Onward… Looking to Being Best of Service to your Organization
By: Joe Raymond
Tags: Careers, Hiring Manager, Recruiters, Moving On, Career Change

Moving on from Credit Sesame

April 2020 and everything after, what is there to say? I wish I had the eloquence to summarize this interesting passage of our times.

After a +2-year run at Credit Sesame, I have moved on. As a Credit Sesame product team, we delivered consumer credit information, tools, and utilities to help bring transparency and better decision-support to our customers’ credit situation.

Leading a product team that is constantly seeking hyper-growth while simultaneously looking for new lines of business to help our customers improve can be stressful and invigorating. Honestly, it’s been nice to take a break from the stress, but I miss the invigoration of the hard-working product team that I recruited. I miss the outstanding people that deliver value and solutions to a customer in need.

Looking to help

What’s next? Well… I’ve been serving my family well and trying to be a good human during these strange and daunting times of the pandemic. As we head into 2021, I’ve started looking to where I can best be of service in my next endeavor. As this is still a very strange and daunting time in our course through human history, I realize that there are so many ways that I can be best of service.

Professional Outlook

I’d love to be of service to your product organization — product strategy, product planning, scaling product teams. Beyond leading product teams, these daunting times require that I put other product skills into service. I usually start with fingers-in-dirt to understand the customer, the data, the business. If you need some customer research or some digs through vexing data to find some customer signals, I’m happy to be of service. If you need some modeling or metric work on product revenue forecasts, product scenario planning, I’m happy to be of service. Need polish and punch on your product slide deck? I’m happy to be of service.

Being best of service as I look ahead

In the Wayback machine of my career, I’ve seen and experienced various times of turbulence. I was at E*TRADE and watched bubble burst in April 2000 where dot-com darlings’ stock prices cratered and hopes tumbled. I was in an airport on September 11, 2001. I saw hundreds of planes suddenly changing course and the sudden change in the trajectory of life and economy. In 2008, while I was delivering eCommerce and marketplace growth for CafePress, the mortgage crisis pressed the credit markets and banking system to the brink of collapse. During the prior crises, the Wayback machine of my career demonstrates that I showed resilience and strength via a “do great work; solve customer problems; do whatever it takes” skill-set and style. I’m grateful for the opportunity and trust placed in me during those times. I’m thankful for the experience and perspective that those times imparted.

So as I tap into the job market with the ascent of “third wave” COVID infections, re-shuttered businesses, coming change in national leadership, and growing distribution of vaccines, I think about how I can as can be best of service by offering my myriad skills and business wisdom.

Product management is where I’ve created value and engendered a team-ethic toward solving consumer problems, but I can give a bunch more. Going way back, my range of experience is broad and diverse — everything from P&L modeling to Little League umpire. Social Distancing subtracts Little League ump from my list, but the rest is very much in play.

Reach out to me for help

So whether you are a not-for-profit in need of some help, an SMB looking for some hands-on business support, a start-up looking to scale your product, or a bigger fintech| payments | eComm business with gaps to fill, let me know how I can be best of service to your organization.

Let me know how I can be best of service.