Jag Duggal on Customer Discovery, Product Strategy and Scaling Nubank

Harry Stebbings speaks with Jag Duggal, Nubank's chief product officer, about product discovery, hiring and scaling a financial-services company. This interview was published in March 2023. Duggal's accounts of Nubank's customers and products reflect his role and commercial interests.

Duggal says founder David Vélez persuaded him to leave Meta and join Nubank in São Paulo. After years at Google, Quantcast and Facebook working in advertising and media technology, he wanted to apply his skills to people lower on the income distribution in a region he felt connected to through his Caribbean upbringing.

He saw fintech as an early-stage transformation compared with the more consolidated media-advertising market. His belief that financial services would be the next major area disrupted by technology was a strategic view, not a guarantee about the industry.

Asked whether product management is art or science, Duggal says teams can make much of it more systematic through measurement and experimentation. His illustrative split is 90% science and 10% art; he considers the latter especially important because it includes empathy and intuition about an unmet customer need.

He says product teams should listen to and observe customers rather than simply take dictation on requested features. Their job is to interpret the need, rank it and then apply business constraints. He credits Vélez with identifying a sharp unmet need among Brazilian consumers.

Good discovery questions explore a customer's life around a problem, not just whether a proposed solution sounds attractive. People may not recognize their own workarounds because they have become accustomed to them. Observation and open questions can reveal a need the customer would not phrase directly.

Stebbings warns that questions can lead customers to a desired answer. Duggal recommends forming sharp hypotheses while remaining willing to reject them: act more like a judge than an advocate. It is difficult because time spent on an idea naturally creates attachment.

His practical countermeasure is to fall in love with the problem rather than a specific solution. Nubank's broader aim was to improve the experience of underserved Latin American consumers; a credit card was one possible way to address it. In his view, keeping the problem in focus allows different solutions to emerge.

At Facebook, Duggal learned to resolve disagreements quickly. When leaders hold opposing views, he says, they should reach agreement or escalate promptly rather than repeat the same debate for weeks. He connects that practice to the company's execution speed, while acknowledging it also has organizational pitfalls.

To preserve agility as Nubank grows, he says the company keeps teams small, grants autonomy and escalates decisions when teams are stuck. Most decisions can be revised, so a timely imperfect decision can generate learning. He credits Vélez with resisting unnecessary corporate process.

Duggal defaults to trusting people after a rigorous hiring decision and invokes Facebook's principle of assuming good intent. Employees need room to act and make correctable mistakes; repeated problems may require a harder conversation. During recruitment, by contrast, he starts with skepticism until a candidate meets the bar.

He says he has become less confident that hiring is a precise science. Credentials, schools and prior employers do not guarantee someone will fit a particular team or problem. He compares a team of star football players with a coherent team: individual talent alone does not guarantee the whole will work.

Duggal recalls Google's credential-heavy hiring, including requests for old test scores and transcripts, and says a computer-science requirement for product managers created blind spots. He cites Kevin Systrom's later success with Instagram as an example. These are his recollections and interpretation, not a full assessment of Google's hiring rules.

He looks for drive: the willingness to act in difficult, ambiguous situations and collaborate to get something done. He asks candidates about hard experiences and moments when they did not know the answer. His phrase for the quality is the ability to tolerate one's own incompetence while learning.

The second quality is clarity. He asks candidates to explain a past company or product to someone unfamiliar with it, looking for an understandable account rather than a particular pedigree. He credits Systrom with the idea that a team may not always be right but should at least be clear.

Duggal calls the slogan “strategy is easy, execution is everything” incomplete. Execution is essential, he says, but without a clear hypothesis about what it is trying to achieve, activity can become frenzy. Clarity lets a team interpret feedback and choose the direction of its next iteration.

He gives a Nubank example: an average satisfaction score for a new product looked mediocre, but the intended customer segment loved it while many other recipients did not. The appropriate response was to reach the right customers rather than necessarily rebuild or kill the product. This is an internal example, not independently published experimental evidence.

