Leaving the bank changed how I understood the choices I brought back.

Mandate

Define coherent business propositions and retain unresolved customer understanding or exceptions before wider delivery.

Outcomes

• Reduced the 2023 forty-feature proposal to an account, payments and cash-flow export core, with credit separately assessed.
• Recorded forty-one continuing and nineteen declining businesses after the sixty-business ninety-day pilot.
• Retained further cash-view revision when fourteen of 180 owners still misread the revised 2025 prototype.

Decisions in context

The CPO remit requires choices about what the product should promise before delivery teams are asked to fulfil it. I want research and testing to change scope where necessary, rather than become evidence attached to a proposition that has already been decided. The bundle and cash-view cases show different consequences: a smaller core in one, further revision after improvement in the other. I lead the product function while lending, risk, compliance, treasury, operations, engineering, legal and cybersecurity retain their own mandates. Bank assets describe the company, not funds I can allocate through a product decision. Executive presentations to the board began with this appointment in July 2020. The role has not included a statutory seat in the fictional record. Its scope is best understood through the choices made and the limits retained around their results.

Reason for the move

Appointed CPO after leading the bank’s business-product portfolio; current role.

Mandate

Manage the business-product portfolio with explicit responsibility for customer transitions and product boundaries.

Outcomes

• Identified 440 of fourteen hundred invoicing users whose history needed more than the standard export in 2018.
• Supported A$3.7 million transition work and an assisted 180-day extension for that group.
• Reported 360 migrated and eighty still supported at the extended review rather than claim complete retirement.

Decisions in context

Returning to the bank allowed me to apply the merchant-products lesson that a good choice need not be the same choice for everyone. Product retirement made the point in another form: a standard export could work for most businesses while leaving a material group unable to leave the old feature usefully. I accepted continued support cost and an incomplete closure account because the dependency was real. The director title described an executive employment role, not board membership. My team worked with operations and relevant control owners on the transition, without claiming that a product deadline settled every permission or record-handling requirement. This period strengthened my view that the exit is part of the product responsibility. The subsequent CPO role expanded that judgement to the scope and comprehension of new propositions as well as the ending of old ones.

Reason for the move

Promoted to CPO as responsibility widened across business propositions and their delivery decisions.

Mandate

Design merchant services around explicit needs, choices and feasible operating conditions.

Outcomes

• Used the 2011 three-hundred-merchant research to distinguish demand for accelerated settlement from adequate standard service.
• Chose an optional accelerated service rather than paid default inclusion.
• Recorded twenty-two accelerated and thirty-eight standard selections in the sixty-merchant pilot after A$2.1 million product work.

Decisions in context

Leaving the bank brought me into a smaller payments business where the link between a service option and its operating delivery was especially visible. The settlement proposal made me question whether adoption alone was a sensible definition of success. A merchant whose needs were met by the standard route did not necessarily benefit from a paid default. I wanted the choice and its conditions to be clear, with treasury and operating colleagues assessing what could actually be delivered. My expense delegation funded product work rather than the company’s settlement obligations. The pilot supplied bounded evidence about choices in that group, not a universal merchant preference. Returning to banking was therefore more than a change of employer size. It brought a stronger habit of asking whom a proposition serves and whether declining an option can be a legitimate product outcome.

Reason for the move

Returned to Erlavane to lead a broader banking portfolio with experience of explicit merchant choice.

Mandate

Develop business-account journeys that acknowledge the participants and conditions needed for completion.

Outcomes

• Owned the single-approver design assumption challenged in the 2004 pilot.
• Recognised thirty-eight blocked businesses among fifty-six with two-person internal approval mandates.
• Supported A$420000 rework for pending, decline, retry and assisted paths without bypassing the relevant checks.

Decisions in context

Product management made my preferences consequential for the path a customer would encounter. I had favoured a short flow and allowed its demonstration to stand in for a complete task. Owen Bellarven’s challenge showed that the second approver and the waiting period were not peripheral details for the affected businesses. We needed product states that made those situations understandable, with operations and control colleagues involved in defining the next action. I did not claim that the rework completed every blocked application, because the case did not establish that outcome. The lesson was about the scope of the task I had approved. Moving into merchant products offered another setting in which customer choice and operating conditions could test that judgement, rather than letting the same comfortable account-opening assumptions shape every subsequent decision.

Reason for the move

Moved to merchant payments to broaden product experience beyond the bank’s account portfolio.

Mandate

Understand the business task behind requests for account capabilities and service changes.

Outcomes

• Examined customer questions about account use and the people authorised to act for a business.
• Learned to distinguish requested features from the task the business needed to complete.
• Developed the research perspective that supported progression into product management.

Decisions in context

I joined after economics study, initially working under a product research manager. The useful part of a customer conversation often appeared after the first request. A business asking for a feature might actually be describing a second person’s approval, a timing problem or a task the existing account made difficult. I learned to ask for that context before treating the request as an instruction to add another capability. The ten-person group was the team around me, not one I managed. I held no independent spending authority, and the bank’s later asset scale should not be assigned to this early role. The experience supplied an interest in the exceptions behind the straightforward journey. Progression into product management would test whether I could preserve that interest when delivery deadlines and an attractive demonstration encouraged a simpler view.

Reason for the move

Promoted from analysis to product management with responsibility for choosing and delivering customer journeys.