YouSaid · the spoken record

Rohini Pandhi

lines on the record: 88
first: 2025-01-12
most recent: 2025-01-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Opportunity to skip our waitlist. And so we'll send you the link, Lenny, and hopefully you can add it to the show notes, but we're giving a small subset of skip the waitlist opportunities for folks that are interested in trying out a new personal bank.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on X, aka Twitter at RohiniP. Would love to connect with folks there. I'm also on LinkedIn. Not really on anything else, though hopefully if I'm in one of those. And we are hiring mercury.com forward slash jobs if folks are interested or if you know great people that we should be talking to. I think other than that listeners can be really helpful to us in continuing to send us product feedback. Please keep it coming. We really do love it and we have a lot of Slack channels just focused on those pieces of like, oh, I've heard from this founder or I'll get a text and I will post in our Slack internal Slack. And so whether your business banking account holder personal banking account holder, we just want to hear what's going well, what's not, what we can do to improve your lives. One thing on the personal banking, we're going to be giving away. So if anybody hasn't tried mercury personal banking, we want to give folks that are listening to this podcast.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What maybe I will call out one because they just got acquired. Bobby Matson, the CEO and co-founder of Pay It Off of Student Loans and working on making student loan repayment easier for people, finding them ways in which maybe they didn't have to repay. Like doing a lot of this, again, unsexy work. And he, when we talked the first time, he was telling me that, you know, he had a new kid. He was still up at like 3 a.m. reading regulations and like what's happening with the student loan process in the federal government. I was like, somebody that cares that deeply that really strives to try to make someone else's life better because they're just finding like what actually needs to happen, what doesn't need to happen. And it deals with real money that these folks are kind of coming out with a real debt that they're having to deal with. It was, yeah, there was like an emotional tug.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A favorite there? Am I going to get it? Rahiti, why didn't you mention this? Yeah, I'm going to get founder texts. But I will say I tend to gravitate towards people that are product-dminded. And when I hear some of the work that they're doing or their pitch, like even if they're not PMs, I tend to gravitate towards those. And I really love their approach to how they think about the problems.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I write a lot of quotes down, and I think there's like, I don't know, I just really like some of reminding myself of some of these kind of quotes. And so I use a bunch, like, I think I use a Bruce Lee quote pretty often, or I used one Jesuit's line in one of my job wrecks. And there's like certain ones that I do repeat, right? I actually found this, and I forgot about it, but I really love it. And so I'm just going to read this one out. This is from Adam Robinson, I think, and he wrote my three guiding rules of life. First, whenever possible, connect with others. Second, with enthusiasm, strive always to create fun and delight for others. And third, lean into each moment and every encounter expecting magic or miracles. I think that's going to be my lifelong, or at least something that I remind myself about as much as I can moving forward.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually asked one of the product leads of Waymo this at a happy hour, and I was like, you know, is it kind of like when you kind of remember like this old elevator, there's always an elevator guy still there? Like even when it was all automated and like you were just pressing buttons, but you wanted somebody there to make it feel like I'm not in Death Cage. And I was like, do you still need a fake driver to just make you feel comfortable? He was like, you'll feel comfortable in less than five minutes. He was right. I felt comfortable in like 30 seconds. It's wild. I love Waymo. Yeah.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a recent discovery, but I still love the Waymo experience. As a product, I don't have you've experienced these rides.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I gotta admit, Apple TV's got some bangers and they don't talk about it. I don't know why they don't market these things better. But like, I'm behind on these second seasons, but like shrinking or bad sisters, slow horses was great severance. Come a bunch. Yeah.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, great. So Exactly. And I will say I love stopping a book in the middle sometimes when you just can't finish it. I don't know why I waited for someone to give me permission on that. And I think it's really helped me like, oh, I got through a few starts of books.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got this book recently called Vectors, Aphirisms, and 10 Second Essays. It is so much fun to just kind of like pick out a couple of these 10 second essays at night and just read a couple of these and go to bed. I'm going to recommend it to other folks. A friend gave it to me and I'm going to pay it forward. And then the other, I guess, the other one that I really just enjoy is this book called The Inner Game of Tennis. I've already mentioned that I'm a tennis fan. It talks about the state of flow that you need when you're playing in like this idea of relaxed concentration. I just love that idea of how do you get into that state of flow in your day to day. Other books that I think that I've read recently have all been fictions. So Pachinko, Cutting for Stone, Song of Achilles, all great ones that I've read recently when I've had some beach time. So highly recommend.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“TransparentCollective.com. We have both a donate button there and an application button. So yes, we would love to, I think we're starting to figure out the next batch. And so great applicants, please come and drop your information. And then we do operate on donations. And so we would love to.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of them. And I think we've now done it for so long that about 10 are already acquired and exited companies do in our alumni group.