As we innovate to help millions of Americans improve their financial health, we’re privileged to have Harrison Neuert as our Director of Product Management at Nickels. With a background rooted in behavioral science, Harrison brings a product and innovation perspective to Nickels. He’s driven by a passion for data science, qualitative research, experimentation, and design thinking, but above all else, he thrives on fostering collaboration within our talented teams to make our products better. Join me as I sit down with Harrison for this month’s employee spotlight to learn more about his background, and what insights he’s gathered from his time at Nickels.
What inspired you to join or brought you to work at Nickels?
My background is in Economics and Behavioral Science. I spent 5+ years working at ideas42, a behavioral science design lab that served as an incubator for Nickels. While there, I worked on a lot of Financial Health products.
So much of the work I did at ideas42 was around how to help people navigate complex financial institutions to do more of what they want with their money. I saw time and again how expensive debt, especially credit card debt, really hindered peoples’ financial goals. Being able to work with Nickels on a product that connects people with the kind of financial products that can actually support their goals was really exciting to me.
What is the most exciting project or activity you’re working on now–and why?
My role is really varied: some days I spend working with designers to turn our vision for the product into something concrete. Other days I’m more focused on collaborating with our Engineering team to make sure that they have the direction they need to build the most impactful features. And there’s lots of other stuff too!
But the most exciting part of this job for me is getting to work directly with our customers to test things out. We have multiple innovation projects in the works right now where customers are testing new approaches to running our analysis and campaigns, and we get to find out what works together. Being able to test things in a rigorous way and then apply that at scale in the product is what gets me really excited.
What have been some of the most important lessons you’ve learned throughout your career?
Understanding the impacts of scarcity on decision making has been really important. People with low incomes are extremely savvy decision makers, but the costs of navigating decisions about finances with almost no room for error are really high. Using this understanding as a starting point for design work around financial services is truly transformative.
If you were not working at Nickels, where would you be? (could be a place, another type of company, industry, hobby, etc.)
I love to cook and eat, and feel most at home in a kitchen. I never quite figured out how to make that into a career that I actually wanted to have in the long term, though!
What would your perfect weekend look like?
Going to my local farmers market on Saturday, seeing a movie with friends, going to the beach, and cooking a big meal on Sunday evening.
Do you have any interesting hobbies or activities or accolades? Is there anything from that experience you bring to your role at Nickels?
In the past year I’ve gotten back into film photography, which is something I haven’t done since high school. I always have a roll of film on the go, and I’ve come to love the process of developing and scanning my own negatives.
Stay tuned for more employee spotlights as we continue to introduce you to the amazing individuals driving innovation and making a difference at Nickels daily.
