoting feedback loops. And then career pathwise on those monthly one on ones when I provide feedback to them. I also tell them, like, how do you feel about your career? This is the career ladder. And every time I onboard a new PM, when I hire, I show them this is the PM career ladder, this is the career path, this is what you need to hit.

And on every performance cycle, what I would do is, So this is how you did over the last semester or whatever cycle length was. This is where you're at. This is the next level. Let's do an action plan. And just tell me, and just tell me what you're going to build. What are you going to build to hit those things that could help you get to the next level?

So that's, [00:44:00] and then the other thing is invest enough skilling your PMs. It's easier, way easier than to hire someone from another company with other product, school learnings, et cetera. So right now I, joined, I joined Clara. I have two APMs. I asked him, do you want to join a pm course?

And there's like this amazing Brazilian, pm. Ed school, ed tech called PM3 whose founder, Marcelo Almeida worked in Luban with me at the time. Yeah. I hit Marcel, I told him, do you want to go to the best product school in Brazil? Yes. They were, they both wanted to go, both associate PMs and they're both going to that course.

And they were super excited about it. So I think that's how you can get a PM motivated. [00:45:00] With clarity on the product vision, clarity on career path, you're upskilling them. You're helping them with their workload management, and you're making sure that they're focusing on what matters the most, right?

It's really hard for them to fail. If you said that those boundaries for them, right? If they do fail after setting those boundaries, maybe it was not the right job, it was a bad moment for them. But at least you set the right course rates, right? And they will be forever, grateful, right?

Monica Millares: Of course.

Of course. I think this has been one of the best conversations I've had in my 70 episodes or something. I'm like, yeah, I'm just listening so carefully. Thank you so much. As we reach towards the end, probably the last, question, other than where can we find you? That's the very last one. If you were to change one thing [00:46:00] in FinTech, just one thing.

To make fintech better for customers, staff, and shareholders. What could that be?

Edu Moore (Clara): Wow. It's a tough one.

I think the one thing I would change is having fintech companies and financial institutions partner with governments to promote financial lives and financial education within schools. Since people, from the beginning when people are kids, and having like money management, wealth management, spending, having good, healthy financial habits, being part of the education curricula.

And I don't think that's only the government's role to do. I think core institutions, fintechs, neobanks, they. Are the ones that [00:47:00] provide those financial products and services to the customers when they are 12 years old, 18, when they get their first job and they should be also be responsible and accountable and pushing for that change, right?

I think as product managers, we always complain that one of the big pain points is that people don't understand the products. People don't know how to use a credit card. So do something about it, right? I have an education blog on my website. Nobody. He's going to read it, right? People don't have time.

I didn't really care. But yeah,

I know. I think I know. But if you actually promote it from school and make it mandatory and they need to get a grade on that to actually get to the next grade and pass the test, then everybody would get out of school at 12 [00:48:00] or 18, depending on the opportunities they have in their lives with some level of financial education and knowledge, right?

And I think that could really change, customer's

Monica Millares: lives, right? Yeah. And I'm like, that can change the future of humanity as such.

Edu Moore (Clara): Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Monica Millares: It's been such an amazing conversation. I'm like, I have no idea how I'm going to cut this into small videos and be like, this is the most interesting bit.

I'm like, you have to listen to it all, not just that minute. Where can we find you and your newsletter?

Edu Moore (Clara): So you can find me on Twitter. I'm Edu Moore, Edu from Eduardo, so Edu Moore blog. You can find me on LinkedIn. I post content on a weekly basis. And they have a newsletter on LinkedIn and I'm hopefully building a sub stack soon.

So just follow me on LinkedIn, and see [00:49:00] around.

Monica Millares: Yes. And all the details will be in the show notes. So can easily find him. Thank you everyone. And Edu, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing all that wisdom.

Edu Moore (Clara): Thank you, Monica. This was so much fun. Yes, it was. Thank you.

Bye bye. Bye bye