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Insights Unlocked
Designing products people trust with Robinhood’s Dheerja Kaur
00:29:56
Robinhood's Dheerja Kaur shares how intuitive design, experimentation, and customer-first thinking drive innovation in fintech.
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- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're joined by Deirdre Kaur, Vice President of Product Management at Robinhood. Dirja shares how she's helping make finance more accessible through intuitive design, experimentation and customer first thinking. We dive into what it takes to lead a product team, navigate complexity and foster inclusive innovation in a fast moving space. Enjoy the show.
- [00:28]
Bobby Mikester
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concepts to execution.
- [00:49]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal Content marketing manager at UserTesting, and joining us today as host is UserTestins Bobby Mikester, vice President of Solution Marketing. Welcome, Bobby.
- [01:03]
Deirdre Kaur
Hi everyone.
- [01:05]
Nathan Isaacs
And our guest today is Deirdre Kaur. Deirdre is the Vice President of Product Management at Robinhood, where she leads teams focused on growth, the core app subscriptions and Sherwood Media. Prior to Robinhood, she was Chief Product Officer at the Skim and held engineering and product leadership roles at espn. Welcome to the show, Deirdre.
- [01:27]
Deirdre Kaur
Thank you. Excited to be here.
- [01:30]
Deirdre, we are glad to have you here. You've obviously had such an impressive journey, right? You've gone from product and engineering roles at ESPN to shaping product strategy at the Skim, and now you are leading product at Robinhood where you're making finance much more accessible to millions of people. Can you go ahead and kick us off by sharing a little bit about how those experiences have shaped your philosophy and how they influence the way you build for users today?
- [02:00]
Yeah, absolutely. So, again, thank you for having me. What I just want to say before I get into it, that I love that I'm on a user testing podcast because part of what I'm about to say is that being customer obsessed and being honestly research obsessed too is a big part of our ethos at Robinhood, but has always been in my career. So thank you for having me. But yeah, for sure. So you can probably tell from the different companies I've worked at, there's kind of a common through line of always working at companies that have a very strong design and even brand ethos where we don't just value amazing, beautiful, intuitive design, but also creativity and even elements like motion and building beautiful products. And then all three of these companies have also had this through line of really obsessive audiences, right? Really, really loyal fan bases. So anything from ESPN where, let me tell you, sports fans are the most insane people you can Build for in a good way. Like, if you love sports, you really, really love sports, really love your teams, you love your players, you use the app constantly. It's super fun. The skin was the same way. It was a very deeply engaged, loyal audience. And then obviously Robinhood, I mean, we built an incredible relationship with our customers from day one. And so all these companies have been very different, for sure, very different spaces, very different products. But that customer first ethos, that design and kind of brand ethos has been a through line throughout.
- [03:32]
Yeah, so you mentioned building relationships with customers from day one. Obviously a huge part of understanding what they're looking for and making their experiences intuitive based upon their needs. You've long been praised. Robinhood has been praised for intuitive design. What elements of your strategy do you think set Robinhood apart and how do you maintain that edge as customer expectations, User expectations are continuing to evolve.
- [04:03]
Yeah, definitely challenging as you grow. But I think there are three components of what has made Robinhood successful, not just tied to its kind of product ethos, but just as a overall strategy as a company. So first is just being best in class at economics for customers and in financial services. That's critically important. So if I take you back to when Robinhood first launched, at the time, the industry was rife with commission fees on every single trade or investment that you made. So for example, if you went on any of the existing platforms to buy a single stock or make any sort of trade, you're paying fee every single time you're doing that or there you'd have these account minimums. And really what that meant is that there is these huge barriers for your kind of everyday person to get access to the markets. Right. There was a true fundamental economic barrier there. And so when Robinhood first kind of entered the industry, entered the landscape, it was game changing because for the very first time you could trade with and invest in the markets with zero fees. It was literally free, you know, and the power of that is incredible. What I love about the company is that we've continued that ethos even as we've launched more and more products, you know, so, for example, a couple years ago, as interest rates started going up, we launched an industry leading APY rate. So you could earn. Now you can actually earn, you know, 4% on your cash. And that's again, you know, just like best in class, we are committed to passing that value back to customers. And, and in financial services, that matters, you know, because otherwise these are real barriers that we see with the legacy players in the industry. So that's one the second I will say sounds like a line, but I promise it's not. We're really at the forefront of tech and innovation in financial services industry. I think one great example of that is that we were actually one of the first brokerages to adopt crypto, you know, and really launch that as a product to customers and a great mobile design. And again, you know, with every product we've built, we've kind of thought about what is the best version of this we can create, how can we capitalize on all the advancing technology and really be at the forefront of the industry. And then the third kind of what we're talking about here is we really prioritize making beautiful, intuitive design and that cuts across both UX design but also creative. Like where we love motion design, we love making things feel beautiful and amazing for a customer and we, we value that. It's not just about checking the box of does this screen solve a problem? But it's also how do I uplevel the whole thing and make it feel like an experience. And so I think those three things have been core to Robinhood from day one, well before my time and are definitely still true today as we build more and more products.
