Morgan Brooks · Chief Product Officer · United States
Oversight of defaults, fees and customer data
My contribution to a board
Most boards hear about products through growth figures: accounts, revenue per customer, retention. I would add the questions that sit underneath those numbers when the customers are small businesses. Which option does the screen choose for the customer, and what does that default earn? Does the customer see the cost in dollars before committing, or discover it later? Whose data does the product collect, for how long, and who else can see it? In my sector these questions decide whether a carrier trusts the software or leaves it, and the answers seldom appear in a board pack unless someone asks. I can read a product roadmap, a pricing proposal or a data-sharing agreement and explain to fellow directors what a customer will actually experience. I am not a financial expert, and I would rely on the audit chair and finance colleagues for accounting judgements. My value would be in recognising when a product decision has quietly become a fee, risk or reputation decision.
Judgement in practice
01
Asking what a default earns before approving it
When I proposed making the fee-free payment date our default, the useful board question was not whether customers liked advances. Many did, and some needed them. The question was how much of our revenue depended on carriers taking an option the screen had chosen for them. On another board I would ask the same thing of any product with a preselected paid option, an automatic renewal or a bundle: what share of revenue would remain if the customer had to choose it actively? Directors do not need to redesign the screen. They need management to show that revenue rests on informed choices, and to bring forward the cost of correcting a default before a regulator, a journalist or a complaint trend forces the issue at a worse moment.
02
Treating another system's data as evidence, not truth
Our hours flags taught me that a warning built on someone else's data inherits that data's delays and errors. For a month, rural readings arrived late and the flags were wrong for some drivers. A board overseeing any product that turns external data into advice, safety alerts or credit decisions should ask where the data comes from, how old it may be when used, and what the customer sees when it is missing. I would also ask how management learns that a warning is wrong, and how quickly. Those questions are not technical detail. They determine whether the company can stand behind what its product tells customers, and they belong in the board's view of product risk alongside cyber security and uptime.
My first year on a board
I would spend the first quarter as a customer before acting as a director. That means signing up, using the product as a small customer would, reading the published fees and terms, and listening to a sample of support calls with management's agreement. I would then ask the chair and the committee chair which decisions the board expects to face in the next eighteen months and where my product experience is meant to help. Through the first budget cycle, I would ask management to show, for the main products, the defaults that carry revenue, the data collected and retained, and the complaint themes by customer size. I would keep my questions within the committee's remit and avoid turning meetings into product reviews, which belong to management. By the end of the year I would ask the chair for direct feedback, including whether my questions improved decisions or merely added length to them. I would also tell the chair plainly where I am still learning, particularly on financial reporting and remuneration, so that my committee work can be planned around it.
Conflicts and their management
The difficult conflicts in my case are commercial rather than personal. Ostervane works with freight brokers, a partner bank, logging-device makers, insurers and factoring firms, and several of those compete with or supply each other. A board seat at any of them would put me in rooms where Ostervane's interests are discussed, so I have ruled out those companies entirely. Elsewhere, I would list every Ostervane partner, my equity holdings and my family members' employers for the nominating committee, and update the list whenever Ostervane signs a significant partnership. If a matter touched Ostervane, I would declare it and leave the discussion, and if that happened more than once or twice a year I would reconsider whether I belong on that board. Information would not travel in either direction: I would not use what I learn as a director in my product work, nor bring Ostervane's carrier data or pricing into another boardroom.
My independence statement
My salary, equity and loyalties sit with Ostervane, and any board I join should know that before anything else. I would treat independence as a question for that board and its counsel to answer against the applicable listing standards and its own rules, using a full list of my holdings and relationships. If they conclude that a relationship impairs my judgement, I would decline rather than argue for an exception.
Board and committee exposure
Presented to the Board or a committee
Ostervane Carrier Software
Board of directors: quarterly product, pricing and roadmap reviews
March 2022–present
Presented the advance-fee default change in 2023 and the location-sharing rule in 2025 for board decision, including the revenue at risk in each.
Reported to a committee
Ostervane Carrier Software
Audit and risk committee: payments programme and customer data
June 2023–present
Reports twice a year with the chief financial officer and general counsel on advance-fee complaints, partner data requests and declined data uses.