Jack Levy is the Head of Platform at Preqin. Preqin empowers the finance community to make better decisions by providing data and insight that increases transparency and access across the global alternatives market. He runs a team of Product Managers and engineers whose focus is on building common services and components, as well as owning the Integrations business, which allows Preqin customers to consume data via Feeds, APIs, and a suite of Plugins and Connectors.

Prior to joining Preqin, Jack has held a variety of roles in Product and Tech over a period of ten years. His experience was predominantly in start-ups and scale-ups across a range of sectors, including HealthTech, PeopleTech, and Government and Defence.

He openly admits to falling into Product Management largely by accident after a brief (and unsuccessful) foray into Public Relations. Outside of work, his passions are music, cooking, and spending time with his family.

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As we get started, would love to understand more about the day-to-day at Preqin?

Of course. Preqin empowers the global alternatives community with essential data and insight. In practice, that means that we hold data on the flow of capital between Institutional Investors (think Pension Funds, Family Offices, HNIWs) and Asset Managers. Alternatives is a broad term but the Asset Classes we predominantly focus on are Private Equity and Venture Capital, Private Debt, Real Estate, Infrastructure, Natural resources, and Hedge Funds. Our global Data Management Team works hard to collect this data from a wide variety of sources, and then it is our job in Platform to present it back to our customers in a way that allows them to do their jobs more efficiently.

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Are you a fan of any specific PM frameworks? If so, can you elaborate?

Thanks for joining and for a great question. I wouldn’t say I’m a die-hard follower of any specific framework; from my experience, the art of good product management is being flexible in your approach and finding the right framework to solve the problem you’re trying to solve. I’d actually advocate against being overly dogmatic and trying to force a framework where it doesn’t quite fit (I tried to force this once on a legacy elimination project, and it didn’t work out well). That said, when me and the team are working on Products that are new to the market and we’re trying to find Product Market Fit, then using some flavor of Lean or MVP really makes sense. Currently at Preqin, we’re also leaning into “Jobs to be done” quite heavily as one of our core values is customer-centricity, and we find this helps to get closer to our customers and forces us to focus on identifying the areas where we can add the most value.

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Can you elaborate on how the platforms looked when you joined versus how the business and platforms have scaled up currently?

We've been on a really interesting journey from a Platform perspective. When I joined, our main application, Preqin Pro, was very much a monolith, and the experience was very much 'one size fits all.' We've invested a lot of time in breaking this down and building out a more service-based architecture. The main benefits we've seen of this are:

1. Speed of development and time to market.
2. The ability to build more personalized journeys for our customers so that there is a much quicker time to value.
3. Less time fixing bugs, meaning we can focus on engaging with our customers and building products and features that help them to get more value from our data.

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Alluding to the discovery phase "We've invested a lot.....architecture" Is it like segmenting the most important set of customers and then building as per most (50-70%) of their use cases? (or) focusing on the hero module or the service where most customers were willing to pay for? Can you elaborate a little more on this?

Yeah, I can speak to this. The approach we took was to try and break down the application to align with customer value. We re-organized the product and engineering teams to focus on the top-level customer personas, and then it was a case of identifying areas of our data and functionality and working through these, prioritizing the most valuable and frequently used areas as we moved to the new application structure.

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You mentioned that it's almost accidental that you got into the product. Can you elaborate a little bit on how this serendipity occurred for you?

It's actually a funny story. I was at a careers fair and got into a very long conversation with one of the people that worked at a company. About halfway through the conversation I realized I had confused them with another company I meant to talk to! However, we had a great chat, and I realized that some of the work I'd done in a previous role as an analyst would set me up quite well for a role in Product Management. Long story short, I ended up interviewing with them and got my first PM job; all due to me going to the wrong stand!

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I'm curious about your approach to collecting user feedback at Preqin, particularly considering the challenge of obtaining feedback from users in a B2B SaaS research platform. Could you share insights on the most effective channels you find reliable in this context?

You raise a really interesting point; feedback can be harder to get in a B2B context. We approach it in a few ways. We use Heap as our analytics platform, and we use this to track general usage and spot trends in the way users interact with our platform. This often gives us signals that we use to dig deeper (e.g. customers drop off at a specific point in the workflow), which we'd then try to follow up with affected customers to get more qualitative feedback. More broadly we make sure we're constantly talking to our customers, be this doing interviews, meeting them at conferences, or leading webinars and seminars. So in summary, using a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to make sure (as the former can be harder to get at scale in a B2B setting)

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I am interested in understanding the skillsets that one needs to build to transition from a PM to a Product Leader. And how do you go about building these skills?

Crossing the chasm is hard, but there are many ways you can start to boost your experience within your current role. For example, if there are more junior members of your team, offer to mentor them. If you have BAs in your org, speak to your manager about potentially taking on line management responsibility. If these opportunities don’t exist in your org, look outside to communities like the Product Folks and see if you can start mentoring externally to demonstrate your ability to develop people. It’s also worth remembering that as a PM you are already managing every day; those “soft skills” you build from working with Sales, Engineering and other functions all require you to influence and lead without authority; these are the key building blocks to management.