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“200, 250 applications that come through. We bring about eight to ten founders in to join us for a week in SF where we pay for everything. And we have sessions for mentoring, small group workshops. We even do hands-on training. Like we'll ask our investor friends to come in and do mock investor meetings and kind of get the butterflies out for these founders that are coming in from all over. coastal founders. There are folks that come in from Detroit or Baltimore or Atlanta, and they have amazing companies. And so we kind of just connect the dots and help them along the way. So far, I think we've had 90 plus alums across our 11 batches. And I think 65% or 70% of them have raised venture funding now because of our programming. I think we have a total of like 125 million in seed or early stage fundraising from across”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just ultimately contributing to an ecosystem that can really allow these types of founders to flourish. So we host a bunch of programming webinars, workshops, that kind of thing, but are kind of like a spotlight event is we fly founders in from all over the US once, maybe twice a year to participate in our seed program.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation that happened. My co-founder and I met up for drinks one night. We both knew each other from like Michigan back in the day, went to school together, and we were talking about how we both kind of went on this entrepreneurial journey and trying to raise money in the Midwest was very different than raising money in New York, which was very different than trying to raise money and sell this dream on the West Coast. And so where we kind of like had to learn a lot of the tribal knowledge that just existed on our own, we wanted to create this collective that transparently shared information with one another in order where we kind of started step one, we would have the next generation start at step two and then pay it forward. And so our programming really focuses on like preparing founders to fundraise, being able to connect investors to high caliber founders that we have in our Rolodex, and then also the entrepreneurs to the right investors for them.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gladly. That'd be great. So Transparent Collective is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We help underrepresented founders get access to resources, connections, whatever they need to build successful tech companies. We started this, gosh, I think it's been about nine years now, eight or nine years ago. And it really was born out of just this like organic”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think we're still early, and so I don't want to say that there isn't a failing yet or anything like that, but I do think everything's showing really strong positive signal. But yeah, fingers crossed. We'll see how things go. And it's always an iterative process”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a like you will get there. And so I think that's one learning. I think a few missteps that we have made were trying too many things at once. It's the classical example of like, oh, we have so many ideas. Let's go build all of these things. And then there is like an element of you're going to understand these new efforts. There's not going to be enough folks to, again, take that seedling, put it into the ground, put enrich soil on it, water it, take care of it. And so trying too many things, understaffing them. And then there's just a lot of missteps, learnings around pricing. I think we've talked about a bit. But there was a lot of internal discussions on like pricing model bundling versus a la carte, how we would price it, how much work we would do on like understanding that willingness to pay, all of those pieces were exciting.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One other learning that I've had from like the block in Mercury world is one thing that Gokul always said and something that he said he learned from Jack actually was something that I feel like is very true with the Mercury co-founders as well. They're never hyper-focused on the revenue. They're never focused on a number that they're trying to drive. They really want to build they keep telling these the teams to build the products that people love and the revenue will just be a byproduct of that. And so if you can get this one step done, the second step is almost”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly Well, there's like some basic functionality that we think should still be free, like our core banking core money movements should always still be free. So when invoicing asks for a different kind of metadata on top of that money movement, that should still be free. But when you need anything more complex and you really are offering your services or consulting fees or products or goods and you do need an invoice solution that works really well with your accounting and then your CPA knows how to track all of that, then that's a paid product.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More complex to pay your vendors or to receive payments and things like that. And so at that point, that's when we want to have the pricing conversation with you and say, we have this product already available. It works seamlessly. It's beautiful with your bank account. You don't have to do anything more.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I really love this idea of what he talked about was know what your product value is and you have to put a price on it in order to know that. And I think we do see that. We just don't where our target customer for these products is someone at the other end of the complexity scale. It's not everyone that we serve right now with our banking solution. And so we have to be really tight about who that ICP was. And then, yes, we do put that price in front of them and say, tell us that it is worth X dollars or Y dollars. And we did a whole willingness to pay process as part of the homework for that. But I think there's like this customer journey with these products, especially accounts payable, accounts receivable. You don't need that immediately when you start a business. You do need a bank account immediately. And so you need somewhere to save your money. You need somewhere where you can move money around. But there might be six months, 12 months, 18 months until you need something that's”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were always free to customers. Now we had to go to kind of a paid offering. And so we want to make sure that people feel good about it. We're not overcharging customers that are too small and don't want to pay. And we're really focusing on the customers that need that extra. The heft that comes with these products.