Inside product management at TotallyMoney

At the heart of every product you use, there’s a product manager. More likely, there’s a whole team of them. They take the seed of an idea and make it a reality — overseeing the whole process, from the initial planning stages, right up to launch and beyond.

We sat down with Jack Mitchell — one of our own senior product managers, to find out how this critical function works at TotallyMoney.

We’re given a lot of autonomy at TotallyMoney. The business works to Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), which means it's up to the product managers and squads to set the strategy and decide how we will hit our goals. It’s a very freeing way of working.

We work very cross-functionally too. Our product teams are split into missions, focused on one overarching goal. These involve multiple disciplines from around the business — from engineering, data scientists and product design, to marketing and compliance.

I work on a mission that is focused on user engagement, an area where the solution to the problem is not immediately obvious. But it’s up to me, the product manager, to define the problem and work with the team to work out how to deliver value for our users and the business. 

As a recent example, we’ve been looking at how we can better personalise our service and deliver relevant value for our users. We undertook user research to discover what messages customers would value, analysed the number of customers it would be relevant for, and worked with the engineers to gauge how long it would take to build. Being a product manager at TotallyMoney definitely gives you great exposure at every stage of the process from discovery to delivery.

The business values a “build, measure, learn” approach, which means we’re free to take calculated risks, using data and product discovery to drive our decision-making and ultimately prioritisation. If you’ve got a good case to explore something new, you’ll be encouraged and supported to make it happen.

I think the level of freedom we’re given could be surprising to some people – but if you like autonomy, you’ll thrive at TotallyMoney. It’s definitely something I think product managers look for in a job. We’ve still got a start-up feel, but with over 4 million customers and a talented team, you can really make an impact.

The next few years are going to be really exciting for the product team at TotallyMoney. We want to put data back in the hands of our customers, and that means finding new ways of surfacing that data and making it genuinely useful for people.

One of the big ways we’re doing that is by adopting open banking. It’ll be a huge focus for us over the next year, and it’ll give us access to more data so we can show customers even better options for them and their money.