One Blue Oak is a boutique consultancy specializing in helping fintechs, banks, and community financial institutions navigate digital transformation. We blend strategic expertise and technological insight to design customer-centric solutions, enabling organizations to adapt, innovate, and thrive in a competitive market.

Sidebar is a private, highly vetted leadership program that accelerates your career. We have the people, the process, and the technology to drive impact and growth.

As the leader of a Product, Digital Innovation & Transformation organization within Valley Bank, I led a high-performing team of 25+ professionals across Product, Design, and Research, to drive business growth through cutting-edge technology innovation and delivering world-class user experience. Our mission was focused on launching new digital capabilities and enhancing existing products to deliver superior customer experiences.• Team Leadership & Structure: Built and scaled a cross-functional team, recruiting key leaders and implementing best-in-class processes for product planning, execution, and performance measurement.• Digital Transformation: Spearheaded a transformative overhaul of the deposit account opening process, re-imaginging people, process and technology to reducing the onboarding time from 45 to just 7 minutes across both online and in-branch channels. This initiative enhanced customer satisfaction, minimized risk, and tripled account opening volumes.• Business Growth: Relaunched the direct digital bank, driving a 750% growth in deposits within the first year, all while optimizing staff and advertising spend to deliver a 30% lower cost than traditional wholesale funding.• Operational Efficiency: Reduced annual call center volumes by 12% through key improvements to self-service customer journeys and experiences.• Risk Mitigation & Customer Experience: Established customer-centric, risk-based transaction limits for ACH, Zelle, and mobile deposits, resulting in reduced operational risks, increased deposits, and improved customer satisfaction.• Core Systems Conversion: Led multiple internal digital platform migrations from FIS MISER to FIS IBS, minimizing disruption through innovative no-code digital communication strategies.• Vendor Management & Strategic Alignment: Conducted a comprehensive evaluation of digital platform partners, re-negotiated key contracts, and aligned vendor relationships with long-term business objectives.

Head of Product and first product manager for early stage Fintech, Varo is a mobile-only digital bank, leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to deliver a next generation banking experience with innovative features to attract, engage and retain customers.Led vision and strategy to product/market fit, acquiring first 1M customers, culminating in the first digital-only fintech national banking charter from the OCC.● Responsible for end-to-end product strategy, execution, and launch, including leading the OKRprocess for defining initiatives, staffing needs and measuring results.● Grew product team from one to twelve in a mix of individual contributors and leaders, aligned withstrategic objectives and achievements.● Lead product team on best practices for planning, definition, execution and performancemeasurement of assigned products in addition to running two scrum team squads for deposits andpayments features.● Definition and execution of digital product roadmap, overseeing delivery to market for critical digitalbanking and payment capabilities, including deposit account, Apple Pay, P2P , remote deposit capture,bill payment, location services and bank-to-bank transfers.● Analyzed product performance to identify customer experience and business performanceimprovements through product analytics and through customer surveys, user studies,workshops/focus groups, and interviews.● Conducted competitive research and analysis on industry peers and competitors, identifying keytrends and areas for potential market/product advantage.● Led strategic partner selection and negotiations, including sponsor bank, core processor, cardnetwork and other key partners.

Leveraging my deep expertise in building and leading teams in highly regulated industries, I formed and led a new innovation and transformation product management team as a startup within an existing non-digital company. Our team objective was to improve lives and cost of care through the development and delivery of regulatory-grade, clinically validated mobile, VR and wearable sensorproducts in Oncology, Ophthalmology and Neurology.● Responsible for end-to-end product strategy, execution, and launch, including leading theoperational process for defining initiatives, staffing needs and measuring results.● Recruited and led a new digital product team, scaling from one to six in nine months, establishedbest practices for planning, definition, execution and performance measurement of our product portfolio.● Established operational tools and processes to deliver human-centered design-based innovative digital products in a highly regulated industry.● Launched multiple clinically-validated products, including MyVision Track, the first-ever patientapp to detect eyesight changes in patients with macular degeneration in the UK. Delivered first betatests of custom VR-based digital therapeutic app for patients with autism with the intention of deployinginto trial in 2022 and re-launched Floodlight, a patient app designed to detect disease change inpatients with multiple sclerosis.

Responsible for sales enablement and product marketing for retail and small business debit, prepaid and credit issuing processing products

Responsible for mobile banking, alerting, mobile payments, eCommerce, NFC/contactless and mobile POS for Americas