About Us
Griffin is a London-based pre-authorisation “platform” bank that provides safeguarded and client money (CASS) bank accounts to technology-driven organisations. We are not only branchless but API-first.
We see a world in which people and firms get most of their financial services and products from non-bank entities rather than high street banks. In this future, these non-bank firms will still need to partner with banks in order to safeguard and ring-fence their customer’s deposits and to programmatically manage access to these funds. We aim to be the world leader in providing these capabilities – and the potential is huge.
The team is still small, at 13 people. We have the bulk of our executive team in place (CEO, CRO, CFO, COO, CTO) and an in-house engineering team of 5 engineers. Our Board is still being assembled but even today has an independent Chairman and next month will appoint another independent non-executive director. About half of the leadership team has prior experience setting up a new bank in the UK – this isn’t our first time and we know what we’re doing.
Culture
We are dedicated and careful stewards of our culture. Rather than “move fast and break things”, we aim to move *thoughtfully* and to make few mistakes.
That having been said, we are a technology company. We plan on automating everything that we can, safely. One of the key outcomes for this role is helping us to build those automated processes in a way that complies with the letter and spirit of all relevant laws and regulations.
We are an outcome-driven environment that operates with extreme autonomy; people are free to keep their own hours and we don’t micro-manage each other.
The Role
As part of the product team, your job will be to drive our product discovery by deeply understanding our customer’s problems and needs and helping to translate those into product specs, working with the engineering team to guide feature development. You can expect to acquire an intimate knowledge of relevant banking regulations along the way.
As a company we are still fairly young, which means we don’t yet have product-market fit – though we have invested a lot of time in speaking with customers about their needs and have a clear product thesis and strategy. Your job is to help us get to PMF.
We practice active continuous integration and deployment, which means small changes are deployed many times per day.
This role reports to the Chief Executive Officer and is an opportunity to shape the product practice at a new organisation.
Responsibilities:
- Driving our product discovery through qualitative and quantitative user research
- Being the voice of the customer internally so we truly understand their problems and our best opportunities for solving them
- Reading the regulations and related best practices that are relevant to our business (e.g. the FCA handbook, JMLSG, etc).
- Working closely with our executive team (CFO, CRO, CCO, etc.) to understand regulatory requirements and how they impact our products
- Leading our hypothesis driven development by prioritising our opportunities by impact
- Helping implement best practice “just enough” process to align the team around those opportunities
- Writing up product specifications and feature qualification documents
- Helping to define OKRs – and then making sure we meet them!
- Working closely with the engineering team on making sure implementation solves the business need and then negotiating the product roadmap
- Responding to regulation-related questions from the development team
Requirements
You must excel at the zero-to-one of a product lifecycle
- You must have led the user experience research to develop and then launch a product at a Pre-Seed/Seed/Series A startup (i.e. pre-product-market-fit).
- You must have a track record in launching “consumerisation of enterprise” / “minimum lovable product” products or launched v1 of a exceptional product in a complex space.
- You should be obsessed with customer and user research.
- You should be exceptional at creating structure out of unstructure.
- You need to be sufficiently technical to have strong opinions about what a good API product looks like.
Other must-haves:
- Communication is extremely important to us. You must be fluent in English.
- You should be exceptionally good at writing concise product specifications that answer the who, the what, the how and the why.
- You are a fast learner, and are capable of being fully productive in less than a month.
- You are capable of picking your battles intelligently.
- You should have experience building internal tooling, particularly in cases where the user isn’t the customer
Nice-to-haves:
(These really are just nice-to-haves, please apply even if you don’t have any of these but you do have experience with all of the above!)
- Prior experience in fintech or an API-first company.
- Prior experience at a tier-1 product-led company (i.e. Airbnb, Stripe, etc.)
- Technical ability (i.e. you can write code).
Benefits
- 25 days off a year + bank holidays
- Tax-advantaged stock options under HMRC’s Company Share Option Plan (CSOP)
- Flexible working
- Private medical insurance through AXA
- Private life insurance through AIG