Darlene Miranda is VP, Customer Engagement and Advocacy at DailyPay, a software company that provides employees with early access to their earned pay. She began her career in digital media and ecommerce and worked for companies like Oracle, Digitas, and Fort Point Partners. After completing her MBA at NYU, Darlene spent nearly eight years in product management at American Express. She has remained in the tech industry since then and has focused mainly on financial software, holding various product leadership positions at CredSimple (now Andros), CommonBond.co, and Sterling.
In our conversation, Darlene talks about the importance of pairing the product function with customer success and creating an obvious link between customer experience metrics and the business outcome. She shares how she fosters creativity by going deeper and looking for the “why” behind the “why” when teams raise potential constraints. Darlene also discusses how to overcome the challenge of building products when you don’t represent your target audience.
I believe that at the core of any good product manager is the strong desire to understand what customers need and go well beyond a surface-level understanding. You have to go deep and unpack what your customers need, how they think, and what they’re doing outside of your product. That requires deep empathy and the ability to think beyond what your company does. Because both types of roles have that in common, the transition was actually pretty seamless and allowed me to jump right in.
When people think about leaving product and going to other areas, it’s easy to view that as a challenge. But when you flip that on its head and consider the opportunities that it opens up, it gets really exciting. For me, I brought a lot of my product experience to this role in teaching a different part of the organization how to think more like product folks —things like bringing design thinking into how you can create a roadmap around anything that you do. That mindset has helped us organize around key initiatives, think about prioritization, and find the right balance between strategic and tactical execution.
That’s pretty common, especially in product organizations. The people that you’re building products for are not who you are, so there can be a disconnect. For example, at DailyPay, we are users of our product and we believe in it, but we are not the target audience. When that happens — when you don’t represent your target audience — you can develop limited views or assumptions of why people should want or need to use your product.
There are a couple of things that I do to help with that. First, and I say this in many meetings, avoid thinking about the “shoulds.” This is when you say things like, “Customers should want this,” or “They should do this.” That’s not how people think or behave, so we have to train ourselves to not think that way. Step out of your four walls and really consider what’s happening in their lives.
The other thing that we employ and that I highly recommend is voice of the customer work. When I first joined DailyPay, we started requiring the team to listen to support calls every week. I just wanted them to hear what customers were saying, the urgency in their voices, and what they were telling us about their lives. We made that required, and it evolved so much.
Eventually, other teams wanted to join in and it became a company-wide initiative. We were not only listening to the calls but looking at session replays too. We were comparing that with data and social media, and bringing different pieces together to tell a story. We made that a practice and that’s what evolved eventually into our formalized voice of the customer work.
This story was a combination of voice of the customer work and looking at data. It’s interesting because we often start with data to build hypotheses about what our users need us for. The DailyPay product is pretty straightforward — we make pay accessible to people before payday. We assumed that everyone who was coming to access their money before payday.
We started to unpack that, and the data actually showed that people were coming in but not transferring. We had to ask “why,” and that’s where the voice of the customer work started to reveal the “why”. If folks are not coming to withdraw their money, what are they coming to do? Through research, listening to calls, looking into what’s being said on social media, and reading reviews, we realized that people were coming to check their balances and view how their compensation was tracking toward payday.
We leaned into that a lot and started talking to users. They told us that previously, they’d use Post-it notes to track hours and pay. Our product created a more efficient way for them to track pay instead, and then they could decide how to modify that, such as picking up extra shifts.
Absolutely. We invest an enormous amount into client research. We have an exceptional client success team, and I’m proud of the work that we’ve done there. They build relationships with our clients in a way that allows us to have a seat at the table. We couldn’t be the organization that we are today if we didn’t make this investment and spend meaningful time understanding our clients’ businesses.
The advice that I give to everyone is that it’s never about us. We do this research broadly so that we are also learning best practices across a broad set of organizations. We learn how they stand up to the challenges of their respective businesses. And when we invest in that kind of learning, we don’t just gain empathy, we become a trusted advisor.
Regarding client research, straightforward questions never truly unpack what’s going on over there. I recently created a discussion guide with unconventional questions. These are meant to uncover the things that you may not get to in a straightforward way. For example, we often try to understand how companies communicate benefits to their employees. They’ll list out all the traditional ways, like their intranets, etc. One of the questions I ask is, “When employees show up for work, who’s the first person they see or talk to?” I train teams to ask some of these unconventional questions that get you answers from a different direction.