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, yeah, we did all of that kind of And then, like right now, I think once you start launch, once you've launched, that's one step, that's one big hurdle. Then the next hurdle, which is really trying to find that product market fit. And that's where we're at now. And I think that's a really important lesson of don't go from launch to try to like revenue optimize or find that efficiency immediately. I think what we really want is to give away that, the second product, the third product for free, encourage as much usage and engagement and retention to show that there's something there and allow customers to feel good about how they would use us in their workflows. And then once they get to a place where they're needing more complexity or needing some areas where they could save time and drive some just ease of use, then yes, they'd actually be willing to pay for it. But it's not like you put this paywall in and then automatically just launch a product and say, now you have to pay us. We want to encourage this idea of like what worked for a core product.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of used that current UX to drive that attached to these new products. So on the opposite side, like the accounts payable side, when you're sending a payment, we highlight bill pay. If you need more complex vendor payments. And so it's a really easy way to just fit into the natural flow of what a customer is doing anyways and say, hey, do you actually need something more robust? We have something for you. Try it out.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Payment requests where you could send somebody a URL. They could go to that URL and send the money that they owe you directly to your bank account. That had traction. And so that was something that we used as a kind of competitive advantage because we're like, oh, we can talk to people that were already doing something that was invoicing, which is a request for payment over the web. And so we talked to a bunch of those customers. We also knew that we had a distribution advantage because if we already had people that were using this, we could probably get more folks that were that were on Mercury already. We didn't have to go find them outside. We didn't have to do a full go-to-market effort. We could just kind of test out if they had a fuller invoicing solution, would they want to use that? And so we used that adjacency to our advantage and our distribution to our advantage and said, okay, let's build out these next products that are kind of in that same ecosystem or universe and see what works and see what sticks.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the other decisions that we had to make that might be helpful to folks was like, what are the next products? And so we really looked at like, okay, we need to find solutions that tie closer to the existing spaces we're in. It needs to be like an adjacency that's just beyond the core. It's not about just building a new feature. You are building a new product line. So what is that adjacent customer segment that would be interested in a deeper, more fuller product experience? A good example is invoicing. We de-risked that when we were thinking about, okay, what's the next set of products that we could look at? We looked at a bunch of different areas and we're really thoughtful around who is our target segment, our ICP, and then who do we want to serve? And we saw some work that was interesting because we had this concept of this product called”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do have a UXR team, which is great. We have a research team, and so they help us make sure that we can schedule it. Honestly, the scheduling Tetris that has to happen is probably the hardest part in a PM schedule, because you're going from meetings to meetings. So it's like sometimes we'll just have dedicated research weeks where we just, we know there's a question that we need answered and we need to go through that discovery. And so we'll clear off our calendars and just book customer calls. When it's like regular kind of sessions that are happening every week, then we try to leverage kind of like a central team to help us manage those calendar and meeting advice and getting people booked. We'll also just kind of get in the sidecar of an RM call or a sales call or CS call whenever we can. Anybody who's doing any sort of research or like voice of the customer calls, anything like that, we're in and we want to hear about it. And then we're also looking and just kind of responding on X.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if I can promo a different podcast episode on this one, that was great. I think I listened to it twice just to hear it a few times. And I think there was an example of like a water at a fountain is free. A water at a hotel is like five bucks. A water on the plane is like the context and the price of what you're offering somebody changes the value perception of what they're getting delivered. And so I think that like customer obsession needs to be just anchored back into the business and the business needs and like what you can actually offer. And so it all needs to be triangulated and balanced out. And so it's not just customer obsession for the sense of customer obsession, but where does it, where does that artistry meet the business?”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems to find a pattern, or you hear about multiple times and then validate that truth and see if that still sticks, like have a prototype, do the betas, see if the numbers actually work out in your favor. I think the other thing is the customer obsession needs to also be anchored back into does it work for your business? Like just because a customer wants it, I mean, they probably want free products that doesn't work for what we're going to be able to serve them with and still be a viable business and still survive. And so I think I actually used a lot of when we were doing pricing, I used a lot of insights from your podcast with Madvan. That was”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a little bit of like what a customer says versus what they want are going to be two different things like if you I think there's just so many inputs to all of this but like if you take just a conversation people are really nice especially when they're talking on the phone they'll be really nice they'll say nice things about your product they'll tell you that they messed up and and the ux is great you've built it the right way and they were doing something wrong and they try to take some of that pressure off of you and what you don't want is to go into a conversation with a bias you want to be a researcher you want to be like this third party non-judgmental kind of like you're being brought into the jungle and just watching what's happening you're an observer you're being a like a documentarian it's it's not about getting your biases checked or validated or unvalidated invalidated but it's like just understand what it is that the customer is trying to do what context they were trying to do it in and get to a truth that”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whenever it happens in real time. And so all of those pieces are customer touch points in my mind. And so it's like get on a call with CS, get on a call with RMs, drive those calls yourself, but just learn as much as you can from what our customers need and what they're doing.