The elementary school my daughter attends is a wonderful place full of excited, happy learners. One reason for that is the staff spend a lot of time with the students, starting in Kindergarten and continuing through 5th grade, teaching and thinking about the school’s core values. These are “Honor Yourself and Others; Work Together; Work Hard, Help Each Other; Try New Things; Be Reflective.” These values create the school community, and you can see the kids behaving with these values in mind every day, in school and out.
Wouldn’t these values make a lot of sense at work, too? (Think about the difference they would make in the planning for your next budget cycle!) So, this week, I will be trying a new thing…attending Shared Services and Outsourcing week in Orlando and hosting a breakfast Thursday morning for a number of Citi’s clients and partners.
As a P2P and Payments product manager in Citi’s Global Transaction Services group, I normally spend most of my time thinking about ways to move money and invoices through commercial networks. But if I reflect on what makes some products float and others flounder, just about every time the linchpin of success is how well the product does in delivering value for both sides of the transaction. In other words, working together across a network. And what is a network, when you get down to it, other than one human being buying from or selling to another human being? If we lose sight of this we quickly find that we are engaging in theoretical product engineering, not banking or commerce.
I’ll have my eyes and ears open at SSOW to learn more about who really lives with the results of a payments and P2P product strategy…the people and places who make up a Shared Service Organization.