I’ll make a bold statement that if customer experience and satisfaction metrics are not product metrics or overall business metrics, then you need to ask if you’re focused on the right thing. If you’re only looking at revenue, business metrics, or product metrics around usage, and you are not focused on customer experience, your focus isn’t in the right place. Those metrics do need a seat at the table. Sometimes, the link between these customer experience and satisfaction metrics isn’t obvious to the business outcome, so you need to make it obvious.
For example, we track support inquiries, app reviews, and several sentiment metrics to identify where we have gaps that we may not see. If you’re not looking into that, you’re actually missing out on potential business impact. We utilize a tool that helps us with this — unitQ. It allows us to take all these different sentiment metrics, both internally and externally, and connect to Zendesk, our support system. That way, it quantifies the impact of friction. We can see that when we close that gap, there’s a business outcome right away that hits the bottom line. So separating the two doesn’t make sense to me.
The way to navigate that is by being clear on the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. You have to understand that you will need to actively say no to other things. There may come a time when you find yourself saying things like, “Churn doesn’t matter right now.” Some people may interpret that to mean you don’t care about churn, but everything can’t be the most important thing to focus on. It’s important to have confidence in knowing that you’re going to have to focus on a certain area and have the courage to say no to other important things.
In earlier stages, you might prioritize getting to a trial or getting to product-market fit. In high-growth stages, you may prioritize awareness, enrollment, and “growth at all costs,” as they say. Later on, you may find yourself managing margins or risks. Regardless of the stage that you’re at, be clear about what you’re focusing on and make sure that everyone is aligned around that.
If you’re in discovery mode, you never want to make big investments because you just don’t know. You need to get comfortable with experimentation because you’re going to be wrong and you’re going to fail at times. This can be scary to many people.
Another thing I see happen is that people feel bound to what they can actually do. For example, we are looking into a new area of our business, and we have a model that’s deeply integrated with different systems. It’s a high-investment model, so experimentation there is going to be trickier. We wanted to push the boundaries and see if we could streamline that integration with these systems.
I said, “There must be a way to streamline that connection so it’s a one-touch.” And that struck fear in a lot of people. Understandably, their first thoughts included, “No, it’s impossible. That’s not how we work. These are very complicated systems.” We went through this exercise where we listed every reason why we wouldn’t do it and began to unpack that. Slowly but surely, the team started to get comfortable and realized that by not putting up those barriers, they could see things in a different light. They started to remove some of the things that they thought they couldn’t do, and this has been really successful. I’m proud of how the team has evolved.
That’s one of the things that I bring to our customer support organization. Sometimes, operationally focused organizations lean heavily on processes. They create processes for a reason, which leads to repeatability and efficiency. But, sometimes when you’re focused on the process, you forget that there may be a world with a different approach that’s going to lead to a different outcome. The way that I foster creativity is by challenging teams and saying, “If you had a magic wand and you could wave it, what’s one thing you would do differently?”
A team member said, “We keep hearing feedback that these emails may not be working in the best way.” I challenge them and ask a lot of “why” questions, like “Why can’t you change them?” I do want to acknowledge and respect that sometimes this can be an annoying practice, but going deeper and asking why, helps teams get creative. I’m seeing this happen right now with my team, and it’s like the most magical experience ever. Once you unleash them and they get a flavor for what it means to think differently, they want more.
It’s hard to do organizationally because silos are easy to form. When they do, it’s easy to become focused on what your team is trying to deliver versus the outcome that you’re trying to drive for the company. When you align around outcomes or customer experience, it doesn’t matter what function you play in a company because you have that shared goal.
From a purely business perspective, we leverage things like OKRs to help us align. It’s not about what the operations team is going to do or what the support team is going to do — we don’t have those because they become team objectives. We don’t want that. We say, “We’re going to drive the growth of X,” and everyone aligns around that. Then, we break down those barriers and drive accountability so folks aren’t focusing on other things. It’s almost like a distraction mechanism.
When it comes to aligning around great user experience, we take the same approach. The customer isn’t thinking about which team they’re interacting with, they’re just thinking about how to best utilize DailyPay. I like to map out journeys step-by-step and make them public. I invite others to look at them as well.
In previous organizations when everyone was in the office, we would take over a whole wall and map the different parts of a customer’s journey. We’d invite teams to come to the wall with Post-it notes, call out different aspects of the experience, and raise whether there could be friction. When we did that, we’d realize potholes in the experience.
I’ve thought a lot about this recently in our enrollment experience. There’s the marketing piece where users are made aware that this exists, and that’s great, but there’s a little area in between them seeing that and enrolling in DailyPay. That in-between we found isn’t as seamless as it should be, which can create confusion. We used data to understand how many people were dropping off at that point, but if we hadn’t mapped that out end-to-end and brought everyone to the table, we’d never have noticed that.
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