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of like, I don't know, just the heartbeat of how we operate. So it almost feels so natural that I'm not sure if I can impart any new learnings on it, but it's like, I kind of expect a customer conversation at least one a week from the team. That seems like such a low bar to me that I think the teams do close to some teams when they're really into discovery mode are doing 20, 25 calls with people. It's wild or like even just going through surveys and understanding what qualitative info that they're getting from the surveys, quantitative info that they're getting from it. I think all of that really counts. We're customer obsessed at Mercury. And so you'll even see like a mod will talk to folks on Twitter or on X directly will get pings from different folks.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think that kind of hits that culture that needed to be instilled into this organization too because we're going to be a zero-to-one team and we're going to have to work in a little bit of a different way. Our counterparts on like the core mature products will use monthly development cycles. They'll figure out their roadmap for the month and then just start executing on it. I could not find a way in which I wouldn't know what was changing in a month. And so we had to move towards two weeks sprints and then weekly check-ins with a bunch of our work just to stay as nimble as possible. We wanted to like be able to learn, iterate, repeat. And we also have a really heavy-handed culture of customer calls, customer research that the PMs needed to do. Like there's just much more kind of like touch point pulse check with who these customers are. We're going after adjacent areas. And so make sure that as a team, you know what your customer needs and why it's important.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, so I think seeding that, it just required, like, we were going after a completely different market. We were going after a different base and having another banking solution. While we still had one, we took a lot of the learnings and efforts that the business banking side did, but we had to rebuild a bunch of that. And so the initial investment just was a different request. Whereas like in invoicing, we're building the software on top of the banking. And it's just it requires a different level in order to get to minimal levable product. And so we're giving the teams just enough, but we want them to stretch.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of depends like our personal banking product has a lot more engineers, probably a 3x than maybe our invoicing product line.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's the full cross functional squads of engine design, product, data science, everyone that you probably need. And then we kind of have cross-functional overlaps with kind of our core teams across the company. So sometimes we would have dedicated if we need a dedicated CS or dedicated risk or dedicated ops folks on these teams. But usually it's just leverage the central teams that already exist for some of those functions.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have goals and we also allow these teams. They're so early that the learnings are really important. It's just like an angel investment. There's going to be pivots. We realize that. We're not saying that it's going to kill it if it doesn't hit X. But we do have goals in mind. We have financial projections in mind. And we say if you don't hit that, what's the key learning that we've made that we think we can still hit something in that general direction in the next six months?”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're thinking of these as small seed stage companies, and every quarter, every half year, we look at them as like, do we want to keep investing? And so there's no end time for them to ever move back into the mature products until they become Know Series C company in and of themselves. So we're not really like looking at an end time. We're just saying you have this dedicated team. We will continue investing and providing headcount and whatever you need as this product, this business line shows the path towards success.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In order for it to truly blossom to a flame. And so the organizational structure really gives these teams that space. We actually created completely different orgs. This is why my team exists as an expansion org because it is completely separate from some of the more mature product teams.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One product to multi product, there's probably like two general categories one, the organizational structure is really important and probably as important as just the product decisions and the organizational culture is also important. So one thing we learned was having new product areas, new seedlings being too close within the true org structure to the core banking or payments or mature products made it hard for that new product to even grow because they were always being pulled in, sucked in, the gravitational force of like a more mature product always had prioritization work, maintenance work, things that were more impactful to be done. And so their roadmaps would always get trumped by any of that. So it didn't afford any space for seedlings to grow. And yeah, like this idea of when you have this small little fire, you want to give it air.