Ever wondered what it's like to drive the experience behind a massive FinTech platform? We recently sat down with Mariel Salem, Product Manager at SoFi, to discuss her unique role, her career journey from big tech to FinTech, and the collaborative world of financial services product management.
A 'Mini CEO' and Chief Problem-Solver
Mariel sees the Product Manager (PM) role as being like a "mini CEO" of SoFi’s product, specifically in her role on the SoFi Plus & Benefits team. Her oversight spans technical execution, functionality, and, most importantly, the member experience. While PMs touch on aspects of marketing and growth, the core focus remains squarely on the product itself. Mariel's current focus is on the SoFi Plus membership and key member engagement initiatives such as managing subscriptions, rewards, and benefits to enhance the overall value proposition for SoFi members. Mariel seeks to understand problems, and as a PM is constantly identifying pain points and architecting solutions that seamlessly balance member needs with business objectives.
Collaboration and the FinTech Factor
While the role of a Product Manager is common in FinTech spaces, a key difference Mariel highlighted is SoFi’s collaborative structure. Unlike larger tech companies, SoFi PMs engage in shared decision-making. Mariel works closely with engineering and design teams: providing strategic direction to engineers and collaborating on the high-level vision with designers.
She noted that while there's a learning curve to mastering financial services concepts, the Member Business Unit at SoFi benefits from a high proportion of former big tech employees, bringing world-class expertise to the platform. Ultimately, it’s about balancing technical execution with creative design to deliver a seamless member experience.
Which of your past experiences gave you the most valuable insights into the why behind user behavior versus the how of delivery, and how do you balance those perspectives in your daily PM work?
I think my most valuable experience came from both my time in management consulting at a top global management firm and my time in Business Operations and Product Strategy at Google. Consulting taught me to live in ambiguity, move quickly, and structure messy, multi-variable problems into actionable insights. It trained me to obsess over the root cause ('the why') – the human motivation, the user pain point, and to validate hypotheses with data.
My time working with both hardware and software products helped me gain the technical rigor needed as a Product Manager. I learned how systems actually work: data pipelines, product architecture, feature flagging, experimentation frameworks, and what it takes to deliver high-quality experiences at scale. That exposure gave me the “how” – the ability to reason about feasibility, sequence constraints, and tradeoffs with engineering.
As a PM at SoFi, I balance both every day. The 'why' ensures we’re solving real member problems and building experiences that feel intuitive, trustworthy, and valuable. The “how” ensures we can deliver those solutions in a way that’s technically sound, scalable, and compliant in a highly regulated environment. Strong product outcomes happen only when those two perspectives reinforce each other, not compete with each other."
What is the single most unique or complex constraint you face as a Product Manager in the financial services sector and how does that constraint change your product strategy?
The most unique constraint in financial services is regulatory compliance, especially when you’re building a horizontal, member-facing product like SoFi Plus that touches deposits, lending, invest, rewards, and payments. Each product is governed by its own regulatory framework, but the member experience needs to feel unified, simple, and intuitive.
This constraint fundamentally changes how I think about product strategy. I can’t simply optimize for growth or friction reduction; every decision must also hold up to UDAAP (Unfair, Deceptive, or Abusive Acts or Practices), APY (Annual Percentage Yield) disclosures, reward eligibility rules, regulatory reporting, and data-handling requirements. Even seemingly small user experience decisions – button placement, copy, default selections carry legal implications.
Unlike PM roles at other tech companies, iteration isn’t just 'ship fast and test.' We have to design with extreme intentionality, document every assumption, validate risk early with Legal and Compliance, and build systems that are safe-by-design. It forces a higher bar of rigor, precision, and cross-functional alignment while also ensuring member trust.