#MyFavoriteProduct July 7: Andre Piazza on Prosper Daily

Andre Piazza is a Product leader that believes in shipping intelligent products, going to market with simple and authentic messaging, creating memorable experiences, and developing lasting relationships. He developed a reputation for having "The Energy of a Sales maker, and the brains of an Engineer". He's currently the Head of Product Marketing at iGrafx. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Andre, please tell us about your favorite product and the problem it solves. I'd choose the Prosper Daily app. It allows the user to track their financials at a expense level, and then report in categories and visualize expenditure on a monthly basis.  The Prosper app keeps me honest around my expenditures and gives me the power to take control of my finances.

What delights you about Prosper Daily? What does it do well?

Here are some real-life examples.  I recently changed my wireless service and had assumed it was an apples-to-apples conversion.  Prosper flagged some of the before and after differences which helped me better understand and dispute the costs with the vendor.  Another example is flagging duplicated expenses.  Finally, we live in a digital, service-based ecosystem, Prosper can help identify situations where we've made a payment in what was supposed to be a free term.  This is a platform I trust.

Prosper Daily is simple to operate: you approve or flag expenses by sliding it right or left.  It is also agnostic to the financial institution.  Its interface can show expenses at an account level, or on the aggregate.  It is also an excellent platform to upsell financial services: "Now that I help you manage your finances, can I help you get a loan? Report your credit score? Protect your identity?"

Product Managers love feedback. What feedback would you give to the product team for Prosper Daily?

Last November, I wrote a blog post on Prosper Daily highlighting adjacent, above-and-beyond use cases that could be surfaced such as credit management, budget management, financial loan recommendations and shopping tools such as rewards programs.  This would fully unlock benefits that the platform could bring to users to attain their goals.  In the context of Seth Godin's "ABN model" (which stands for assets, boundaries and narratives), the Prosper Daily team would most likely have to be re-imagined or altered to add more features.

As a product person, what elements of Prosper Daily have you brought into the products you manage?

I believe there are two notions that are valuable to any Product leader.  For one, product managers should always strive to deliver simplicity in intuitive ways.  Two, we should challenge the status quo of our industry to deliver fresh value. Who says you can only track financials through individual institutions? There's someone that is doing this, in a safe and friendly way, at no cost to the user.