Smit Doshi

Work

A wider canvas.

I work on credit card Buy Now Pay Later lending — helping people break big purchases into fixed monthly payments instead of carrying a revolving balance. Mostly Chase Pay Over Time After Purchase and Pay Over Time at Checkout. My job these days is mostly about setting direction and keeping the things we build honest to the people using them. Most of what matters in product is invisible — the thing you didn't ship, the word you took out, the sentence you rewrote because a real person was going to read it at the worst possible moment and deserved better.

Learning the craft.

Same problem space, smaller canvas. This is where I learned the craft of lending as a product — the math of it, and the very human question of whether a financial product actually makes someone's life less stressful. It's the intersection I keep coming back to.

Finding product.

Before Chase, I was a product co-op and then a product analyst at Recorded Future — my first real taste of the craft. I learned to ask better questions before writing a spec, and I learned that product was the discipline that tied everything I already loved together: the engineer's instinct to build, the analyst's instinct to understand, and a third one I didn't have a name for — the one that cares, a little too much, whether the thing you made is actually making someone's day better.

A master’s in data.

Before product, there was data. I moved to the US for a master's in data analytics at Northeastern. Partly because data was where the interesting problems were hiding, partly because I wanted to understand the systems that had felt so opaque to me as a newcomer. I left with an answer and a new question: data could show you a problem with unbelievable precision, but it couldn't, on its own, build the thing that fixed it.

The first version of the question.

Before data, there was a mechanical engineering degree. I picked it because I liked building things. Four years in, I realized the part I loved wasn't the machines — it was the pattern underneath. Find a problem people actually have, and build the thing that makes it smaller. The problems I wanted to solve just weren't made of metal. That was the beginning of everything that came after.

Outside of work, I read more non-fiction than is probably healthy, I'm teaching myself to code, and I'll try any cuisine at least once — usually in a city I've never been to before. I'm also the kind of person who shows up to a casual game and immediately starts thinking about how to win.

If any of that sounds like your kind of person — get in touch →