- [06:58]
Yeah, certainly being a game changer in a highly regulated space like finance is no easy task. Financial topics themselves can be intimidating for folks. So I love that you're making things accessible while also making things beautiful and amazing from an experience perspective. How do you, when you think about doing that right and what it takes to design simple and accessible tools, how do you and your team ensure clarity while making sure you know, you've got all of the robust capabilities that you need in a highly regulated industry tucked under the hood.
- [07:39]
Absolutely. So one thing that I actually like to just touch on up front with something like this is that it's actually a little bit counter might seem counterintuitive, but regulation and great design are actually not at odds with each other at all. So the way what I mean by that is that fundamentally if you go talk to our regulators in this industry, the thing that they care in first and foremost about our customers and making sure their customers understand what they're doing, that they're educated and so well, like, you know, from outside in it might seem like, oh, there's regulation and there's complex stuff over here and there's intuitive grape product design actually all the incentives are aligned. You know, regulators really care most about customer education, about things being in the best interest of the customer. And as a product company, that's what we want to. Right. And so I really like kind of touching on that because I think not everybody realizes that especially if you're not in the industry. So that's one. And I think, and like I said, that kind of makes our jobs easier because that's our ethos. And so that being said, you know, like you said, the products themselves are quite complex, right? And they get more and more complex as you kind of advance. And so how you solve for that, how you design for that, where you balance simplicity, kind of intuitive design while recognizing that, you know, these, these products can be quite complicated is, is no easy feat. One thing that, what I'll say is many strategies to, to, you know, to, to address that. One that I really love that has, we've seen a lot of success from is kind of this ethos that we have which is that people should learn by doing. And so what I mean by that is, you know, we don't necessarily think that the best way to understand, you know, the markets or understand how to invest is to go off on, you know, somewhere else and take a class on investing or something. The best way to do it is to kind of step by step actually try it. And our, the way we design our products is we, we help walk you through that and help you feel those kind of moments. So for example, when you first download Robinhood, let's say this is your first time ever investing. When you make that very first trade, we have this moment where like you are now a shareholder of a company. Congratulations. That's a huge moment, you know, or you know, even when somebody is trading options, which is a much more advanced, complicated product, we integrate moments of education throughout that flowing throughout that experience kind of issue. And so while, you know, it sounds, you know, quite simple, it's actually hard, right, because you want to find the perfect moments where you're not taking away from the tasks that the user is trying to do in your product, but finding that moment to quickly help them understand what they're doing and kind of progress. And that is kind of try a true kind of thing that kind of integrates across every single product we build again versus these things sort of being separate work each other.
- [10:25]
I love that, I love that gradual approach. It's, you know, an opportunity, it sounds like for people to dip their toe into the water in a non threatening, more guided way through the products that you build and how you design those experiences. So I want to touch on something that you've talked about, you've talked about developing a Spidey Sense as a product leader. I love that term. How do you coach product managers to build product intuition without having to micromanage? Especially when you're dealing with the environment you operate in, which is obviously fast paced. It's high stakes. These are financial products that people rely on.
