For Donna Milrod, chief product officer at State Street, good product development starts with discipline and taking a look at the bigger picture. With myriad competing priorities, she believes success boils down to creating things that work for a broader market rather than just a single request.
"Our clients are the true north," Milrod said. "You have to listen to them, but innovation isn't only about creating custom capabilities."
That restrained philosophy has underpinned a year in which she has overseen initiatives spanning development in exchange-traded funds, digital assets, private markets and geographic expansion.
In March, Milrod helped Dimensional Fund Advisors launch the first U.S. ETF share class structure for existing mutual funds, with State Street providing the operational infrastructure. This means an ETF can exist as a share class of the same mutual fund portfolio, allowing ETF investors and mutual fund investors to share one underlying fund.
More than 100 applications have now been filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, with State Street servicing more than half of them, Milrod said.
Meanwhile, digital assets continue to sit at the top of her agenda. In January, State Street launched its digital asset platform, infrastructure that is core to the bank offering tokenized money market funds and ETFs, tokenized deposits, and stablecoins.
"We've clearly moved away from experimentation to real execution," Milrod said. "We've moved from proof of concepts to asking, 'What are the business cases?' The commercial value is starting to emerge, and institutional interest is now upon us."
While regulatory clarity and growing institutional confidence have accelerated adoption of digital assets, Milrod still sees them as an addition to traditional financial infrastructure. "We believe traditional and digital assets will live side by side for a long time, and they need to interact," she said. "Our role is to manage that fragmentation."
Beyond ETFs and digital assets, she has continued to expand State Street's alternatives capabilities, helping scale the firm's private markets business while advancing next-generation transfer agency, fund accounting and administration solutions.
In the year ahead, Milrod's priorities include bringing the firm's tokenization engine into production and expanding bespoke capabilities for alternative assets.
Milrod is also preparing the business for establishing direct custody in Saudi Arabia that State Street announced earlier this year, a move she said reflects both client demand and confidence in the country's 'Vision 2030' transformation. "We've been supporting the Kingdom for many years," she said. "We felt it was the right time for us to go direct to the market."
Her advice for the next generation of leaders is to prepare themselves for how new technologies might present unique opportunities. With AI becoming embedded across product development, and quantum computing moving toward commercialization, she believes product leaders have more opportunities than ever, provided they never lose sight of the customer.
