206 - Regions Bank’s Former CDAO On Buy vs. Build and What It Takes to Get Your Analytics or AI Product Into a Bank

Two weeks after leaving his role as Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Regions Bank, Manav Misra came back on the show (he was first here on episode 97) to talk about the other side of the table: what it's like to be on the receiving end of data and AI software vendor pitches. Manav has been a long-time proponent of the data product management model of building, and so I imagined he had a pretty methodical way of doing buy-vs-build evaluations when vendors wanted to get their "wares" into the bank ;-)

Manav has never been shy about building internally, and one of his engineers built a competing solution on his own time during a side-by-side with a vendor. The result? Tune in to find out!

We also got into:

• What a startup has to show a buyer who is confident in their engineering capabilities internally
• Whether "the domain knowledge is baked into the product" actually mattered to Manav as a buyer
• What's still defensible for your product when Anthropic ships a skill that covers your industry (hint: Manav's answer wasn't domain expertise)
• Where POCs die inside a highly regulated buyer like a bank, and the one kind of internal ally he says a young vendor can't get through withou
• His aircraft carrier analogy for convincing internal bank leaders a startup is a safer bet than IBM, Salesforce or ServiceNow
• What happens when leadership loves a product and the end users won't touch it
• Manav's new advisory work and what he's been telling Purgo AI, a startup he now advises

If you sell a data or AI product to enterprise buyers, especially regulated ones like banks, this is a rare candid look at how one of them decides.

Links

Purgo.ai:

Manav on LinkedIn

Full transcript and show notes: designingforanalytics.com/resources/episodes/206