- [11:10]
Yeah. So just to give you a little bit of background, when I started my career I was actually in engineering and I moved into product, you know, a little bit farther in. And so it was actually helpful because I got to kind of experience the very big difference between managing a team of engineers versus managing a team of product managers. And I say that because I like to say is that managing PMs is really hard because fundamentally when you're a manager, oftentimes you know different functions, whether it's engineering or design or even you know, I'm hard loading functions. You're, you're, you can be pretty involved in the day to day of your report. So if you're an engineering manager, oftentimes you're actually doing code reviews. Right. You're a design manager, you're like in the figmas with the designers, you know, you're kind of hands on with them. But the fundamental nature of product management is that it's a little bit of a nebulous job. Right. And so you don't have all these like day to day artifacts where you're hands on coaching. And also the nature of the job is that a great PM and a PM set up for success. It's pretty autonomous. They have their squad of people across design, engineering, data, research, etc. And they're setting their priorities, setting their roadmap, they're making the decisions. And so you don't have nearly as many opportunities to one just see the work that they're doing day to day and then to, you know, you're not really in the forums as much to really kind of give them hands on feedback coaching. And so I say all that to just explain to people how hard it is. So what that means is that you really, I think managing PMs is a unique set of skills that you learn as a manager and I've definitely learned that the hard way. So when I say things like Spidey sense, what I really mean is you have to get comfortable with managing and communicating in the gray area because what often happens is for example you might be managing a team of PNS and you might get some wind that one of the teams things just aren't going super well, you know, and that could be that a project isn't totally hitting its deadlines or you get some feedback from the other managers that like, hey, the dynamics of the team are off and you get like have these little signals and you kind of have to lead into that pretty quickly. You can't wait until you have all the data, right? Because you know getting that data can be hard. And so you kind of have to lean into the signals and you have to learn how to do that and how to have that conversation with your PNs, even when you don't really have all the detailed information. And so for example, for me, what that sometimes looks like is getting comfortable saying, hey, I'm not totally sure what's going on, but something seems a little off, right? Or like this project seems off the rails, like I don't know, this is a mess. I actually don't know if that's your fault or not. I don't know what feedback to give, but can you tell me what's going on and how can I help and how can I get more context? And it sounds so simple. But even be able to have that conversation makes a huge difference because as managers you're often told up when you're early in your career that you know, you should, when you have feedback conversations, you should really gather all the information, like lay it all out, be very concrete. And this is kind of completely counter to that. You know, you'd be comfortable engaging on feedback without having all the information and having these kind of senses that something might be off. And again, not from a style perspective, that can be very uncomfortable for people, especially as they're data management. Other thing I'll say is that it also kind of like I said earlier, you have less of these ongoing opportunities for coaching because you're just not in their work constantly day to day by nature of the job. And so what you have to do is you have to be very thoughtful about when can I find whether it's like an artifact like a roadmap doc or a PRD or just a strategy that they're working through where I can really with high intent work with them on how to uplevel them in a specific skill or area. Because again, those opportunities are much fewer and far between than other functions. So as an example, that can sometimes mean, hey, here's a high grade pm. They're really good at a few things, but maybe they still need to learn a lot more about data and experimentation, rigorous. So I'm going to talk to them about that and say, hey, we're going to spend the next however many months kind of upskilling you on this, which means that there are going to be three projects where I'm going to really dig in with you. And the reason for that is that I want you to learn. I'm not micromanaging you, I want you to learn. And you have to kind of really think ahead and be high intent about how you find those moments.
- [15:44]
As product managers are getting comfortable working in what you call kind of the gray area, right. Due to the nebulous nature of the role, certainly that can impose a bit of risk. And you've said the team should aim for something like 30 to 50% risk of failure in their projects. How do you connect that spirit of experimentation back to business goals that leadership management cares about? Like increasing lifetime value.
