Unlocking Value for Unique Customer Sets: A Conversation with Abhijit Chaudhary
As Chief Product Officer at Green Dot Corporation, Abhijit Chaudhary has a deep understanding of the importance of balancing business and customer needs. With a platform approach to serving users, Green Dot supports five core areas of its business: embedded finance (BaaS), direct-to-consumer, retail, tax services, and payroll services. We sat down with Abhijit to discuss how he thinks about serving each user and the importance of keeping the corporate mission front-and-center when weighing product decisions.
A Platform Approach to Serving Users
Abhijit emphasized that the customers Green Dot serves vary considerably, with different needs and requirements. However, by taking a platform approach, the company can build new features efficiently and scale them for multiple groups. For example, if a rewards feature is developed for a particular partner, it can be offered across the board to all stakeholders. As head of product, Abhijit must understand the needs of B2B customers, their end-users, and B2C customers to effectively service everyone on the platform.
The Evolution of Product Leadership
Prior to joining Green Dot, Abhijit held various product leadership positions at companies like American Express and Discover. He has seen product management evolve significantly over the past two decades. The introduction of agile methodology to product development was a game-changer, freeing up time for engineers and product management folks. Today, product management plays a crucial role in driving prioritization and enterprise strategy.
Balancing Business and Customer Needs
Abhijit believes that providing value to customers is essential. To achieve this, Green Dot looks at any problem through three different lenses: Is it solving a customer’s problem? Is it going to lead to better customer satisfaction? Does it serve the company’s purpose-driven mission? By focusing on customer needs first, Abhijit believes that the rest will fall into place.
Seasonality and Customer Needs
Green Dot’s customer needs closely follow business needs, but sometimes they follow a normal course or cycle, and sometimes they have seasonality. For example, during tax season, customer needs are very seasonally-driven. To prepare for these cycles, Abhijit’s team starts preparing six months in advance to ensure they are ahead of customer needs. They also use analytics to measure every single event and optimize interactions with customers based on those events.
Communicating Effectively with Customers
Abhijit emphasized the importance of communicating small bits of information to customers over time through their platform. To achieve this, they create multiple scenarios for different messaging types and do a lot of testing and learning with customers. They also use analytics to understand customer perception of messages and how they react to them, allowing them to enhance messaging and positively influence customers.
Stress-Testing New Ideas
Abhijit believes that new product features and enhancements come from a mix of customer input and internal innovation. They involve customer input and feedback at all levels of the product development lifecycle and use a version of the PDLC lifecycle. When developing new products and features, they ask themselves, “Is this holding true to our mission?” and put ideas through an ideation session, similar to “stress testing,” to find out if the intention is to help customers.
A Recent Product That Adds Unique Value
Abhijit highlighted Green Dot’s flagship digital bank for consumers, GO2bank, as a product that adds unique value for both the business and the customer. They spent months talking to customers to understand what was important to them, and their top need was access to cash. They built a product around their needs, which allowed customers to build credit and access other financial services in one ecosystem. Since its launch in 2021, GO2bank has added millions of customers.
By prioritizing customer needs and staying true to their mission, Abhijit and his team at Green Dot are able to create products and features that truly make a difference in people’s lives.