A product career that began with a member's three overdraft fees

The member who taught me the most about banking products came to my counter at Skaarland Community Credit Union in Duluth in the autumn of 1999. She had paid three overdraft fees in one afternoon. Her paycheque had arrived on the same day as three small purchases, and the order in which our system posted them overnight had taken her below zero before her deposit counted. I explained the posting rule correctly and watched it make no sense to her. I had been in the job four months, after an economics degree at Ellery Hill College, and I remember thinking that a rule nobody could follow from the outside was not much of a rule.

I spent three and a half years at Skaarland, first serving members and then as an analyst in lending operations, where I learnt how loan files, payment schedules and late-payment letters fit together. In March 2003 I moved to Omaha to join the disputes team at Quillmore Card Services, a listed card issuer. I wanted to understand payments at a scale a credit union of 210 people could not show me, and disputes were the right place to learn it. Every dispute is a customer telling a card issuer that something did not happen the way they expected. After a year of reading them I could see that a large share had nothing to do with fraud. Cardholders did not recognise the merchant name on a statement, or a free trial had turned into a subscription, or a refund had been issued and not yet posted. I became manager of a team of twenty-six dispute specialists in 2005 and started keeping a register of disputes the product itself had caused.

That register moved me into product. In 2007 Quillmore asked me to lead the design of online disputes and card servicing, which until then had happened almost entirely by telephone and post. I had no formal training in design, so I enrolled in a part-time master's degree in human-computer interaction at Merriwold University, studying in the evenings until I finished in 2010. The course changed what I paid attention to. In 2009 we tested our new dispute form with a group of cardholders that included a blind man who used a screen reader. He could not get past the second page, because the list of merchants was an image. I had not thought to check. Since then I have not released a product without first watching someone who uses assistive technology try it.

In 2012 I took over Quillmore's rewards and card experience products, covering 3.2 million active rewards accounts. The decision from that period I think about most is the one we made in 2014 to stop points expiring for cardholders in good standing. It cost the business the income it had been booking from points that were never redeemed, and the people who disagreed with me were right about the number. I still believe we were right to give it up, and I set out the case on my impact page.

I joined Corriston Bank in Louisville in September 2017 to lead consumer digital and deposit products. My first two years went on rebuilding the mobile app and online account opening, which together moved the share of new checking accounts opened digitally from 19% to 46%. The work I am best known for there began in 2019, when our complaints data and the member I remembered from Duluth pointed to the same place. We redesigned how the bank charged for overdrafts, showing customers a projected balance and giving them a day to put things right. Fee income fell by more than half. The bank kept more of its customers.

In April 2022 I joined Lanternfield Cooperative Technology, the credit union service organisation in Madison that runs digital banking for 74 credit unions. Dorothea Kimbrough, our chief executive, asked me to turn a heavily configured app into one product that worked for every member of every client. That has meant three large decisions: limiting what each credit union may change so that the app works with assistive technology, moving third-party data access onto connections members can see and end, and building small-business tools around cash flow rather than invoicing. Each decision disappointed some of the credit unions that own us, and I have tried to tell them so before they found out for themselves.

I work in writing. Every significant proposal I take to our board's product and risk committee begins with a page listing who will be surprised by the change and experience it as a loss, whether members, credit union staff or partners, and it attaches the objections I did not accept. I spend one morning a month listening to calls in a client credit union's contact centre, because that is where our design mistakes arrive first. Colleagues would say I am slow to start building and stubborn about the order in which things ship, that I ask to see a feature working with a screen reader before I ask about its launch date, and that I would rather publish a decision a client dislikes than leave it ambiguous.

Open to Board appointments · Advisory roles · Speaking invitations

Languages / English · Spanish (conversational)