Jason (00:38)
Hi Regis, how are ya?

Regis (00:39)
Jason,

I'm great. How are you?

Jason (00:41)
I'm doing great. Welcome to The Wise in Five Thank you for being an amazing advisor on The Wisory Thrilled to have you.

Regis (00:47)
Happy to

be here, happy to be here.

Jason (00:49)
Good. Well, what I thought we'd do before we dive into the questions is really, if you wouldn't mind just giving our viewers and listeners a little bit of your amazing background that brought you to this point.

Regis (01:00)
Yeah,

absolutely. I'd be happy to. So I spent the first, let's see, eight years of my career on the consulting and agency side, working on a bunch of different automotive, consumer products, digital launches at the time, and then spent the last 21 years at Rocket companies and built and brought Rocket Mortgage to market. So the entire process of going from

multiple failed experiments to the one that actually worked and launched at the Super Bowl in 2016, and then everything from there on. So going from a very small team of 12 that locked away in a room to a team of 500 with multiple work streams, from a product that nobody knew about to a household name, took a lot of work, a lot of passion and living our philosophies and isms at Rocket at the time to get there.

but it has been just an awesome ride and have learned a lot along the way and have come up with a lot of frameworks that really can help others, which is why I'm so excited to be a part of The Wisory

Jason (02:01)
Well, that's why we're excited to have you be part of The Wisory and we're gonna dive into some of those things. But before we do, I wanna ask you what I ask all my guests, which is where do you find inspiration in daily life?

Regis (02:14)
for

sure. So I tell you, there's kind of like three main places. One, and this one's going to be a little funny, overbearing complexity. When I see something that's complex, I just want to dig in and make it simple. It's something innate in me I just want to do. And like, I feel like that's a noble challenge. So when I see that, that is definitely one thing. The second I would say is just really innovative people, you know, especially like startup founders, high growth founders at startups.

They have this innate ability to see friction and see problems that need to be solved. And so many of them are operating under constraints that they have to get creative on how they solve that. But that is where I feel like you can turn friction into something super impactful and really make change in the world. So being around those type of people just really electrifies me, And then I would tell you the third most important is my close family, my wife, Carrie.

My 15 year old son, Sammy, my 17 year old daughter, Ella. Whew, Jason, they inspire me, they educate me, they challenge me every single day. But I will tell you, like seeing the world through their eyes is probably one of the best gifts I've ever had.

Jason (03:22)
I, well, it doesn't get better than that. So thank you for sharing that. So you referenced that you took Rocket Mortgage from an idea to a household name. Can you tell us more about that experience and that journey, like all the different things that had to happen to make it a household name?

Regis (03:40)
Sure,

sure. So I'll start by saying we started with two very simple questions. Maybe we were a little naive at the time, but we said, why can't you buy a home when you're at a showing and you're standing in it? Why can't you do that? And then the other thing was, why can't you refi your mortgage when you're standing in the line at Starbucks? mean, things should be that easy. And luckily now they are. However, then they were not.

And so we set about to really kind of tackle those problems. And the way we design the product experience, it's always been about asking less of the user, but knowing more about them. so really kind of taking the friction out, you got to use a lot of data. You got to figure out how to connect different data sources. This was a time when financial data standards weren't even where they are now. We had to develop a standards body to do a lot of that work. But we put all these things in place.

to really scale an idea that at first was sort of one of those classic embarrassing minimum viable products to something that was at scale used every single day around the clock.

Jason (04:41)
Wow, and what year was that Regis that you took that on?

Regis (04:43)
⁓ So we started in earnest

in 2012, brought it to market at the Super Bowl January of 2016. And I'll tell you, four years in development, yep, the first MVP was a refi experience, the second was a purchase experience, and we layered in a lot of automation and using data in kind of new and innovative ways. And, you know, I'll tell you,

Jason (04:52)
Wow. So four years in development.

Regis (05:08)
our obsession with like literally finding a better way all the time was what got us through it. I mean, so many other teams would have stopped, but taking something that was that complicated and making it so simple. I used to tell people it's like putting someone who doesn't know how to fly an airplane into the cockpit of a 747 and saying, go, you know, it's hard, right? So, I mean, but the thing that really came out from all of that was that

Jason (05:27)
Land this plane.

Regis (05:32)
know, simplicity scales. We all crave it. We all crave simplicity. Life is so complicated. Things are so complicated and confusing all the time. We all know simplicity when we see it. you know, creating that is really where growth comes from. It's not from doing all the things you could possibly do. It's from really elegantly doing what matters most and doing that well over and over and over again.

Jason (05:56)
I couldn't agree more, right? It's kind of easy to make things complex. It's hard to make them simple.

Regis (06:01)
Yeah, right,

exactly, exactly.

Jason (06:04)
Right? So, this is not blowing smoke by any means, but you're one of the world's experts in product design and development. Clearly what you just shared about Rocket. So what are the key ingredients that you see to building successful products that create a successful, easy for me to say successful business? Obviously simplicity is one, but I'm sure there's a lot of things that went into it, both.

from a strategic and tactical standpoint.

