Ep. 66 - What Goldman Sachs Gets Right About experience debt - Ashana Singhania

Ashana Singhania, VP Product Management at Goldman Sachs and former product leader at American Express, operates at the intersection of product, trust, and regulation. Having led zero-to-one launches and large-scale platform consolidations across payments, lending, and digital banking, she brings a clear-eyed view of building customer experience inside highly regulated financial institutions.In this episode, Ashana introduces the concept of “experience debt” - the invisible friction that accumulates when speed, compliance, or legacy systems outweigh intuition and clarity. She explains why dashboards often lag trust signals, how product leaders can quantify qualitative friction, and why empathy, alignment, and narrative-building are essential to protect customer trust at scale.Guest BioAshana Singhania is a product and innovation leader in fintech and banking, currently serving as VP Product Management at Goldman Sachs. Prior to this, she spent nearly a decade at American Express building and scaling products across payments, lending, risk, and digital banking.She specializes in zero-to-one product launches, platform transformations, and navigating trade-offs between speed, regulatory compliance, and customer experience in complex enterprise environments.TakeawaysCustomer experience is “everybody’s KPI, but nobody’s operating mandate” - and that’s where friction begins.Experience debt is more dangerous than technical debt because it erodes trust silently and spreads across teams.Dashboards lag trust signals - qualitative feedback, repeat contacts, and hesitation often reveal issues before metrics do.Quantifying friction requires translating customer pain into revenue delay, cost-to-serve increases, and operational inefficiencies.In regulated environments, trust and consent must take priority over speed - especially as AI and agentic commerce evolve.Chapters00:00 Introduction to Ashana Singhania02:18 Is experience part of product or vice versa?05:04 Aligning silos around a North Star08:10 Roadmaps, customer feedback, and evolving priorities11:49 AI, agentic commerce, and trust in finance16:01 When dashboards are green but trust is red18:55 What is experience debt?21:17 When experience debt becomes an organizational problem24:50 Preventing friction through testing and metrics31:17 Building cross-functional bridges in large institutions35:44 Platform consolidation and hidden complexity39:49 Technical debt vs experience debt43:07 Making experience debt visible and actionable47:54 Quantifying qualitative friction52:44 Advice for product leaders in feature factoriesLinkedInAshana SinghaniaJochem van der Veer