- [16:18]
Yeah, for sure. So generally it starts at the top. I think you have to set a tone that creates a culture of experimentation, which means that you as a company are willing to take big swings to try and fail. Because inherently, if you're willing to be ambitious to take swings, you will fail. That is literally how that works. And it's really important to have that tone because it sets, it kind of gives the space for teams and PMs especially to feel like they can do that. And as a business, it's really important because if you don't do that, you're going to hit local maximum, right? You're going to hit kind of a plateau or a ceiling. Whether it's a specific part of your business, part of your product, or your business as a whole, you're just going to hit a plateau, right? Because at some point there's only so much that your surefire optimization type work is going to get you. And so again, first it starts with just tone at the top. You know, we expect that not all of our experiments are a success. And that's a good thing because we are learning. Or, you know, if a teen took a big swing at a problem and really kind of tried something out of left field and it failed, celebrate that, you know, and those little things make a huge difference. Because if you don't do that, then people's default nature tends to be, I need to hit my goal, so let me hit. Do all the obvious things to do that. And so you have to kind of as a leader, build a counter to that. If I talk about Robin, and specifically, you know, we're pretty ambitious as the company, if you, you know, hear our CEO Vlad talk like we got big goals, like we are only getting started in many ways. And so we, we, we take that and, and, and really Give teams that feeling of wanting to be ambitious too. So I'll give you one specific example. You know, on our growth team, we were looking at the onboarding flow and you know, with, with things like that, especially in the growth world. Right. It's so easy because to find only low hanging fruit because there's so much of it, you know, there's a long, long set of screens. You know, you can like optimize the crap out of that flow and see a ton of short term business impact. But sometimes we'll just say to a team, hey, but what would it look like if you doubled this? What if it looked like if you tripled it and you just give them the space to think really big, think ambitiously and think out of the box from what they would normally think if they were just trying to hit a number. And again, what that means is that the roadmap will likely have a portfolio of bets. Some of those will be really big swings that can often fail. And also, you know, some short term wins, low hanging fruit that are a little bit more straightforward. But overall, what that gets you as a business, if you're kind of taking that all the way from team all the way up to the company level, is that again, you kind of have that full portfolio and so you're always thinking big, you kind of take big swings, but then you also have so more of those short term bets that help you ensure that you're hitting your goals no matter a lot.
- [19:14]
Yeah. So it sounds like giving them the space to like you said, think big really starts with creating a culture of experimentation that executives are bought into. It comes from the top. You've also gone through and implemented strong systems. Right. For surfacing insights from support and surveys. How do those real time signals influence thinking big? Thinking, you know, really operating within an experimental culture. How does that influence your product decisions and how do you measure that impact on long term engagement?
- [19:55]
Yeah. So tend to think of this as sort of three aspects. So understanding what's happening and why. Right. And so there's experimentation which we kind of talk about, but generally having a very robust culture around experimentation, having experimentation platform that supports that. We've invested a lot in that at Robinhood. So we always understand incremental impact of everything that we're doing in a very data driven way. The second is tied to what you were calling out, which is our research function. So we have an awesome research team. We do the full gamut of research, whether that's foundational research, especially for new zero to one areas to ongoing Talking to customers, understanding their reactions to a product, et cetera. And then like you were mentioning in app surveys, for example, we were getting like real time signals on whether it's drop off and funnel conversion, et cetera, because that can be a really, really helpful data input as well. The third piece is customer support, because the way we like to think about it, I think a lot of companies do this, is that our support agents are truly the best people to talk to, to tell you what your customers actually think. They're literally talking to them all day. And so it is sometimes a sadly very underutilized team. And at Robinand it's not. We love our support teams. They're super embedded with our product teams and we are constantly trying to get, you know, a feedback loop from them on how are people reacting, what issues do they have, etc. And so the kind of those three prongs of, of insights are a superpower for PMs, right? Because you have the data, you have the customer insights from surveys or just ongoing research, and then you actually have the support agents. We're talking to customers on the ground every single day and all three of those come together to sort of help triangulate not just what's going on with the product today, but where are opportunities or how, you know, what, what are we seeing for Newfoundland?
- [21:50]
So, you know, I have to hit you with an AI question always.
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Yes, of course.
- [21:54]
Right. So as AI becomes more integrated, really everywhere. Right, but specifically within consumer finance, how do you see product design evolving? What opportunities, what potential pitfalls? What are you preparing for?
- [22:10]
Yeah, so listen, we're in the early innings, right? It's an exciting time, exciting time to be a pm, a designer, really, anybody in this industry. So again, putting Robinhood aside, this is just more fundamental. You know, I relate this to, you know, when I was earlier in my career and mobile first came out, which dates me a little bit, but, you know, it was a whole new way of interacting with digital products. And, you know, the companies that succeeded were the ones who thought about first principles principles, which is, look at this new technology, look at this whole new way of interacting with something. How would I design something from scratch, not just take my website and adapt it to mobile. I think a very similar mentality will happen and has to happen with AI. And you're already seeing that a lot, but especially for established companies, the pitfall is if you're like, hey, here's my product, how do I integrate it here, you know, versus thinking from first principles, you know, again, the exercise of If I were starting from scratch and this is the technology that I was working with, what would I create? And for design especially, there's still so much more to explore from where we are today in terms of what that means for actual interaction design. Because obviously when AI first really kind of, you know, came out, the big thing was Chatbots, right? That's kind of like the obvious thing, right? That's like the obvious UI for interacting with it. But I guarantee you that however many years from now, Chatbot is not going to be the primary interface. Right? There are going to be so many different ways to think about it. And so it's a really exciting time. And I think just the companies and the people that are thinking about this from first principles with interaction design are going to be the ones that win for Robinhood specifically. Obviously, we work in a super regulated industry, so we need to be really thoughtful and careful about how we approach AI, you know, to make sure that we're thinking, you know, safety first. That being said, you know, we've, we've been able to do that. We actually just announced a new product called Robinhood Cortex, which is our new AI product which is launching this year. We just announced it recently and it's kind of approaching this problem of how do you help people navigate what's happening in the markets, how to do real time analysis, again from first principles with this new technology. And so we're super excited about it. But again, early innings. So I think we have a lot, a lot more to do here from an industry perspective.