The speakers discuss metrics that can be gamed. Duggal distinguishes the period before product-market fit from scaling afterward: paid acquisition can make an unloved product look large for a while, but it cannot substitute for genuine customer value. He calls that distinction customer love.

He uses surveys, including the Sean Ellis question, and net promoter scores as signals before pushing scale. A large existing customer base can make even a weak launch look impressive for a time—the “dead cat bounce” he worries about. He wants new products to add value rather than rely only on the existing brand.

Churn is one important outcome because a leaky bucket cannot be filled indefinitely with new users. He also asks product and engineering leaders to call customers directly and listen for enthusiasm rather than politeness. He treats surveys and conversations as complementary evidence.

Stebbings notes that customers may remain with a bank because switching is difficult, not because they love it. Duggal agrees retention alone is insufficient and distinguishes an account, an active customer and a primary banking relationship. This qualification matters when interpreting churn.

Nubank tracks whether customers bring the bulk of incoming money to the bank, adjusted for local payroll practices, and also looks at engagement intensity. Duggal says the primary-relationship measure rose from about 10% to well above 40% of all customers over three years while the customer base grew. These are company-reported metrics under Nubank's definition, not independently verified comparisons.

He says app usage may not always equal affection for a bank, but Nubank's internal analysis treats engagement as a leading indicator alongside customer-love measures. The interview does not provide the underlying analysis, so the relationship is a company claim rather than a universal rule.

Product priorities follow the company's mission and a clear target. Duggal describes two simultaneous ambitions: expanding from Brazil into Mexico and Colombia, and evolving from a credit-card product into broader financial services including investments, insurance and lending.

He says investors questioned whether the model could work beyond Brazil, partly because credit-card economics and working-capital cycles differ across countries. Nubank believed consumers in neighboring markets were also underserved but had to demonstrate that its model could travel. His assessment reflects the company's perspective.

For allocating resources, he cites a rough 70-20-10 heuristic while warning that it is imperfect. Nubank continues investing in core products and gives small teams room to develop substantially different offerings. Further resources follow evidence of customer love, in his description.

Duggal says he participates in several product reviews each week, sometimes focusing on a small part of a user flow. He finds it difficult to balance broad inclusion with a safe space where teams can reveal problems and suggest imperfect ideas. He would lean toward psychological safety and clear decision-making authority.

He identifies a strong decision during the pandemic: turning a savings-focused account into a more transactional everyday account. He cites debit cards and Brazil's real-time Pix payment system as important to engagement, and describes intensive work to simplify the experience. These are Nubank's internal assessments.

A second example is a secured card that lets customers provide a deposit and build a payment record when the bank cannot yet extend unsecured credit on its terms. Duggal says it helped bring people onto a credit pathway. His success claims are company assessments, not evidence of outcomes for every customer.

He says the company had struggled to define a fundamentally distinctive offering for higher-income customers in Brazil. The lesson, in his view, is to identify a specific customer and deliver something meaningfully different rather than merely incremental. This remains a problem the team was working on in 2023.

In quick-fire questions, Duggal says teams should always listen to users without automatically following every proposed feature. He believes incumbent Brazilian banks were responding and that Nubank had raised the competitive bar. This is his interested assessment of competitors.

He says credit is difficult because it involves more than technology, and credits Nubank's early decision to tackle it rather than defer it. On hiring, he warns founders against assuming a person successful at a large company will automatically thrive in an ambiguous startup.

His advice to a new product leader is to be clear about the priority that must be achieved. He admires Vélez's willingness to change his mind when presented with a stronger argument, even after holding a strong opinion. Duggal says the goal is collective correctness rather than winning a debate.

He praises Spotify's evolution from music to mobile, subscriptions and podcasts, combining customer focus with technical depth. This is his product judgment and personal listening experience. Stebbings thanks him and closes the conversation.