The Experience Edge: What Goldman Sachs gets right about experience debt

Ashana Singhania, VP of Product Management at Goldman Sachs and former product leader at American Express, joins Jochem van der Veer to share how she thinks about customer experience from a product perspective—navigating the competing pressures of speed, compliance, regulatory constraints, and the slow-burning problem that derails even the most technically sound products: experience debt.

Here's why you don't want to miss this episode

Experience is everyone's KPI, but nobody's mandate

Ashana opens with a framing that will resonate with anyone leading CX in a large organization: customer experience is a shared responsibility across product, engineering, risk, compliance, operations, and servicing—but when something breaks, ownership rarely sits clearly with one team. Her approach is to trace friction back to its source using user feedback, complaints, escalations, and repeat contacts. The customer, she reminds us, doesn't experience your org chart. They experience the failure points as a whole.

Why compliance and risk are core design partners, not gatekeepers

In financial services, the instinct is often to treat compliance as a downstream review step. Ashana argues the opposite: risk and compliance have to be in the room from the very beginning. Not as blockers, but as co-designers who help define what's actually buildable and ensure that what ships is sound. This isn't just about regulatory caution—it's about building products that customers can trust, which she treats as the fundamental basis of any financial offering.

The dashboards lag trust signals

One of the most actionable insights in the episode: green dashboards can mask a broken experience. Ashana describes launches where completion rates looked healthy but customers were uploading documents repeatedly because the upload flow was unclear. Approval rates were high, but servicing teams were fielding constant questions about terms customers didn't understand. The product functioned—but it didn't reassure. Her conclusion is a principle worth writing down: by the time you see measurable drop-offs, confidence has usually already started to erode underneath it.

When a product problem becomes an experience problem

Ashana draws a sharp line between the two. A product issue is contained. An experience issue is the moment servicing teams have to compensate for a product decision—when repeat contacts, manual workarounds, and explanation overhead start spreading across the organization. That's when the problem has moved beyond product mechanics into something that requires cross-functional coordination to resolve. She's direct about the implication: the burden of confusion belongs to the organization, not the customer.

Experience debt is harder to unwind than technical debt

Technical debt is complex but visible—you can scope it, prioritize it, and get it done. Experience debt is distributed. It lives across product design, operational guardrails, customer messaging, and recovery mechanisms. It has no single owner. Worse, customers often adapt to it, tolerating friction because they have no alternative, which means the urgency never rises until the volume of complaints reaches a threshold or a severe escalation forces action. As Ashana puts it: technical debt slows systems down, but experience debt slowly changes how customers feel about your product—which is far more severe and far harder to reverse.

How to quantify what feels unquantifiable

For product leaders trying to get cross-functional investment behind experience improvements, Ashana offers a practical framework. Start with volume: how many customers are experiencing this friction? Then connect it to time-to-revenue: if onboarding takes ten days instead of two, you've delayed revenue by eight days per customer. Then calculate the cost-to-serve impact: if the same issue is driving 50 calls a month to your service center, that's a quantifiable cost save. Build the business case from those three parameters, then model the engineering investment required and the trade-off against competing priorities.

From instinct to action: making experience debt visible

Ashana's approach to surfacing experience debt is grounded and repeatable. She tests her own products continuously—not just at release, but routinely—asking whether she can complete the journey herself, whether the tooltips explain what's needed, whether she's asking for more information than the product actually requires. She joins client calls and sits with operations teams to hear escalations firsthand. She maintains a living backlog of experience debt items and carves out dedicated engineering capacity in every release cycle specifically for platform health. And critically, she closes the loop—communicating improvements back to operations and servicing teams so they can set the right expectations with customers.

From Insight to Operating Model

What makes Ashana's perspective valuable for CX and product leaders isn't just the frameworks—it's the underlying discipline. She treats experience debt as a first-class operational concern, not a nice-to-have backlog item. She builds the organizational bridges before she needs them. She quantifies qualitative problems with enough rigor to get executive buy-in. And she does all of this while managing a product portfolio inside one of the most compliance-intensive environments in the world.

For leaders who feel like experience quality is slipping through the cracks between teams, or who struggle to translate "the journey feels broken" into something a CFO will fund, this episode is the blueprint.

Want to hear the entire conversation? Watch or listen to the podcast with Ashana and Jochem on The Experience Edge:

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