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The Product Discovery Process That Built Amex’s Award-Winning App

The Product Discovery Process That Built Amex’s Award-Winning App
Blog Author: Rina Alexin

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When Jose Quesada joined American Express, the world of mobile banking—and the product discovery process driving it—looked very different. The iPhone was still young, the App Store barely existed, and “digital transformation” was mostly a buzzword echoing through boardrooms. 

Fast-forward to today: the Amex mobile app stands among the world’s most-loved financial products—a benchmark for usability, reliability, and customer experience. 

That evolution didn’t happen because Amex built faster. It happened because Amex learned faster. 

In his conversation with Rina Alexin on Productside Stories, Quesada reveals how his teams transformed the product discovery process into a strategic advantage—one that balanced long-term vision with short-term delivery, killed bad ideas early, and earned the trust of even the most skeptical stakeholders. 

 

Discovery ≠ Delivery

Early in his career, Quesada saw the same trap most product teams fall into: they confuse shipping with learning. 

“Just because you build something doesn’t mean customers will come,” he told Rina. “Discovery isn’t about deciding how to build something—it’s deciding whether you should build it in the first place.” 

That shift in thinking shaped how Amex now approaches innovation. 

Instead of viewing discovery as a kickoff phase, Quesada’s teams run two tracks in parallel: one focused on delivery (shipping features, maintaining BAU), and another focused on discovery (testing hypotheses, exploring the next 18–24 months). 

This dual-track product discovery model keeps the company moving fast without losing sight of the horizon. But it also created a new cultural rule: failure is data. 

“The happiest I am,” Quesada says, “is when I see red in our dashboards. It means we learned something. It means we avoided wasting time building the wrong thing.” 

Instead of fearing negative outcomes, Amex celebrates them as progress. Product managers are encouraged to design experiments that could prove their assumptions wrong, not just validate them. 

That mindset is what turned discovery from theater into muscle memory. 

 

How Amex Made Discovery Visible

Running two tracks is one thing. Getting the rest of the organization to value both is another. 

When Quesada first proposed embedding a discovery function alongside delivery, not everyone was convinced. Some leaders wanted clear ROI before investing time in “exploration.” Others were wary of slowing delivery down. 

So Quesada did what any good product manager would: he ran an experiment. 

He started small, with a single mobile team. They built a discovery cadence around the Amex app itself, running parallel streams of customer testing, hypothesis mapping, and small-scale pilots. The goal wasn’t to prove the model worked. It was to create proof points that would make skeptics lean in. 

Within months, the results spoke for themselves. The team was uncovering customer friction before features were scoped, avoiding dead-end builds, and creating a stronger link between design, data, and strategy. 

“We didn’t go from zero to a hundred overnight,” Quesada explains. “We started with one team, one vision, and built momentum from there.” 

As leaders saw the evidence, discovery gained legitimacy. What began as an experiment soon became the default operating model for Amex’s global product organization. 

 

Stakeholder Judo: Winning Trust Without PowerPoints

Product discovery isn’t just about frameworks. It’s about people. 

Quesada jokes that product managers need a black belt in stakeholder judo: the ability to turn resistance into support using communication, relationships, and data. 

“You can’t win over stakeholders with endless decks,” he says. “You win them by using their language, showing results, and making them part of the story.” 

For Quesada, that story starts with empathy. He studies how each stakeholder behaves, not just what they say. Those who challenge new ideas aren’t “detractors”—they’re alignment opportunities. 

His playbook for stakeholder alignment is deceptively simple: 

  • Communicate early and often. “Don’t surprise people,” he warns. “Executives hate surprises.” 
  • Invest in relationships before you need them. Hard conversations go smoother when there’s trust. 
  • Let data do the talking. When discussions turn subjective, evidence resets the room. 

That trust is what allows Amex’s product teams to run ambitious bets with autonomy. And it’s how Quesada transformed discovery from a team exercise into an organizational behavior. 

“The more visible discovery becomes,” he says, “the more it earns protection from leadership. People stop asking why it matters and start asking how to get involved.” 

 

Building Strategy That Actually Sticks

Ask 10 PMs what “strategy” means, and you’ll get 12 answers. Quesada laughs at that because he’s seen it firsthand. 

“A strategy isn’t a vision statement,” he says. “It’s a set of hypotheses you’re willing to test.” 

In his framework for strategic product management, a good strategy has five ingredients: 

  1. A vision worth chasing. The north star that makes experimentation meaningful. 
  2. A data foundation. Hard numbers plus human insights—both are needed to see the full picture. 
  3. A clear problem or opportunity. Don’t confuse the two, and don’t let them blur into feature lists. 
  4. A story that travels. Strategy has to be told, retold, and understood beyond your team. 
  5. A validation plan. Decide upfront how you’ll know if it’s working—or when to pivot. 

At Amex, that approach turned abstract goals (“be more customer-centric”) into measurable initiatives. One discovery experiment around search and discoverability connected directly to reduced call-center volume—a metric executives already cared about. 

That alignment was no accident. 

“If you want your strategy to survive contact with the business,” Quesada says, “it has to speak the business’s language.” 

 

Leadership Is Context

When asked what separates good product managers from great ones, Quesada doesn’t hesitate: context. 

“Our value as product leaders isn’t in managing backlogs,” he explains. “It’s in connecting the dots—between customer, business, and technology.” 

That’s the heart of modern product leadership skills: curiosity, communication, and contextual judgment. 

Quesada teaches his teams to look beyond their domain—to understand how Amex’s corporate strategy, risk appetite, and market moves inform their roadmap choices. He also empowers them to fail fast and learn visibly. “If you never see red,” he tells them, “you’re not pushing hard enough.” 

 

Lessons for Product Leaders

If you’re a product manager aiming to operate more strategically, Quesada’s advice is refreshingly grounded: 

  • Master soft skills early. Storytelling and relationship-building will outlast any framework. 
  • Be open to change. Every organizational shift is a new sandbox to explore. 
  • Don’t just learn strategy. Practice it. You can’t think your way into strategic thinking. You learn it by doing, by testing, by failing, and by revising. 

 

From Process to Culture 

Amex didn’t transform through one grand “innovation initiative.” 

It happened through hundreds of small, deliberate choices: testing instead of guessing, aligning instead of convincing, and turning discovery into the default behavior of a world-class product organization. 

“We don’t think in projects,” Quesada says. “We think in products. And we don’t build because we can. We build because we should.” 

That’s what a mature product discovery process looks like in practice: not a checklist, not a phase, but a culture. 

And for teams stuck in the delivery grind, that might just be the discovery they need most. 

 

Take the Product Discovery Process Further