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I want to understand how you were able to switch between so many domains and get diverse experience? And do you think people should keep on changing domains? I have seen that most companies prefer the same domain experience. I don't think that's important because Product management is not dependent on the domain; you can get that knowledge within the 1st month of joining.

I think this is an interesting point and to some extent it will vary by sector, company, and hiring manager. Many PMs are also domain experts and that is fantastic to have. I can only speak for my own experience, and as you rightly point out I've moved around a fair bit. What I've found is that you can get a fresh perspective by exploring different sectors. I also think that the core skills you need as a PM are inherently transferable; as long as you stay curious, spend time to understand your customers and interact well with sales, engineers, marketing, and other stakeholders then you'll be just fine. I am, of course, biased 😊

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You mentioned recently that you are trying to get away from social media - however I was thinking about this and have the following questions: When such products were being designed in the early 2000s, Facebook/Google/Twitter/Reddit etc, how come everyone came about developing the same strategies to focus on 'user engagement' I come from a finance background and have used Preqin for reports a lot - kudos on the content!

Great question. To take the first point, I think engagement is really just a proxy for "are people using my product" so it's not totally surprising that this became the go-to metric for many companies. I would say it's a broad term; engagement is context-specific and what you take it to mean will vary from company to company, sector to sector etc. On your second point, thank you first for the kind words about our data and content 😊

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What were a few things in general that helped you stay ahead of the curve over the years, given you didn't study in tech?

In terms of staying ahead of the curve, I guess while I'm not technical by training, I've worked at smaller companies where out of necessity I had to teach myself some basic coding. I've grown to love that side and found myself gravitating towards the more technical aspects of the role, which I guess is how I've ended up in Platform tech. In terms of practically how I've done this, I would say a combination of self-study, learning on the job, and bugging my engineers with badly-written code and asking for help.

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By bugging the engineers, were you having your written code reviewed by the developers? If so, Just curious what languages you were coding in?

Yes, albeit informally! I've worked with a number of languages, including PHP and Java, but most recently I've been learning some rudimentary Python.

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For someone interested in understanding the strategy for managing the product roadmap, how do you strike a balance between incorporating user feedback and determining the features your team deems crucial for staying ahead of the competition? I ask this because often user feedback tends to focus on feature comparisons with competing research platforms rather than suggesting entirely new features. Can you provide an illustrative example that showcases how you successfully navigate this balance in your roadmap planning?

Great question. The truth is there is no magic bullet or single methodology that guarantees success here, and it is probably the hardest part of the job. What we try to do is avoid being overly reactive, and instead look at the common themes we're seeing from the feedback we get, and try (where possible) to identify the underlying problem and see if it is something a) we can address, and b) if it is desirable/in line with our broader strategy. It's not always easy, and I think the hardest skill I've had to learn over my career is to get comfortable with saying no! I think the way we've really tackled this with some success over the last year at Preqin is our focus on jobs to be done; we've found that this is very helpful in avoiding the risk of "feature factory" behavior.

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You mentioned Heap as one of the tools you use. Are there any other tools you'd recommend or are particularly fond of suggesting for tracking user behavior?

There are a wealth of tools out there. My exposure has been primarily to Heap and Amplitude for user behavior, but many other vendors are doing great things in this space. I've also personally found Lucky Orange great for their Heat-mapping capabilities. We also use Delighted for CSAT, which is another useful indicator for customer sentiment.

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There's always a debate whether to be engaged or not on social media. Given that you mentioned recently that you are trying to get away from social media, any tips or anecdotes you'd like to give to fellow PMs who'd like to grow, be vocal but those aren't usually active on social media?

Great question. My advice would be to think like a PM on this one and ask yourself "what is the outcome I want to achieve from using this social media platform." LinkedIn can be a great way to build your network and find roles, but it's also very easy to "doom scroll" through the increasing amount of clickbait on the feed! So, if your goal is to find a new job in (for example) Fintech, then follow some of the companies you're interested in working for, see if you can connect with some folks there and maybe join some groups that exist in the domain. Just make sure your relationship with these tools remains healthy and that they are helping you to achieve your goals. Having said all of the above, I do love a good cat video 😄 Pre-empting the next question, here is my all-time favorite (shared with me originally by my old Boss!): Cat Video

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Before we go, any advice or insights that are big NO while reading resumes for PM/interviewing candidates or good practices that you appreciated while shortlisting them?

My three top tips here would be:

1. Keep it as concise and precise as you can (no one wants to read a 10-page CV).
2. Lead with your personal achievements and focus on outcomes you achieved (e.g. I built feature x that had engagement of y% and generated $z in revenue).
3. Make use of styling and formatting to draw attention to the areas you want the hiring manager to pick up on. Make it as easy for them to see your potential as possible :)

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