Canopy’s Vision

To empower people and organizations to reach their full potential with personal, transparent and safer financing.

Canopy’s Mission

To enable organizations to launch personalized, transparent, and safer credit and lending products and to support those products with world-class servicing in a secure and compliant way.

What is Product’s Calling?

• Advance Canopy towards its Long-Term Vision and Strategy
• Enable cross-functional collaboration and own business outcomes
• Inspire and evangelize the impact our product will have and will have

How does Product do this?

1. Influencing Scope and Priority: Understanding user needs, and using those to drive business goals. Constantly framing, and reframing these as we learn.
   • Helps the team make high quality, actionable decisions with extremely high decision velocity
   • Facilitates problem and solution discovery and creates collaboration on teams
   • Tightens scope of critical path for projects to maximize incremental value and rapid learnings
2. Championing Impact: Constantly talks about how what we create impacts people
   • During meetings
   • Via digital content (videos, slack, notion, etc)
   • Both internally and externally

Stuff that is extra

<aside> 📒 Many product folks are interdisciplinary, such as TPMs, analysts, or design-driven PMs, and may have backgrounds that help them wear multiple hats.

While Product Managers and Leaders can often add value to these areas, they do not directly fill Product’s calling.

Still, Canopy’s Product Team is absolutely here to provide assistance with these things where we can.

</aside>

• Helping with project management
• Helping with delivery
• Helping with engineering
• Helping form designs or wireframes
• Helping with resource & capacity planning
• Talking to customers about their requirements (vs about their goals, pains & success definitions)
  • a misconception is that product wants to create requirements of projects
    • product actually wants to frame problems clearly, and help teams collaboratively find solutions that delight users. Sometimes this means writing specific requirements, but more often, it involves problem synthesis, experimentation, and team brainstorming.
  • previously, because of this, PMs got pulled into more project management, but Canopy has moved the bulk of these responsibilities outside of product via:
    • Better scoped SOW’s
    • Double down on accounts leadership
    • Double down on implementation leaders outside of product
    • A client delivery team within our product organization who focuses on ensuring we meet client deadlines.
    • Dedicated project managers in our engineering organization

How do we measure Product’s impact?

• Achieving strong differentiation:
  • Complexity of the lending programs we onboard grows over time
  • Clients are successful in hitting their growth targets and growth metrics
  • We can onboard more and more clients with less and less cost
• Impact:
  • Features and projects that we build create high long term value
  • We can measure high vertical and horizontal usage of our product. The way clients use our product grows over time
• Alignment
  • Multiple departments within Canopy can articulate a shared narrative behind why we add value to our customers