What is it like to work in fintech? A day in the life of a Bolt Product Director

Matthew Low is Director of Product at Bolt, a cash and payments technology company in San Francisco fintechworking remotely from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Drive the core product team, which includes payment, payments, risk and data products. Low also worked on the product in the cryptocurrency sector with Kraken and spent much of his previous career as a corporate lawyer.

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6:00 in the morning. I’m usually awake at this time, with a young family at home. I work on my first cup of coffee and catch up on Slack messages, emails, and industry news before the kids’ morning routine and off I go.

8:00 in the morning. Remote working has been a great benefit in balancing both my work and personal life. I have been able to carve out more time for in-depth work/planning and can work as early or late as needed. Bolt’s tech teams focus more on deliverables and writing than talking and Facetime.

9:00 am. I’m an early riser and a big believer in “eating the frog,” so my mornings are usually dedicated to the biggest, hardest, most important tasks. I will dedicate a large portion of my mornings to work related to planning, strategy and product development.

11:00 am, Many of my colleagues are on the West Coast, so I usually meet with the team at comedy clubs or individually in 1:1s in the late morning and afternoon. Product engineering and design are closely connected, and we constantly communicate about short-term issues and long-term product vision. Product is a multi-faceted role, so we also collaborate with Go-To-Market, operations, sales and other teams.

Without an internal culture, working remotely requires communication to be direct, concise and deliberate, whether on asynchronous channels like Slack or live via Zoom. It provides some separation from groupthink and allows more time for introspection on such communications.

12:00 pm Given the distribution of our team across time zones, I will graze most of the day and eat lighter work meals in the morning and afternoon between meetings.

2pm Typically, I spend my afternoons addressing follow-up or open issues in my product suite. I typically use this time to focus on more tactical deliverables and the meat and potatoes of leading a product team. As a director of product, I’m like a player-coach. I still get my hands dirty running our payments business, but I often have to zoom out and think more deeply about how our core products fit into Bolt’s larger vision.

I also spend a lot more time mentoring product managers, performing product reviews, and serving as a sounding board for our product team as they make tough product calls. As at the beginning of my career, these product managers are much more “in the weeds,” focusing more deeply on the strategy of specific features and measuring its success in the finer details of its execution.

4:00 pm I usually carve out about an hour in the afternoon for school pick-up, so I can step away from the screen and spend uninterrupted time with family before calling it a day.

7:00 pm The finishing time varies slightly from day to day, but I usually finish by 7pm. I end my days by clearing out my inbox and pending queues, then rededicate myself to any work that needs another round of review.

7.15pm One of the great benefits of being remote is the time saved from commuting. Since I work in my home office, I usually go upstairs to help with dinner, play games, or read children’s books on repeat. Sometimes we go out for a run in the park before dark, and I usually do a Peloton ride. After catching up on the financial markets and spending some quality time with my wife, I went to bed at 10am.

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Photo by Chris Montgomery ON Unsplash

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