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» VISIT US ONLINE @ DSNEWS.COM 23 faster decisions. As we continue to innovate, we're spend- ing lots of time with our customers, helping them not only integrate the technology or the functionality but also working with them on ways they can change their business processes to take advantage of the value proposition. Can you tell us how your development and testing processes work? First and foremost, we put the customer at the center of everything we do at Fannie Mae. Secondly, we are very mature in our agile engineering practices. We have been operating from an agile perspective at the firm for the last four years. We have intersected the customer- centric mindset with our agile development process. at translates directly into how we build and roll out products. We've put a digital operating model in place at the firm to spur innovation and deliver faster. Our operating model has three main tenets: empowerment, collaboration, and test and learn. We now have our agile teams—we call them squads. ey consist of about seven to nine people and they're empowered to solve a problem, collaborate, and test and learn with customers. It could be a large problem that could take two years to solve, or it could be a small problem that takes three months. We are customer-insight driven, meaning we collect insights from our customers before we start building. From those insights, we're able to develop a hypothesis. en, we pull our customers into those discussions, and we validate those hypotheses through testing and learning. is is a big change for us because in the past we would build what we thought our customers wanted, and get something into production. en there would be, in some cases, little to no value, because we didn't start innovating with the customer at the begin- ning of the process. A part of this operating model is to pull a series of customers into that problem-solving process so you get their point of view and you put yourself in their shoes. We co-create with them. Being agile and working in what we call two-week sprints, we're always able to have customers looking at what we're building. It could be wireframes; it could be prototypes; it could be working software. But every two weeks, we get some customer input on what we're doing. at allows us to pivot quickly. at's part of our agile journey and that's pull- ing our customer into our agile journey. Lastly, for some of our innovations, we do a series of test-and-learn pilots where we're able to run, concurrent, a number of concepts and get that feedback from our customers as they're using it. When we call something a pilot, it's a piece of code that is in produc- tion that customers use. Did it add the value that we think it did? We're very metrics driven now, so any pilot we enter, we've got a customer hypothesis and a series of metrics we use to manage and measure value. What are some of the technologies that you think have the potential to reshape the industry? e move to the cloud. You get a different perspective on resiliency and security because all of that's built in. e cloud, for us, has been transformative. It also makes you build things differently. You don't build these big applica- tions anymore. You build smaller, which is important. APIs have been, and will continue to be, transformative for the industry because of their low-cost. It's allowing not just Fannie Mae, but all sorts of entities in mortgage fi- nance to exchange pieces of data real-time and then insert it into business processes. We also think Blockchain and artificial intelligence have a lot of applications in mort- gage finance. ose are the big emerging tech areas that I see changing mortgage finance over the next 24 to 36 months. What is something that you wish more people understood about your job? When you read my title, "Head of Digital Products," most people gravitate to, "Oh, you're building a bunch of cool tech." Well, we are building a bunch of cool tech, but it's tech that's adding value to our customers. My job is really about transformation and culture change inside the walls of Fannie Mae and the mortgage finance transformation outside of the walls of Fannie Mae. We're doing it under the digital umbrella, but it's a way we can pivot and engage our customers differently. By engaging those cus- tomers differently, we're able to bring different types of value to the marketplace. "When you read my title, 'Head of Digital Products,' most people gravitate to, 'Oh, you're building a bunch of cool tech.' Well, we are building a bunch of cool tech, but it's tech that's adding value to our customers. My job is really about transformation and culture change inside the walls of Fannie Mae and the mortgage finance transformation outside of the walls of Fannie Mae."

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