Even with small ideas or small changes, you can already impact a lot. It doesn't matter what position you are in, everyone will listen as long as you have good ideas.

Ali Simsek

Junior Product Manager

What are your core tasks and responsibilities within the Product team?
A Product Manager’s responsibility is to come up with creative and productive ideas for the company and in the end ship them together with engineering and design. It’s also our responsibility to check that the according features are adding value to our customers. Therefore, looking at metrics, gathering data and insights is a core part of our day to day doings.

Every day can be different. One day you sit in meetings and especially defend or argue with other product-minded people about how you should feature xyz. The next day you are briefing engineers or having discussions with designers about how certain features look or should act like. It can be very different, but there is a lot of collaboration across features for sure.


You started at LIQID as an intern – what excited you most about the company that made you decide to join full-time?

Contributing even more into the product roadmap. It's very fulfilling to come up with ideas which you can convince leadership to build together.

Even with small ideas or small changes, you can already impact a lot. It doesn't matter what position you are in, everyone will listen as long as you have good ideas. So, having a nice product taste and keeping yourself informed on what's new in the product world and what's the status quo will help you a lot in the day-to-day doings. 

Besides that, I love working together with my colleagues - they mean everything to me. Therefore, when I'm in the office, I really enjoy just being in the office, collaborating or even just drinking some coffee with them. The people make the right job.


Which skills or competencies do you think are essential for success in Product at a digital wealth management company?
Product taste, radical scoping of features and timelines, Stakeholder collaboration. It is very valuable to be able to code or design since these are functions you are going to work closely with. If you are able to do both, you have the best fundamentals to become a Product Manager.

If I had to choose out of all of these, it really depends on what kind of environment you are in. I would choose the product taste in a smaller company because there is predominantly going to be less stakeholder collaboration needed and therefore it will be very much output-focused. But if you're in a slightly more grown company, then I would say that stakeholder collaboration will be one of the most important skills to learn. In a digital wealth management company as we are right now, I would say that having a combination of all three of the set skills are going to be very important. It needs to be balanced.


Which trends and developments in digital wealth management or Fintech excite you most right now – and why?
I love that more and more companies are getting venture funded which are having the courage to go ahead and break up very conservative structures.

That's why I embrace and love that we work together with modern partners such as Upvest to actually combat this because fintech doesn't need to be complicated. It needs smart people to go ahead and make things which seem complicated look very simple.


You are a member of 2hearts, a community supporting tech talent with immigration backgrounds. What drew you to join this initiative, and what role does it play for you personally and professionally?
Statistically, people with immigration background will have it harder to get a degree and therefore be successful in their career. But there are always exceptions to the rules, that's why there is much greatness across the industries from people with an immigration background. I want to embrace this and this is exactly what 2hearts is doing.

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