Meet the team: Katrina Scott, Product Manager at Ravelin

Katrina Scott is a Product Manager in our Product team. Before joining Ravelin to help combat fraud, she spent several years working for a startup focused on ensuring the safety and security of people and assets working in dangerous places. She also worked for a peer-to-peer lender.

This blog post is part of our new meet the team series, and here we talk with Katrina about why she likes working at Ravelin, how we build trust with our clients and what a typical day working in the product team looks like.

Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your role at Ravelin?

I joined Ravelin as a Product Manager earlier this year. My role is basically to work across departments and support the delivery of a really high quality product that solves our clients fraud problem in a meaningful way.

As a product team, we work closely with our clients and internally with engineering, detection, sales and marketing to translate requirements into a product that fits in with our wider vision.

What was your business background prior to joining Ravelin?

I accidentally stumbled into the world of start-ups after I completed my masters. I got a job as a data analyst for a start-up that provided data and analysis tools to companies, NGOs and government agencies operating in places like Iraq. It was all about mitigating risk to their employees and assets.

Start-ups being start-ups, I was soon doing more product management than data analysis and when the company merged with a more established provider, I took on a product role.

I took some time out to travel around Cuba and Colombia for a few months and then worked for a peer-to-peer lender before starting at Ravelin.

What does a regular day working in the product team at Ravelin look like?

Honestly, I’m not sure there is ever a ‘regular day’ for a Product Manager!

One of the things I love about the job is that it’s so varied. On any given day you could be pulling together requirements for a new feature, analysing data to see how clients are using the product, doing user research, throwing together mockups or researching trends in fraud.

Do all of Ravelin’s clients use the product the same way?

No, definitely not! Every Ravelin client will have a unique set-up - some have teams of fraud analysts, some don’t. Their goals in relation to fraud rates will be different depending on their risk appetite - this is often informed by their goals around conversion (which will also be different!).

What rules they want to implement based on their unique business strategy will vary. How they want to handle suspected fraud may also be different, some may want to automatically decline or push transactions to 3DS while other clients may want to review that customer in more detail first. It really depends on the needs of the client!

How do you ensure that we offer to our clients reflect Ravelin’s core values and builds trust?

Good question! I think having a solid understanding about what our clients care about is key - talking to clients and doing user research is a really important part of this. Our company history is also underpinned by the fact that our product emerged because we faced fraud challenges as merchants. We’ve been there and had to figure out how to protect our margins while preventing fraud.

Making sure that clients have a great experience from the first time they get in touch with us, to when they integrate and when they then use our product on a daily basis is also really important.

At the end of the day though, having a product that does what it sets out to do (in our case reduce fraud) is the most important part of building and maintaining trust. Having oversight of this via the platform e.g. the ability to see in full every customer and the outcome supports this.

What are the key characteristics to look out for in fraud protection when building a product?

You have to build a product that can adapt quickly as fraud tactics and patterns shift. As soon as you block one available route to commit fraud, fraudsters will find another. If you can’t keep up then it’s hard to sustainably reduce fraud rates in the long term. That’s why Machine Learning is so powerful; it adapts as fraud adapts.

What do you enjoy most about working at Ravelin?

So many things! The culture - the team is big on collaboration and I feel like everyone takes pride in what they do individually and as a team. There’s also loads going on from yoga in the office to lunches and code alongs.

For me, the content of the work is really interesting and ties in with my academic background in criminology and security studies. I also really like that we are solving a problem for our clients and making sure that people don’t become victims of fraud. We’re basically crime fighters by day, it doesn’t get much cooler than that.