- [24:40]
Yeah, yeah, it certainly is early, but like you said, right. It kind of gives you the ability to start from, start from scratch, be thoughtful, be creative. And Robinhood has certainly done this in other areas. One example is the recent crypto trivia contest is an example of being playful and educational with ux. How do you balance engagement with clarity when you're gamifying something like financial learning?
- [25:11]
Yeah, so I would say kind of like I was saying earlier with like learn by doing the way we approach education or just understanding concepts is what's going to work for people. Right. Because again, people don't want to sit and take a class on something or just read a long article about something. They want to interact, they want to try things. And so yeah, just to touch on what you're referring to, we launched a live trivia contest earlier this year where customers could kind of log on and live answer questions and kind of participate in a trivia contest on the markets. And it's just a really fun way for People to learn honestly. And I think that that is what succeeds. You know, I think that there's, again, similar to, like, what we talking about earlier. These things aren't at odds with each other. Right. The thing that is most effective to helping people understand or engage are the things that are most engaging to them, you know, and so we really believe that these fun, creative experiences are the best way to get people to engage with the markets and actually learn.
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I love that. And, Deirdre, you've been a vocal advocate for women and underrepresented voices in tech. What has helped you navigate leadership, and how are you fostering an inclusive product culture at Robinhood?
- [26:32]
Yeah, this is super personal for me because, you know, I will say from day one and still today, you know, I always have my moments of imposter syndrome where I'm like, you know, hey, am I. I really called by to be doing what I'm doing? Is there somebody out there who's better than me and trust me all the time? Right. It wasn't just like an early career thing. So what I've learned is that, you know, one, I picked the right environments that set me up for success, where I thrive personally, you know, they. They work for my skills, but also I'm surrounded by great people who see value, you know, in me and see value in what I do and kind of lift me up. And I think that's always been true for me, every place I've worked, everywhere from ESPN when I first started or, you know, I was one of a very small set of women on a. On an engineering team, but had an incredible set of managers and mentors who proactively promoted me, you know, which was incredible. Very. And I feel very lucky to have that. Although due to Robinhood, where I've had, like, kind of an incredible career here and really, you know, value the leadership who kind of empowered me. And so for me, what that means is I want to do that for others. Right. And so what that looks like is a couple of things. You know, one is I generally sense that, and, you know, I want to be careful about generalizations. But what I do see in myself and others is that oftentimes women can sort of have a lower risk appetite sometimes or have a little bit more fear of failure, and also don't necessarily speak up as much as. Well, again, not necessarily a blanket statement thing, but it is something that I've kind of noticed and I've noticed in myself as well. And so I look for that. Right. And I try to build relationships where I can help build people's confidence, you know, and help them speak up or help them feel like they, they deserve to be there and they're contributing something awesome and, and also help them embrace risk a little bit. You know, pick that big project that seems super scary that you've never done before or take on that new role, you know, kind of take the leap, you know, and I think those are kind of these little moments where I feel like I can kind of see, see the things that I've had to overcome myself in my career, and I can kind of stop that in others and help them overcome that in ways that I've had others do for me.
- [28:47]
Take the leap. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Deirdre, for being on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation. How does someone learn more about you, your thought leadership, the work that you and your team are doing over at Robinhood?
- [29:00]
Yeah, for sure. So you can follow me on LinkedIn or X on both those platforms. And then more importantly, we are hiring at Robinhood across everything, including product design. So engineering, obviously. So, you know, if you're interested, we have an awesome culture. Hopefully you've got a little bit of a preview of that here and we'd love to chat with you. So thank you.
- [29:24]
Bobby Mikester
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already. Don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.