What does a product manager do at Capital One?

Product management at Capital One is a booming, vibrant craft that reimagines the status quo and drives sustainable customer experiences through technology. Product managers are designing, creating and pushing innovations forward across Tech, Banking, Card and all other areas of the company. They use collaboration, data-driven work and balanced judgment to determine if a product is usable, viable and feasible.

Because product managers have such varied roles, we spoke to a few of them about their work, meaningful projects they’ve tackled and what candidates should know about working here. 

What do you do at Capital One?

Alex Wood, vice president of product management and data for Human Resources: My teams are responsible for all the products, platforms and data that power HR, including recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, compensation, benefits and career development. We’re aiming to bring the same high caliber of craft to internal products as we are to external experiences.

Brian, product manager for the Machine Learning Platform: I focus on the internal cloud computing infrastructure our machine learning experts and data scientists use. My role within the team is to define the needs of our customers and use that to develop a roadmap and vision so our products meet our colleagues’ needs. This requires a lot of design thinking, research and breaking down work into actionable steps. 

Lauren, director of product management for Premium Cards: I work with different Card teams who manage existing services and create new experiences for our customers. I pull in Tech and Design teams to form our ideas. I do customer research to understand how we can make our experience better. I really love my work because you see these new experiences come to life for our customers. It’s incredibly rewarding.

What projects have you worked on?

Alex: I’m excited about three things we’ve made great progress on. We’ve integrated our interviewing and recruiting tools. We continue to leverage the power of insights and data in our performance management process. Finally, we’re continuing to build a data ecosystem and foundation to experiment with new technology, including AI, that can enhance our processes in HR.

Brian: Our team introduced a new workflow orchestration capability that is used to build and train some of the most important models at Capital One, such as transaction fraud. It’s cool to be part of work that’s so tangible. Anytime I swipe my Capital One credit card, I get this small thrill to know I was a piece of the puzzle that enables Capital One to help protect its customers. We are also working to build a deeper integration between our core tech platforms and our data lake to streamline the model training process for data scientists.

Lauren: Two projects stand out to me. We launched a counter offer tool when I worked in Small Business Card. Rather than decline customers in the application, we were able to offer them something else. That was such a cool innovation at the time. The other was adding online access for authorized users so they can see transactions and make payments. It was a technical challenge to build, but such a meaningful change for our customers. 

What should product managers know about working at Capital One?

Alex: We’re building really great tools that solve problems in increasingly delightful ways. Leaders at Capital One recognize that, so you have a lot of resources at your disposal. I’m used to organizations where product teams often have to be  incredibly scrappy and constantly making the case for investment and prioritization. Here at Capital One, we’re actually doubling down.

Brian: You’re not expected to know everything, but you should be curious. Capital One is a great place to learn. Ask questions and do research. Express your curiosity. Lean on your partners. As product managers, we need to explain the context around our work.

Lauren: Data is an integral part of what we do. I was an associate in the Analyst Development Program and switched to product management because I saw how the latter allows you to use data to create great experiences. Learn how to work with it because data is going to inform whatever product you’re managing.

Apply for a product management job here.