Written By Ken Dare
The ability to adapt to rapid change is a critical component of successful product management within the banking and finance sector. As new technologies emerge and consumer expectations evolve, it is crucial for today’s finance product managers (PMs) to ensure their products not only meet current market demands but also adapt to shifting demands and emerging innovations. Accomplishing this difficult task involves reducing reliance on static roadmaps and long-term planning cycles to focus on dynamic, data-informed decision-making.
By using the latest data to anticipate changes, leveraging technologies, and implementing strategies that allow products to change and grow, PMs can “future-proof” products. They can also cultivate a culture of continuous learning, resilience, and experimentation that helps power their company toward greater success. In this Q&A, Sri Phani Teja Perumalla, an experienced product leader with a proven track record of launching consumer-facing products, including multiple experiences for a leading cloud-based voice assistant, shares his insights for PMs challenged to adapt their strategies, workflows, and mindsets at unprecedented speed.
Q: What does it mean to future-proof a product in today’s rapidly advancing technology environment?
Perumalla: Future-proofing is less about predicting what will change and more about building around what won’t change. For example, in the banking and finance sector, customers want to protect their money and feel in control of their financial situation. Those driving needs mean they seek strategies to save smarter and spend more confidently. The products that will last are those that keep these timeless needs at their core, even as technology, regulation, and behavior evolve.
The key for PMs is to design around these enduring human motivations while ensuring their products can change and grow. They can achieve this by infusing products with adaptable technology, flexible architecture, and evolving insight loops. There are numerous examples of institutions that are effectively future-proofing their products by keeping their focus on customer motivations.
For instance, Citibank Hong Kong recently added a Wealth 360 feature to its Citi Mobile® App to improve customer experience. Now, customers can easily view their savings, checking, and foreign exchange (FX) accounts and check the status of transactions from various financial institutions. The tool’s holistic view of their financial health also allows them to track their carbon footprint, supporting greener spending. Another example is Banco Topazio in Brazil, which transitioned from a traditional bank to a fully digital entity through an application programming interface (API)-centric strategy. The bank reports that, in addition to improving customer accessibility, the move shortened product development cycles from about a year to three months. Smaller banks are also using artificial intelligence (AI) to expedite consumer credit decisions.
Q: Is there a common error that PMs make when future-proofing products, and how do they avoid doing this in the future?
Perumalla: PMs should always focus on a product’s “why, what, and how,” in that order. When used properly, these three elements serve as an anchor to prevent PMs from going down the wrong path. The “why” is the product’s value to customers, the “what” is the experience the product delivers, and the “how” is the technology that makes it possible. One of the biggest mistakes PMs make is flipping the order and chasing the “how” before defining the “why.” This approach leads to a loss of focus on what customers really want, resulting in inefficiency and poor product performance.
In a rapidly changing environment, staying focused on the customer helps PMs avoid getting caught up in meaningless trends and better identify where technological advances will elevate customer experience, which remains the top priority. Unlike most industries where speed wins, PMs in banking and finance must balance innovation with integrity, velocity with verification, and creativity with compliance by concentrating on three areas. The first is customer foresight, which involves understanding customer motivation and how it manifests in emerging behaviors. Systems thinking is the second area. Here, PMs strive to connect technology, risk, policy, and design into a unified ecosystem view. Strategic agility, the third area, encompasses pivoting without losing direction and maintaining precision, even amid rampant uncertainty.
The most effective product leaders strike a balance between innovation and practicality by providing teams with the freedom to explore bold ideas within clearly defined guardrails of customer value, regulatory compliance, and operational stability. In global banking and finance, practicality isn’t a restraint, it’s a discipline. It helps ensure that innovation compounds over time, instead of collapsing under complexity. The role of the product leader, first and foremost, is to make innovation sustainable and create an environment where new ideas are encouraged, evaluated through the lens of customer trust, and executed with precision.
Q: What key strategies can PMs utilize to future-proof products?
Perumalla: Successful PMs accept that change is inevitable. They prepare from day one by asking which parts of the product will likely stay relevant to customers and which may lose their edge. With that understanding, their goal at the design stage is to create a product that can continuously adapt to customers’ enduring needs. To accomplish this mission, it is critical for PMs to understand three elements: “the constant,” which is the customer problem the product strives to solve, “the variable,” which encompasses features, channels, or enablers that will need to evolve as behaviors or technology shift, and “the signal,” which refers to the metrics, feedback loops, and insights that show product performance.
The strongest PMs regularly consider the constant, the variable, and the signal, and leverage this information to optimize the product. They also approach product development with humility, expecting evolution, embracing feedback, and continually creating pathways for renewal. They recognize that no product is perfect or ever complete. In financial services, products remain relevant when they evolve in step with how customers earn, spend, save, and invest. PMs can help ensure product relevance by prioritizing behavioral intelligence over static research, creating a living product strategy that advances and grows, pursuing total lifecycle ownership, and designing for resilience rather than novelty.
Ultimately, products are best future-proofed when learning is integrated into the operating model. Future-proofing isn’t measured by how well a product performs today. Instead, it’s measured by how prepared it is for tomorrow. This approach requires both the product and the PM to consistently learn and evolve.
Perumalla: PMs can track performance by focusing on several fundamental areas. Adaptability incorporates metrics such as time to integrate new capabilities, release frequency, and speed from insight to action. Customer relevance includes factors like net promoter score (NPS), retention, new versus legacy feature usage, and sentiment across key customer journeys. Resilienceencompasses uptime, fraud ratios, recovery time, responsiveness to market changes, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
It is vital for PMs to pay especially close attention to resilience. Understanding how fast a product can learn, adapt, and continue creating value amid change is fundamental to future-proofing success. It is essential for PMs to remain committed to designing and launching products effectively, and to monitor their lifecycle and performance to maximize results and identify issues before they become major obstacles.
Leveraging future-proofing for greater growth
When PMs recognize that adapting to rapid technological change in banking and finance isn’t about chasing every new tool but rather about developing a mindset of agility and foresight, they unlock a significant competitive edge. By learning quickly, testing boldly, and staying grounded in customer needs, PMs can make smarter product decisions and create more meaningful user experiences that keep their companies ahead of the competition.
Today’s most successful PMs are not simply technology adopters. They are change leaders who inspire teams to embrace innovation without fear, align cross-functional goals around new possibilities, and turn disruption into opportunity. The future of product management belongs to those who see change not as chaos, but as the catalyst for progress.
About the Author:
Ken Dare is a freelance writer with more than 20 years of experience covering the finance and technology markets, including future-proofing. For more information, contact writedare@gmail.com.
Future-proofing refers to designing products or services to remain relevant and effective despite changes in technology, consumer preferences, or market conditions.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable values that demonstrate how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.
Customer relevance is the degree to which a product or service meets the needs and expectations of its customers, ensuring satisfaction and loyalty.
Adaptability in product management refers to the ability of a product to evolve based on changing market demands and customer feedback.
Strategic agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt its strategy in response to changing market conditions and opportunities.
Explore more articles in the Interviews category
