For tech professionals, considering the next career move often includes acquiring and sharpening a targeted set of skills, but the most attractive skill may be the most universally applicable: creativity.
Creative thinking skills are some of the most attractive tools a professional can have in today’s market. According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs survey, 73 percent of organizations noted that creative thinking was a top priority when considering talent — and it’s growing increasingly relevant as time goes on.
At Kikoff, employee creativity breeds new product offerings for its customers. Paul Stavropoulos, a member of the product team, underlined the power of agency on the Kikoff team, noting that for creative thinkers, a role at Kikoff means having the opportunity to take great ideas from paper to production.
“If you have an observation and you find data to support that observation and prove an initial hypothesis, you will have the chance to bring that idea to life,” said Stavropoulos.
Built In San Francisco spoke with Stavropoulos about the culture that supports Kikoff’s team of innovators and their exciting projects on the horizon.
Kikoff is a personal finance company offering fiscal wellness services via its platform.
Describe Kikoff’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
“Agency.”
Kikoff is the right place for those who want the agency to discover opportunities and want to do the work to bring those opportunities to life. If you have a proposed idea, project or exploration you are passionate about, as well as evidence that it could be a successful endeavor for the company and our users, and a thought-out plan, you will have the freedom to deliver it.
“Kikoff is the right place for those who want the agency to discover opportunities and want to do the work to bring those opportunities to life.”
Kikoff lives and breathes agency. So much of our product is the result of an internal memo with supporting data and a roadmap or the result of a hackathon project that the team wanted to bring to life. In fact, our current core offering itself was the result of a hackathon project from a few years ago.
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently, and how did it help you grow professionally?
We’re using AI agents to prevent scams, fraud and phishing attempts from ever reaching consumers via call and text.
We’ve seen so many of our consumers fall into hard financial times from such scams and have learned that people don’t want to waste their time on the phone with swindlers anymore. We’ve built an app that screens incoming calls and texts from unknown numbers, filters out known scams, solicitation and suspicious phone calls from ever reaching our users and provides context to every “legitimate” phone call from unknown numbers, so users can choose to take or decline the call.
This work has my team and me working at the forefront of AI, voice and speech-to-text technology. It also has us honing and exercising our product-market-fit and zero-to-one muscles. We’re in search of ways to provide value to people and find the fastest way to bring that value to market. It’s been a blast!
