Acting as product counsel: legal's role in successful product launches

Effie Dower: Hi, everyone. Yes, my name is Efftichia, for those of you wanting to see how to pronounce the full name. But Effie is great. I'm just here to host this session today.

I'm very lucky today to be joined by Will from Revolut and Jonathan from Figma. We're going to be running through a few topics today during the session that have been compiled basically with lots of lovely questions from the Juro community. So we've roughly gathered them into three sections, which are resources and processes, collaboration and communication, and challenges and risks.

And then we should have some time for Q&A at the end. It'll be about 40 to 45 minutes for this session. And as Theresa says, if you do have any questions, just pop them in the chat. And now I'll hand over to Will for him to give an introduction.

William Findlay: Hi, thanks. As Effie said, my name is Will. I lead the regulatory team within the legal department at Revolut. So I've been at Revolut for four years. For those of you who haven't heard about Revolut before, we are a UK-founded fintech company. We provide a base payment account to a range of customers in the UK, Europe, and further afield as well. We provide a lot of additional services such as crypto, insurance, trading, and various other things. And we have around 30 million customers globally. So product launches are a very big part of what my team does. We are a fast-paced fintech company who happens to operate in a highly regulated environment. So a large proportion of what my team is here to deliver is successful and compliant product launches.

Effie: Thanks, Will. And now handing over to Jonathan from Figma.

Jonathan Keen: Hi, thanks. So my name is Jonathan Keane, and I head up the international legal team here at Figma, which is basically most areas outside of the US. I've been at Figma now for two and a half years and seen a huge amount of change in that time. Figma, for those who don't know, is an online UX UI platform. So a platform for creating websites, applications, basically any kind of digital asset. And whilst we have a dedicated product team that's based in San Francisco, I've been involved in the go-to-market strategy behind new products here at Figma during my time with the business. So excited to share some of my experiences with the rest of you.

Product launches: legal counsels' role

Effie: Amazing. Thank you both. So yeah, as the title of the roundtable suggests, we are talking about how the legal team can help in successful product launches. I think the first section we'll go to are about resources and processes. Will and Jonathan, let me know who'd like to take this one. The first question will be, what is the legal team's process when the business is launching a new product or updating an existing one? Maybe I'll go to Will first.

Will: Sure. So from my point of view, I think that the legal team should not have its own process. I think the key to a successful product launch is being embedded in whatever your own company's product development process is. You don't want to be an exception. You don't want to be different. You don't want to be something that someone has to do in addition to everything else to have a successful product launch process. Everything needs to be consolidated. All the departments need to be as consistent as possible in what they're doing. You need to make sure you're not collecting the same information from an internal customer as another department. And you need to make sure you're not asking the same questions or signing off on the same things.

So what that means for us at Revolut is we are a key stakeholder in our centralized product and change approval process. I'm sure we've got a range of maturities of organization on the line today. So we've had a core process which has stuck with us for quite a period of time. It's a change management process and a product approval process. In some ways, that's very, very helpful because it means the answer is if you're changing something, you submit it to the process. In other ways, it's not that helpful because it's not as specialized as it could be for different things, which can mean that you're a bit slower for some changes, which you might be able to speed up a little bit with. The advantages that you do have with a consolidated process like that, though, are that the process is clearly understood.

So it's really important to make sure that everyone in your company understands what the process is and understands what needs to be submitted to the process. Because if you don't have clear understanding of that, you're going to have a very difficult relationship with people who are trying to launch those. If they don't know what the process is, they're going to launch products without submitting it to the process, and then you're going to have issues to remediate, which is not fun for either of you. And equally, if you don't have clarity about what falls within and outside of the process, then you may find yourself in a position where someone is saying, you know, legal has said that I need to go through this process. Legal should never be the decision maker on that. The process should be clear and you should be a stakeholder in the process and not caught up in, you know, political debates about whether something goes into the process or not. I will stop there.

Effie: I'm just going to ask you, Will, actually, because obviously Revolut has grown massively, has Legal always managed to be involved in those processes? Because as you say, and on Fido, we definitely try and not make it a legal process, but that we are part of the process. Have you seen that mature? Because obviously there are people in the crowd from all stages of companies.

Will: Yes, yes, is the short answer. So Legal was one of, well, a lawyer. It was one of the early hires in the company. A lawyer continues to be one of the first hires in any new jurisdiction that we launched in. That would definitely be different to other companies. That's a symptom of the fact that we are a regulated financial institution, and so regulations are quite important to us. But what that means is that there's always a lawyer there. The other things that we have emphasized as we have grown, which have ensured that that continues to be the case, are Number one, we are pragmatic and I know we've got other questions on that, so I won't get into it in too much detail. But we've developed a reputation where we help people move forward, so they do like coming to us. And number two is we always, always emphasize legal gets involved early on in the process of everything.

Effie: Yeah. Jonathan, have you got anything you'd like to add to that about legal team in the process?

Jonathan: No, I think Will's been really thorough there with his overview. I just add that how important it is to be embedded in the design and product development teams in an organic and natural way prior to any individual product launch. You should be having regular cadence with them anyway. So none of this should be a shock to you. You should be aware of the product roadmap and be feeding in from the very conceptual stages of any product development project.