Regis (06:28)
Yeah,

yeah, I would, I would tell you and the viewers that great products are born from great habits. And I think there's five habits a team needs to have and practice continually day in and day out. That is the execution. One is defining the problem so clearly that everybody on the team knows it and can say it word for word. It doesn't matter if you're a team of five or a team of 500. It's so critical to be able to have that.

The second thing would be building learning loops. So one of the things, you know, we couldn't build for every financial situation when we went to market. And so we built these things called pit stops in the experience where it was like, wow, Jason, your financial situation is complex. Sorry, we don't support that yet. Talk to a person, you know, and what we did is we tracked those things and we learned, ⁓ that scenario matters more than this one. Or we're seeing a lot of people with that typical situation. We should solve for that next.

And so having those learning loops in the experience, know, time and iteration solve a lot of problems. So having those there was critical. And I think it is a critical habit of good teams. Three more for you. One is about trust. You have to design for trust. So much of compliance and regulation, especially in financial services, is just about making the experience simple and clear for someone who doesn't do finance every single day, you know?

And so if you just design with that in mind, you actually achieve the goals of so much of the regulation in the first place. So being really good at that is another. The fourth I would tell you, and I know you know this, is aligning sales, marketing, and product teams altogether, getting them on the same frequency and then on the same rhythm can be incredibly impactful when it comes to executing and making an impact. And so that is just a critical habit that organizations need to be really good at. And then

The fifth is one that I don't think is probably talked about enough and it's always hard to invest in for product teams. And that's the quiet infrastructure. There's things that you don't necessarily see, right? So the data quality, the identity work, the automation, how you leverage AI, there's all of those things that are kind of under the hood, if you will, that actually enable delightful experiences at scale, but you can't have them if you don't invest in them.

You know, and so those habits about defining the problem, building the learning loops, designing really for trust, aligning product marketing and sales. And then finally that investing in the quiet infrastructure, you know, those, those things that are necessary. If you do those things consistently as a team, that's a path to category leadership.

Jason (08:57)
Amazing so four and five right? So the alignment and then we're talking about the quiet. So that's that tends for me to say, how do you work across right? How do you work across teams? Not just within teams and. What have you seen work best right? Because then we're getting into a even with the data right? There's a people component in terms of how you need to pull those things together so.

Are there certain things that you've learned in terms of how to drive that alignment between the teams?

Regis (09:26)
Absolutely,

absolutely. I'll tell you the one thing not to do it's to come down from the mountain with two stone tablets and tell everybody how it's going to be. That is not it. Right. So it's very much about being collaborative in how you develop your go to market strategy and then executing on it together. And so the more collaborative that is across product marketing and sales, the more impactful it is in the market. And so I would tell you that is a big

Jason (09:34)
Right?

Regis (09:53)
And so things like working on how are we going to position this thing to different audiences? You know, we spent a lot of time and a lot of craft went into articulating that at Rocket because we didn't care if you were watching a Rocket ad on a gas pump or you were talking to Rocket team members in Washington, DC. We wanted everybody on the same page. And so it's critical that you invest the time to do that and do that together as a cross-functional team.

Jason (10:19)
makes total sense. So you have a ton of wisdom, Regis. My question is, when you need to check on something new, right? If you're building a new product or a new market or going to a new role or whatever it may be, who do you go to? Like, who are your mentors and advisors that you go to, you know, to help you work through those things?

Regis (10:37)
Yeah,

I've been really lucky, Jason, to work with and collaborate with thousands of people over my career, right? But I'll tell you three that really stand out. One is Dan Gilbert, the founder of what is now Rocket Companies and the chairman. ⁓ Absolutely. His lessons around belief and conviction driving outcomes. You one of the isms there is when you believe it, you'll see it, essentially.

Jason (10:51)
Legend.

Regis (11:01)
That taught me how to scale conviction and culture together in a way. And really his clarity of vision and focus on execution combined, that really is what has been able to change an entire industry around that organization. That's the first person. The other two that come to mind right away are the two CEOs that I worked under there, Bill Emerson and Jay Farner. From Bill, I learned how to be calm under pressure.

He is one of the most grounded leaders I've ever met and showed me steady leadership in times of wild intensity. I'll just kind of leave it there, right? Like all the different things you do as an organization as you're pushing the envelope, know, he showed me how to be calm and also push for execution without really sort of sacrificing empathy.

You know, it was such a rare combination of how he was able to unlock that in people. It was just an amazing, yeah, amazing person to learn from, you know? And then Jay Farner, he really taught me about precision and the discipline of clarity and really like how to focus on what matters most and make the complex really simple. I would tell you that

Jason (11:52)
What a great lesson. Yeah, that's that's incredible.

Regis (12:10)
That was one of the things that I took away from working with Jay and together those three shaped how I lead. It's really like believe deeply, stay very grounded and real and execute with clarity. And those are lessons I try to pass on when I work with FinTech founders and execs today.

