Product Management Alignment

## Background Faisal brings approximately 7-8 years of product management experience, starting his career at 10 Pros, a global software consultancy where he worked with diverse clients across healthcare, fintech, and entertainment sectors. His most significant role was as the founding product manager at Finmark, a Y Combinator startup, where he was the first team member to join the founding team. At Finmark, he built a financial planning and analysis tool for startups and SMBs, successfully scaling from zero to thousands of customers within two and a half years, which ultimately led to the company's acquisition by Bill.com. Currently, he serves as a senior product manager at Bill.com, continuing to manage the Finmark product while overseeing feature integrations from Finmark into Bill's broader platform. ## Work Experience Faisal's recent work has been particularly focused on AI and data interaction solutions. During his time at Finmark, he developed an AI chatbot that allowed users to interact with their financial data - described as a "basic rudimentary version" of what Zenlytic is building. While this project never reached its full potential due to acquisition priorities and the 12-18 month integration timeline, Faisal later worked on the foundational infrastructure that now powers Bill.com's AI chatbot across all their product offerings. His approach to product management is highly tactical and hands-on. He maintains daily meetings with co-founders, engineering leads, and technical architects to facilitate progress. His workflow involves challenging leadership decisions, working closely with design on prototyping, writing requirements that are "loose enough for design to do what they think is best for user experience" but "rigid enough that they actually know what they need to do." He emphasizes pre-development alignment, ensuring design and engineering sign-off before moving to development, though he's comfortable making quick decisions when time-sensitive issues arise during development. Faisal has technical depth with a systems engineering background, basic coding experience, and SQL proficiency. He describes himself as knowing "enough to be dangerous" but sufficient to have meaningful technical conversations and understand complexity. ## Candidate Expectations ### Working Style Faisal expects to work as a liaison between all teams and departments, serving as the "glue" that connects engineering, design, sales, customer experience, and leadership. He's comfortable working at all levels of the organization and expects to have frequent touchpoints - potentially daily meetings with key stakeholders and at least weekly meetings with engineering leads. He strongly values both synchronous and asynchronous communication, setting up systems that allow team members to provide feedback when convenient while maintaining open lines for urgent matters. ### Role Scope and Responsibilities He expects to take ownership of the complete product development pipeline, from gathering and filtering feedback to prioritization and execution. Specifically, he anticipates managing both internal feedback systems (from engineering, executives, sales, marketing, customer success) and external customer feedback. He's prepared to gradually take over customer conversations from the CTO Paul, aiming to establish direct customer relationships within the first 30 days. Notably, Faisal expressed strong interest in taking on UX responsibilities, which he found "very interesting" despite acknowledging it's uncommon for product managers to be so involved in UX design. He's prepared to work closely with design to translate complex technical requirements into usable experiences. ### Technical Engagement He expects to be deeply involved in technical discussions and decision-making, comfortable with the complexity of data modeling, SQL joins, and technical product features. He's prepared to bridge the gap between engineering's technical capabilities and design's user experience focus, particularly for complex features that require domain expertise to properly convey to design teams. ## Questions/Concerns Faisal raised several strategic questions about the company's current processes and structure. He inquired about the existing engineering interaction processes and roadmap building procedures, identifying that there appears to be limited structure currently in place. He specifically asked about the biggest internal process challenges, learning that prioritization and focus are major issues, with the team frequently pivoting based on whoever is "loudest" rather than systematic feedback analysis. He was particularly interested in understanding Paul's current prioritization methodology, learning that it's largely instinct-based from customer interactions rather than a formal process. Faisal also inquired about the team's openness to process changes, asking whether they would prefer dramatic overhauls or incremental improvements, and was reassured that the team is very open to better processes and would likely accept new methodologies without significant pushback. His questions demonstrated a strategic mindset focused on understanding existing gaps and how to systematically address them, particularly around feedback management, prioritization frameworks, and team communication structures.