How Product Thinking Can Transform Traditional Risk Management
How Product Thinking Can Transform Traditional Risk Management
Risk management is undergoing a seismic shift. Once confined to compliance checklists and reactive fire drills, it is now being reimagined as a driver of trust, growth, and competitive advantage. Across industries from financial services to e-commerce and autonomous vehicles, leaders are realizing that risk functions must evolve from static and siloed to iterative, user-centered, and data-driven.
Narendhira Chandraseharan, Strategy Product Manager at TikTok, aSenior IEEE MemberandRaptors Fellowwho has shaped risk strategies across global platforms, has been at the forefront of this transition. “Risk isn’t just about avoiding loss,” he explains. “When done with product thinking, it becomes a way to unlock confidence for customers, for regulators, and to enable business growth for the company itself.”
The Problem with Traditional Risk Management
Despite technological advances, many organizations still approach risk management with a compliance-first mentality. This creates three major weaknesses: reactivity, siloed operations, and a narrow focus on regulations rather than strategy.
Naren points to industry failures as evidence.The Wells Fargo “fake accounts” scandal, which prioritized regulatory checklists over ethical practices, eroded billions in value. In e-commerce, reactive approaches to chargebacks and refund abuse are projected to cost the industry more than $34 billion by 2025. “When risk is treated as a cost center, it leads to short-term fixes that leave companies exposed,” he says.
Applying Product Thinking to Risk
Product thinking introduces a different mindset: one rooted in user journeys, iterative design, and measurable outcomes. It takes a broader, holistic approach to risk management to ask how risks affect users at every touchpoint and how systems can proactively detect and mitigate risks.
This philosophy shaped Naren’s recent work leading global anti-fraud solutions at TikTok Shop, an initiative spanning 10+ countries in four regions. He and his team built risk products and machine learning models to detect fraud involving creators, sellers, and third-party agencies. The results were highly impactful:multiple millions in fraud losses prevented every quarter, thousands of fraudulent creators removed, and incident response times halved in many cases during high-volume sales events like Black Friday.“Our approach wasn’t just to stop fraud,” he explains. “It was to build a safer, more trusted marketplace for millions of honest sellers and buyers.”
AI-Driven Risk as Competitive Edge
AI is emerging as the foundation of modern risk management. With anomaly detection, dynamic risk scoring, and graph analytics, companies can anticipate threats before they materialize. This marks a sharp break from reactive models, enabling preemptive controls and faster response loops.
Naren, who shared his perspective in his Hackernoon article “A Product Manager’s Take on AI-Driven Risk Management” has implemented these principles in domains ranging from e-commerce to insurance. At TikTok Shop, his team designed real-time enforcement systems powered by AI, balancing fraud detection with minimal false positives. “AI gives us the ability to profile risks in real time, at global scale,” he notes. “But the real advantage comes when you integrate that intelligence into the product experience seamlessly.”
Building Trust Beyond Compliance
The future of risk management is not about avoiding regulatory penalties. It is about embedding risk awareness into product design so that customer trust and business growth reinforce each other. Companies that succeed will treat risk functions as enablers of innovation, not barriers to it.
As ajudge at the Globee Awards for Innovation,Naren has seen how forward-looking companies use risk strategy as a differentiator. “The best organizations don’t wait for regulators to tell them what to do,” he says. “They set the bar higher, because they know that trust is the most valuable currency in the digital economy.”
Why It Matters
Risk is no longer a back-office function. It is a boardroom conversation, a user experience factor, and in many cases, a growth enabler. For companies navigating AI adoption, global commerce, and digital transformation, the opportunity lies in shifting from reactive to proactive and guided by product thinking.
Naren’s career offers a blueprint for this shift. By applying product thinking to traditional risk management practices, companies can offer dynamic user experiences that can not only prevent loss but also gain a strategic advantage. “When risk is built with the same rigor as a product,” he says, “it doesn’t just protect value. It creates it.”
The views expressed here are Narendhira Chandraseharan’s personal opinions and do not reflect those of his current or former employers.
The views shared by Narendhira Chandraseharan were provided in a personal capacity and do not represent those of his current or former employers.
