The Experience Edge Ep. 66 - What Goldman Sachs Gets Right About experience debt - Ashana Singhania
Ashana Singhania, VP Product Management at Goldman Sachs and former product leader at American Express, operates at the intersection of product, trust, and regulation. Having led zero-to-one launches and large-scale platform consolidations across payments, lending, and digital banking, she brings a clear-eyed view of building customer experience inside highly regulated financial institutions.
In this episode, Ashana introduces the concept of “experience debt” - the invisible friction that accumulates when speed, compliance, or legacy systems outweigh intuition and clarity. She explains why dashboards often lag trust signals, how product leaders can quantify qualitative friction, and why empathy, alignment, and narrative-building are essential to protect customer trust at scale.
Guest Bio
Ashana Singhania is a product and innovation leader in fintech and banking, currently serving as VP Product Management at Goldman Sachs. Prior to this, she spent nearly a decade at American Express building and scaling products across payments, lending, risk, and digital banking.
She specializes in zero-to-one product launches, platform transformations, and navigating trade-offs between speed, regulatory compliance, and customer experience in complex enterprise environments.
Takeaways
- Customer experience is “everybody’s KPI, but nobody’s operating mandate” - and that’s where friction begins.
- Experience debt is more dangerous than technical debt because it erodes trust silently and spreads across teams.
- Dashboards lag trust signals - qualitative feedback, repeat contacts, and hesitation often reveal issues before metrics do.
- Quantifying friction requires translating customer pain into revenue delay, cost-to-serve increases, and operational inefficiencies.
- In regulated environments, trust and consent must take priority over speed - especially as AI and agentic commerce evolve.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Ashana Singhania
02:18 Is experience part of product or vice versa?
05:04 Aligning silos around a North Star
08:10 Roadmaps, customer feedback, and evolving priorities
11:49 AI, agentic commerce, and trust in finance
16:01 When dashboards are green but trust is red
18:55 What is experience debt?
21:17 When experience debt becomes an organizational problem
24:50 Preventing friction through testing and metrics
31:17 Building cross-functional bridges in large institutions
35:44 Platform consolidation and hidden complexity
39:49 Technical debt vs experience debt
43:07 Making experience debt visible and actionable
47:54 Quantifying qualitative friction
52:44 Advice for product leaders in feature factories