What do you do and what is it about your job that gets you out of bed in the morning?
Getting out of bed in the morning to do this job is easy. I love how I always feel challenged in my work. I also believe my team makes a difference for our company and our consumers. I am a Senior Director product manager in Identity at Capital One. I lead a team of product managers that create best-in-class user experiences in the space of consumer authentication. We build new ways to authenticate consumers when they are accessing their Capital One account and executing financial transactions. We also enhance, maintain and operate the Identity & Access Management infrastructure that authenticates millions of consumers and processes billions of transactions a year.
My team and I make a meaningful impact with our work. We tackle the ever-changing landscape of fraud and cyber threats and respond swiftly to prevent consumer harm. We also make the experience better for our customers and enable new features in the digital space. People sometimes don’t realize that nothing is possible from a financial transaction perspective without the right layered security controls. My team ensures new features, like viewing your credit card number online, are protected properly to prevent harm. We also create a positive customer experience by not asking for erroneous authentication from the customer if we can verify it is them by other means.
How did you get to where you are today?
I have such a different origin story than most people doing product management. I started my career as a Chemical Engineer and I was a practitioner in this space for 10 years. I designed and started up chemical manufacturing equipment for Honeywell. I also improved throughput and product quality. It was a really different life to what I do now, but there are a lot of parallels and I learned so much about leadership and risk management.
In 2010, I decided to leave Chemical Engineering to pursue a career at Capital One as a Process Manager. I was attracted to Capital One as they were often cited for being a great place to work for women. I planned to leverage my MBA and Six Sigma skills to improve business processes instead of manufacturing processes. I started in what was then called the eCommerce Security Office and my running joke is that it was me and one other person. From there, I became one of the few experts on customer authentication, multi-factor authentication and layered security controls. Over the years, we decided to build our own cloud-based Identity & Access Management platform for all consumer authentication. I had the opportunity to lead much of this work and grow my team. It’s been an exciting journey here at Capital One.
What is the most important lesson you have learned along the way?
The importance of empathy. I know now, the most important thing I do is lead others. To lead, I need people to want to follow me. This is not something people do because I am smart or technically competent, although I am sure those things can help. A great leader is empathetic and understands the needs and motivations of their team members. One important lesson I have learned is that I need to spend time developing my interpersonal and leadership skills. In my early career, I focused too much on filling my technical competency bucket. I had the mistaken belief that knowledge of how to build great Identity products was the main thing I needed to lead. I now spend more time on learning how to be a better listener, how to manage emotions, and how to inspire others. I find these types of leadership skills to be critical in accomplishing great things.
What's your pitch to CEOs in the identity space? What do you suggest they START / STOP / CONTINUE doing and why?
We need to start putting the customer first in the Identity experience. As Identity practitioners, we tend to focus on stopping threat actors and fraudulent parties. To do this, we often sacrifice customer experience. This means customers cannot complete their most important transactions. In the financial services industry, it may be moving money to help an aging parent with expenses or to pay for their child’s college tuition. In other areas, it may be to open an account, to conduct a name change, to get health care benefits, to access welfare programs and much more. Why should our customer’s struggle to accomplish these very important tasks due to Identity friction? We should stop inconveniencing our customers to prevent fraud.
I have heard it said that our goal should be to strike a balance between customer experience and security. I would argue we should strive to do both of these with excellence. In this age of technology, we should be as good as the malicious actors at detecting and stopping them as they are at emulating others. We should also strive to make the customer experience as seamless and easy to navigate as possible when a customer needs to provide Identity verification and authentication.
In one sentence, why does diversity matter to you?
Representation in the technology workforce from the full diverse breadth of our population is necessary to build products that serve ALL and to enable us to provide creative and innovative solutions that fulfill the needs of humanity.
What book/film/piece of art would you recommend to your fellow members? Why?
I like to read and listen to a range of topics to help me grow and develop. Here is a short list: Dare to Lead with Brene Brown, The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos, The Confidence Code by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, Atomic Habits by James Clear, and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff.
What advice would you give to the teenage 'you'?
Start working on building your self confidence now! This issue still plagues you in your 40s. You are capable of so much more than you think. Try not to stress so much. The bad moments will not be as bad as you think and failure leads to success. Overall, be kinder to yourself and believe in your ability.
Where can we find you on social media / the Web?
LinkedIn - Melissa Y. Heng
Twitter - @melissawholeads