Jason (12:28)
Yeah, that's fantastic. And I, and I could feel it right as you were laying out each of the three and what they taught you and just how you've been sharing your thoughts during our podcast. So I love that. We're on our fifth question. We're on our last question, Regis. It's hard to believe, the world is changing around us, right? With technology and AI. mean, technology is constantly changing, but AI feels like it's an accelerant.

Regis (12:42)
Wow, that's quick.

Jason (12:52)
right now and a lot of questions. how do you see these types of technological changes in AI affecting the way products and brands are being built and scaled in the future?

Regis (13:02)
Yeah, yeah, is, hmm, the speed of the game just keeps getting faster. Number one, to your point about being an accelerant. I'll tell you, I think AI is forcing everyone, whether you're a founder, a product leader, an exec, a marketer, to really look at your strategy and go, is it right? Is it clear? is the way we're executing really the best way to be doing things? And I love that, right? Because it's like continuously getting better.

How do you get better? And if we unpack strategy, it's like, are we targeting the right personas? Are we looking at the competitive landscape properly? How clear is the strategy for us to go to market? How clear is our positioning? And I see two shifts that are happening like wildly fast. One is we're moving from kind of basic conversion funnels to feedback loops.

And one of the things that's happening is AI is able to close the gaps between what someone wants, how they go about getting it, and how products that they use learn and get better. It's closing those gaps. That used to be very rote. it's like, learn what customers want, put product in market, and then learn, and then go build more. Well, now that's all collapsing in a positive way, in a really positive way.

I would say what that's also doing is it's forcing kind of the second thing is it's less about feature velocity, if you will, and more about outcome velocity. Meaning when everyone can ship features really fast, well, what makes your product different than anybody else? Right? It's so much about the outcomes that your product actually delivers. So I think the companies that stay really clear on who they are, what they stand for, what they deliver, and then

Jason (14:30)
Mm-hmm

Regis (14:46)
How are they learning to make that experience better? Those are the companies that are gonna win going forward.

Jason (14:52)
Yeah, do you I agree. Do you see? What do you see to the product lifecycle being affected with that? So there's always the ⁓ the business owner gets tired of the product or service before the customer does right. And now that the technology has the ability to move faster and faster, how do you think that affects that dynamic?

Regis (15:12)
I

think it's a really good question. I think it does a couple things. One, you can be ahead of the curve of your product faster and with less effort than you ever could before. So when you could take what used to be a 30 to 90 day research period on new features and condense it down to minutes because you can have AI agents that are personifying your personas.

Jason (15:27)
So. ⁓

Regis (15:39)
and you can just ask them what they think, that changes everything, right? So you can like really prototype and test ideas before you put them in the product experience. And so I think what that does is it keeps founders curious, and they're not waiting so long for the product to change in order to go to the next thing, to the next thing, to the next thing. So I think it speeds up the life cycle, but I will caution that if there's not the clear strategy,

involved in where you're going, you can drift so quickly and so easily, just as much as like an unguardrailed AI GPT can hallucinate, right? You can drift in your strategy so quickly if you just pursue every idea. So it's a lot about how do you use the tools to quickly test those ideas and then decide what to invest in, execute, learn and repeat.

Jason (16:28)
Right, it's the classic just because you can do it, should you do it, right?

Regis (16:32)
Exactly. Exactly.

Jason (16:33)
That's fantastic. Regis, we have completed the five questions. You have passed with flying colors. No question from my end. One last question for you though. So as one of our newest amazing advisors, I'm so thrilled to have you on. What should folks who are coming to The Wisory who would like to talk with you, what kind of questions should they ask? What kind of advice should they expect to receive from you?

Regis (16:39)
Alright.

Well, I'll tell you, I think a lot of folks are looking to how do I scale my business or how do I scale my product? I'm going to really challenge folks to really understand if they have product market fit first, because it's so critical that you have a product that fits with real problems people have out there in the world and does it really well. Because once you have that, scaling actually becomes quite easy. It's so much more about

is the fit right first. And so looking at that and saying, what do you think the product market fit is today? Where do you feel like you're winning? Where do you feel there are gaps? And coming up with which frameworks to use to close those gaps, and then working on go-to-market strategy to achieve scale. There's so many lessons I have from many Super Bowls and many national campaigns there that I can help folks with too.

Jason (17:45)
I'm sure you do. Well,

Regis, the businesses that connect with you could not be more fortunate because your wealth and knowledge, I mean, people can feel, mean, the energy, the perspective that you bring is just unparalleled. So I can't be more honored to have you on the platform and to open you up to folks who you want to make their product market fit.

and their go-to-market strategy even stronger and stronger. So thank you.

Regis (18:13)
Thank

you, Jason. I'm psyched to be on the platform and ready to help.

Jason (18:16)
Thanks. Have a great rest of the day, Regis.

Regis (18:18)
All right, you

too.