StellarFi Spotlight - Kevin Phillips | VP of Product

Meet Kevin, VP of Product at StellarFi ?? and quite possibly one of the coolest people in the company. In this interview, we peel back the “layers of Kevin” and learn about what makes a product executive tick, his super cool hobby, and his tips for junior product managers.

Explain what you do in one sentence.

I build products that empower our members and help grow our company.

You were an early employee at DailyPay and you did impactful work there as the VP of Product and VP of Growth, from growing the product team to helping 100x their ARR. So after doing that, why StellarFi?

My best experiences as an employee have been during earlier stages of a company. At this size, the company connects cross-departmentally in such a healthy, team-oriented way. Everyone is rallied around a mission, figuring out what we need to build.??

That time of really building a product from scratch and figuring out product-market fit and building infrastructure for things to come is where I found my sweet spot as an executive – being able to balance strategy, execution, vision, and management. I knew that at StellarFi, I had the opportunity to go back in time, do all those things again, and go where I can make the biggest impact.

What’s your favorite thing about working at StellarFi??

My favorite thing about working here is the sum of many parts but ultimately, it’s making an impact. It’s satisfying to be able to prioritize a feature or experiment, launch it, then see the data and the impact that it has on the company and our users.?

What are you working on right now that excites you??

Building out my team and building new expansion features. Once I get the new team ramped up and running on their own, we’ll be able to make a much bigger impact beyond core growth. In product, you want to be able to go as narrow and deep as possible in focused areas. If you can go deeper, you can come up with better ideas and become more of an expert on what we should do. That’s hard to do if you’re spread thin, so ramping up this team unlocks the gate for me to do even more of the things that I'm excited about.?

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working??

Music is my life. I throw small events around New York City as a DJ and one big yearly event is my music festival I throw at my grandparent’s cattle farm in California - it’s called Farm Party. Throwing this festival is a huge event for me. I’ve been doing it for seven years now. It’s generated a very cool community of people around the world and lots of people based out of San Francisco / Bay Area. For many, it’s the only festival they attend yearly so it’s like a big family reunion.?

I was the social chair of a fraternity in college so I got into DJing, mostly mainstream hip-hop and top 40. I went to Electric Zoo after I graduated college and my life changed. I got super into electronic music. I started recording mixes on my computer and sharing them with friends who would then share with their friends and the demand increased. My mixes started gaining popularity so I decided to DJ my first live set at the inaugural Farm Party in 2015.?

Click here to listen to one of Kevin’s mixes.?

What would be your pie in the sky DJ gig?

There are some major camps and art cars at Burning Man (ex. Robot Heart). I DJ at my own camp and friends’ camps at Burning Man, but there are some camps there with thousands of people I would love to play at.

You adopted your dog Charlie after being his foster dog dad. Tell me about that experience.?

In 2012, I had an idea for a company so I moved to San Diego to live with my sister while she was in her senior year of college. She had fostered 31 dogs since before I got there and Charlie was her 32nd foster dog. Within a week of being there, I knew we were keeping Charlie. I named him after a character from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I had everyone hooked on the show at the time. I lived in San Diego for a year and a half. We fostered four more dogs while I was there and they were all named after characters from the show.?

Any personal goals for 2023 you’d like to share?

Move out of New York City. My sister lives in the Tampa area and like many New Yorkers, I left New York in 2020 and quarantined with her for four months. She lives on a canal with a boat in the backyard. We would go on sunset rides in the Gulf every night. If you have a rough day at work, you can jump on the boat and every bad ounce of what you were feeling just melts away and life is perfect. I absolutely love it down there.

What words of wisdom do you have for junior product managers?

1. Start simple. A lot of times people want to complicate things and boil the ocean. You should be able to identify the MVP (minimum viable product). Your full vision for a project could take two months to execute, but you don’t want to take two months to complete it, especially if you’re not 100% confident it’s going to work. Start simple and break your projects up into several phases you can chip away at. Complete the first part in two weeks then layer and learn as you go. It allows you to get more stuff done and make a bigger impact on the business.?
2. Be quick, but don’t hurry. I learned this from my high school basketball coach and it’s helped in life, too. As a rocket ship startup, we want to move as fast as possible. But there’s a difference between moving quickly and hurrying. If you rush to make decisions, you will almost always end up failing. Take that little bit of extra time to think through potential issues and the overall product. You’ll allow yourself to still move quickly, but you’re not going to rush and break things.

To learn more about career opportunities at StellarFi, visit?https://stellarfi.com/careers.