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say like six seven months, we launched what I talked about before was bill pay in May. We launched invoicing, something near and dear to my heart in August. We had updated like spend controls and spend management tools and employee reimbursements that launched in October. Each of these, one of the favorite learnings from all this or the favorite stats is each subsequent launch that we just described took less time than the previous from concept to launch. So we were getting really good at like understanding what that product velocity is, how we build products and then how we launch and find the right product market fit within these systems. And so a lot of exciting stuff, we're still in the early days of kind of building out the SaaS model, building out personal banking, but lots more to come. So excited for kind of where Mercury is set up for in the next few quarters. Going into some of the maybe the biggest lessons learned about going like from”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone still does. And so we're in the early days. So, yeah, I'll take this opportunity to make sure that we talk about which products first, and then I can go through kind of our lessons learned. But we shipped a lot this year. There was just a ton of activity this year, which was really exciting. 2024 marked the first foray into consumer for us. We launched Mercury Personal Banking in April, which has been a wild success, and we have a lot more coming up with personal banking as well. And then we launched a suite of software.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nobody wants to be at the other, like the audience end of this or the user end of this. And so you don't want something that like, oh, it's for procurement. So therefore, they don't care. No, everyone wants to have a nice experience in dealing with the work that they have to do day in and day out. And so I really do love.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Full power and capacity of an enterprise level product line, but it's still easy to use on the go and being able to do a bunch of banking that wasn't even close to this level of like ease and customizations two decades ago. It's something that we really think is Of the basis of why quality is embedded into everything that we talk about and do. It's an obsession within the company, quite honestly.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I completely agree with both points. Like, one, it has to come, it's a cultural value. It has to come from the top. It has to come from the beginning. And I think the second piece of it is like there's like this trend of, I don't know, B2B products that became, I think like maybe a decade ago, a big push was simplify it, make it feel like a B2C product, make it simple, make it easy to use. And there was this push of just like, I don't know, rounding corners and making the fonts better or something like that, you know, using some white space. It's just very simplistic ideas of it. But now I think the next generation of all of these products is not just make it simple, make it still powerful and make it easy to use. So now you have both concepts coming together. And so quality is truly just this idea of how do you build these products that fit within small mobile screen and still have”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful confidence inducing and trustworthy. And then on the other side of it, I just think it's building great products should be fun and fulfilling for all of us. And so you want to spend your life on something that people love and enjoy using. I think that's something that Jason's really taught me. And so by doing this, by investing in quality, by thinking about quality, you're also having the second order effect of attracting great talent who want to be there and be proud of what they're building. And then it also has this effect of like endearing customers to you because they know that you're focusing on what matters and how to make their lives a little bit easier and better and simple. And so it's this circular effect that I do think has compounding interest rates on it.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product to pay my bills, which is not something you hear every day. And I think one of the mercury values that I've really tried to internalize is like have that intention behind every detail in order to make the product, in order to take that product to that next level of care and craft. And when you consider the compounding effect of all those little intentional incremental improvements, all together, it starts becoming a mo. It becomes this competitive advantage for you. And so I think there's like there is an argument, a strong argument to really think about quality craftsmanship, how you're building something that can be evergreen.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's not a lot of, you know, it's not like this consumer exciting app, but you need the details to be precise, to be intentional in order to breed that trust and confidence that the customer base needs in order to save its money with you, in order to move its money with you. One of the examples we had recently was we launched a product called BillPay. And in that, you can upload an invoice, you can just drag and drop your invoice from a vendor, and we will OCR it will like read all the details and we'll pre-populate some fields for you. And as you kind of go through those fields and check that we got everything right, the right hand screen kind of zooms into the right part of the invoice. And that little detail.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something I've learned a lot from the Mercury folks over the last year. Even the OGs back at Square in the early days, there was a lot with, you know, on the surface, I think Ahmad even says this, on the surface, it's completely irrational to invest in quality, right? Like especially for a KPI-driven company or KPI-driven company or organization, there's often this like false dichotomy that creeps up that's like you either have to be this quant heavy of experimentation, like move fast type of company, or you can be this design heavy, focus on artistry, but doesn't really drive any customer value. And I feel like those two ends of the spectrum are just completely insane. You need to be somewhere in between. But, and I think like what I've learned from the companies that I've most recently been at is the details done right really matter. Especially when you're in like a boring industry like fintech, meaning like it's just unsex.”
2025-01-12 · Lenny's Podcast · How to build your product team from scratch, attract top product talent, go multi-product, and more | Rohini Pandhi (Mercury, Square) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source