The latest episode in the 'Meet the expert' series: Raushon Uddin, Director of Product, TRG Screen
Spend half an hour talking to Raushon about product management and you quickly get a sense of how her mind works. She’s naturally inquisitive, always looking to get beneath the obvious answer and clearly energized by the opportunity to make things better.
As Director of Product at TRG Screen, those qualities serve her well. We caught up with Raushon to talk about what has shaped her approach to product management, the impact of AI, and why solving the right problem matters far more than simply building what someone asks for.
I’m a Director of Product at TRG Screen, responsible for our spend and compliance management product suites.
I oversee our flagship product, Optimize Spend, so that naturally puts me at the intersection of product, technology and pretty much every other part of the organization. I lead a team spanning product management, product ownership and, more recently, user experience design.
I’ve always worked in product management, but across quite a diverse range of industries – marketing, data, finance and legal. I think that breadth has been a real advantage. Every industry has its own challenges, but there are often overlaps in the underlying problems customers are trying to solve.
Moving between industries forces you to keep challenging yourself. You’re always asking: what can I bring from somewhere else that might give us a different perspective?
The opportunity to genuinely transform the industry. The impact we can make at TRG Screen is very tangible. We’re not introducing technology for innovation’s sake; we’re using it to help people work smarter, make better decisions and free up their time to focus on more meaningful work.
Financial institutions operate in incredibly complex environments, with a lot of rules, regulations and considerations around anything you build. Historically, that has made it hard to move quickly, but AI is starting to change that.
There’s a real appetite to rethink how things are done, and it’s pretty incredible to see an industry that has traditionally moved cautiously embrace new ways of working.
Because what a customer asks you to build and what they actually need aren’t always the same thing.
Customers naturally come to us with ideas. They might say, “Could you add this here?” or “Could you change this because it would make my life easier?” That input is really valuable, but what they’re asking for may not always address the underlying problem.
So I always want to go back a step. What are you doing today? Where are the bottlenecks? What are you ultimately trying to achieve? Once you understand that, it becomes our job to work out the best way to solve it.
Ultimately, the customer only cares about the outcome. So listen very carefully to what they’re asking for, but make sure you understand the problem behind it.
I think we’ve reached the point where organizations can no longer just experiment with AI. The question now has to be: what difference is it actually making?
How can you use it to save time? Where can it remove manual effort? How can it help people achieve more?
Those are the questions customers are increasingly asking us, and businesses are asking themselves internally too.
But we also have to be thoughtful about it. AI is incredibly capable, but there is human knowledge and experience that you simply can’t replace. If organizations move too quickly, there’s a risk of losing expertise and only realizing afterwards how valuable it was.
For me, AI should be a partner. It should supplement people and enable them to do more – rather than assuming that everything a person does can or should be replaced.
Curiosity is probably one of the biggest. If your job requires you to innovate, you have to be curious – about customers, about what people need, and about whether there might be a better way of doing something.
You also need to be willing to challenge people.
Someone once described product management to me as having “all the autonomy without any authority,” and that has always stuck with me. You sit in the middle of so many competing priorities, you have to step back, look at the bigger picture and make the right call.
You have to be evidence-driven and willing to say no, otherwise you end up with a product made up of everything everybody has ever asked you to build rather than the things that genuinely add value.
And then there’s hard work. I take a lot of pride in what I do and I genuinely enjoy it, so going above and beyond has always come quite naturally to me.
Actually, no! People often assume I’m quite extroverted because of how I am at work, but I’m really not.
Outside work, I like a very calm, simple life. I’m happiest at home with my husband, watching TV, or spending time with my family. They live about five minutes away, so I see them pretty much every day. I also have two cats I adore, and they definitely add a sense of calm to an environment.
Work can be chaotic and demanding, so when I get home, I want the opposite. I like things to be calm and quiet, and I just really enjoy being with my people.
We travel a lot – probably somewhere every month or every other month – and I absolutely love it.
I have this thing where I’ll see somewhere in a film or on TV, become completely obsessed with it and then decide I have to go there. Sometimes it’s exactly as I imagined it; sometimes you’re reminded that some things look slightly different on TV!
My husband also takes me somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit for my birthday each year. We’ve been lucky enough to travel to places like Mauritius, Bali, Singapore and the Maldives, and I love that feeling of putting yourself outside your usual environment and seeing what life looks like somewhere completely different.
Closer to home, we love walking. At weekends, we’ll pick an area of London and just walk until we’ve done 20,000 or 30,000 steps. We just love exploring different parts of the city.
It probably sounds very simple, but that’s what I love about it.
Stay tuned for more expert insights in our Meet the Expert series, where we showcase the people behind TRG Screen and their contributions to the financial services industry.