Epsor

Marion Turbet is Head of Product at Epsor. Before joining the company, she held various positions at Societe Generale for ten years. Her favourite thing about Epsor is the company’s collaborative, friendly culture.&nbsp;Defining the product visionI held a number of positions at Societe Generale before joining Epsor two and a half years ago as head of product. My job is to define and iterate the product vision, recruit product managers and designers and help them grow, and to make decisions on the roadmap. I also solve all types of day to day issues.&nbsp;Throughout my previous jobs, I acquired a variety of hard and soft skills. These include knowledge of user experience in financial products and regulatory issues in the banking industry, but also how to do good user research, interviewing techniques, management skills, and knowledge of iterative work, such as how to launch an MVP, or how to derisk.Another important thing I learned is the ability to switch between operational and strategic tasks. I also learned many soft skills, such as establishing trustworthy relationships, learning how to listen, learning how to make my case and convince others.Problem solving teamAs the Product Team at Epsor, our role is to understand which problems users are facing and how we can solve them in the simplest and most efficient way possible. Each team consists of a product manager, product designer, lead developer, and three to five developers. Each team sets out a medium-term vision for the next one to two years, on how they are going to contribute to the global product vision. Then they set specific objectives and a roadmap for the next quarter to realize their mission.&nbsp;Some of the teams work on the end user experience, so end users are typically employees who have savings — we call them the savers. Other teams are working on scalability by helping Epsor onboard large companies who have 10,000 employees or more, which has a lot of implications on the features we can offer.A guided onboarding experienceEvery newcomer at Epsor joins an onboarding program which consists of general and technical training. Each training session is run by a different team — such as founders, HR, product, tech, experts in employee savings, experts in pensions, experts in finance.Besides this general onboarding program, the product team has a dedicated program which we adapt to every new joiner. It’s basically a “to do list” in Notion where, day by day, the new joiner is invited to read a document, talk to someone in the Ops team, in the sales team, call a few users, and spend some time in the customer success team. This way, each day of these first 2-3 weeks is “guided”, so the new joiner can get to know our users, clients and products very fast. They also get to know key people in the company.Semi-independent unitsWe’ve designed the organization in such a way that teams can work as independently as possible. In the past, for example, we learned that it didn’t work so well to have a frontend team and a backend team who rely heavily on each other to deliver a feature. Of course, within the teams we still work really closely together, and there is also cross-team information sharing; tech teams are informed of the experiments that are run by the PMs and the designers. We also share demos and presentations, and organize quarterly events where tech and product teams meet to solve specific challenges. Last but not least, we have Tech Weeks to collaborate and solve specific challenges.Safe and motivating environmentWhen I first joined Epsor, I noticed how friendly the culture here is. People here always make each other feel comfortable, and when something goes wrong, the mindset isn’t to blame a specific person or a team, but to learn from what we did wrong collectively. It’s a very safe environment where people are free to speak their mind, and encouraged to do so.&nbsp;The way meetings are conducted, we really listen and encourage everyone, also junior people, to give their opinion. I’d also say that we are all very motivated by the mission and the product we’re delivering to our users.Women at EpsorWe started this initiative recently, where we get together with women at Epsor to discuss two topics: how to onboard and retain more women, and how to empower women financially. This second topic is related to our product, so naturally we care about it deeply.We want to ensure we have gender parity in our user tests and user interviews, for every product experiment, which is challenging considering that Epsor's male users have historically shown higher response rates. We also aim to include gender data in our product analytics to run specific quantitative research on how female users interact with our application and how this differs from male users. We see this as a starting point for dedicated research on women's financial empowerment. It will also help us set specific KPIs in the future and therefore influence our Product Roadmap.

“We have a safe environment where people are free to speak their mind”

Team 50inTech