Product counsel: compliance obligations

Effie: Amazing, which actually leads really nicely to our next question is, what compliance aspects should be addressed during product design? And then what proactive steps can ensure ongoing compliance throughout product development?

Jonathan: Maybe I'll jump in first on this one if you don't mind. But I think data protection is the big obvious one there. And data privacy, you can't have privacy by design if it's an afterthought from the product development team. So the most effective way of getting that into everyone's heads, an important factor is education. A lot of the time when you're dealing with engineers or product folks, like things that we take for granted when it comes to data protection, even the basic concepts of what is personal data, they're just not concepts that everyone else in the technical world are necessarily familiar with, or they might be familiar at a very high level, not necessarily understand like IP addresses and etc. etc. It can all be classes as personal data and therefore we need to build in safeguards and mechanisms for dealing with that.

So yeah, that's something that is always my number one priority. And then because Figma is such a visual and creative tool, I think IP and the risk of IP infringement, what's happening with the IP that people are using our platform to create and how do we regulate that and ensure we've got appropriate safeguards in place for that. And then I think a really interesting development with the Digital Services Act is how you think about community and how you think about users interacting with each other in a public forum, because there's a whole load of new safeguards and measures that brings platform providers. So what are your take-down measures? How are you going to ensure moderation in any space or product where you're creating for third parties and maybe public users to interact on your infrastructure in your product, but not necessarily expressing views of your company?

Effie: Yeah, amazing. Thank you. And then the last question in this section, as it were, is have either of you had any success with self-service solutions with the product team? Will, should I go to you first?

Will: Sure. Yes, we have. So anything which you can get someone else to do for you as a success. And often those other people will be happy with that as well. So if you work in an organization where you have a product owner chasing you every five minutes to deliver something for them, you are helping them if you allow them to do some of that for you. Specific areas where we have had success, some basic applications and some more novel applications. So basic applications in our product approval process, we have questionnaires that the people who want to approve, have something approved fill out. So that's an element of self-service because you ask at the first instance for someone to provide you the relevant information, then you have a package of what you need to review and you can take that forward.

We also have tried to go self-service with a lot of our terms and conditions changes and our promotions terms and conditions changes where we can. We run a high volume of promotions which are highly customized to different markets and different products. It's not efficient for all of those to be drafted by legal, even though they are legal documents. So we have drafted templates and we've empowered the product owners to fill those templates out, which speeds things up a lot for us and for them. And further along that scale, in some applications we use contractual automation tools as well. So again, just we have a template. We allow the business to use that template and that takes something off our hands. We use that for highly standardized things, obviously. So we use that for some promotions, terms and conditions. We definitely use that for NDAs and a range of other agreements as well.

Effie: Amazing. Yeah, in Onfido, we like to call it empowering the other teams as well as a bit of self-service, but a good energy change in the word there. And I guess, Jonathan, how about a Figma? Have you seen success through self-service as well?

Jonathan: Yes, yes, and no. I think it's important to make sure that you're not overly confident in the initial risk assessment templates that you use as well, because products change, product scopes change as well. So I think it's a continual process rather than looking at the initial information you've got and then just building your legal advice off the back of that. So certainly it helps and it takes you maybe further down the road than you would have been without it for sure, especially in respect to the initial risk assessment. But I think I see them as part of the solution rather than solving the majority of the problem.

How legal counsel can empower product teams

Effie: Yeah, trust but verify. I like it. The slogan for today's roundtable. And obviously, trusting and verify, I think, leads very nicely to our next topic, which is collaboration and communication. Because obviously, we're only as successful as how well we are communicating and working with others on launches. So, Jonathan, maybe you first. What are your tips on where to start from a legal perspective regarding new product launches?

Jonathan: Yeah, so here's where I try and push the Figma products. So like Figma, because it is a product, and apologies, that's not going to happen. But Figma, because it's a product development tool, is a very good example of a tool which the designer is in the entire time that you're in the designer, you're in the product developer world by being in Figma. And I think by being able to use their tools and interact in an environment that they're comfortable with and that they understand is a really good place to be so you're not bringing everything out of the product into kind of Microsoft Word, God forbid, or even DDoX. So something like Figma, an interactive design platform where you can see how the product's being iterated and then how your legal advice is playing out in real time. So for example, privacy policy, seeing how that is incorporated, how the consents are built into every part of the user flow. That is extremely helpful for both the product team who understand that you're seeing what they're seeing. And then from the legal perspective to see how your legal advice is actually implemented in the product itself. So yeah, getting tech savvy and understanding the tools that development team are using is very important.

Effie: Yeah. Will, is there anything you'd like to add on any tips on where to start?

Will: Yeah, so a couple of more macro points before I'm happy to endorse Figma as a tool. So on the macro point, at the risk of stating the obvious where to start, you should start at the beginning. If you're not involved from the beginning, something's gone wrong and will continue to go wrong because your product owners are going to design something without speaking to you. And then when you eventually come back together, you're going to have difficult conversations because they will have wasted time and resources on building something which you need to change.

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