Overhauling a 50,000-person division that spans products, countries, and a $12 billion annual budget is no easy task — but it's one that Monika Panpaliya is spearheading for the nation's largest bank.
As the head of JPMorgan's global technology-product office, Panpaliya is pivoting the bank to a product operating model that will sync IT teams and digital tech products. The goal is to operate more like a startup, Panpaliya told Insider. With the initiative, the bank appointed 25 "mini-CEOs" who are dialed in on the product and the teams supporting them.
"When you look at companies that are successful, it's about delivering products that customers love, and it's about delivering them at speed," Panpaliya added.
To get there, Panpaliya said JPMorgan had turned to another large corporation for inspiration: Google. A decade ago, the tech giant, which has about 150,000 employees, undertook its own research to determine what drove an effective team.
Termed Project Aristotle (after the philosopher's aphorism that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), Google found that five key issues determined the performance of teams in reaching both quantitative and qualitative goals.
Most importantly, Google employees had to feel psychologically secure on their teams and be willing to take risks without fear of retribution or ridicule. They also had to feel like they could reliably depend on other team members and that the responsibilities of the team were clearly defined. Last, Google found that its staff had to find meaning in their work and then see an effect in the results of the team.
For JPMorgan, implementing Google's research as the bank structures its product operating model has come down to one key task, Panpaliya said: adequately measuring employee satisfaction. It's an issue that is as salient as ever given the battle for tech talent in a highly competitive ecosystem of banks, fintechs, and other financial firms.
"We have to start measuring the sentiment of our teams and how empowered they feel. In that comes things like, 'Do I trust the people around me? Do I have psychological safety? Can I depend upon the folks on my team?'" Panpaliya said.
JPMorgan's road to a product operating model
To get the multiyear transformation underway, Panpaliya started with what she believed to be foundational pieces: company culture and mindset.
"I talked about the business outcomes, obsessing over customer experience, and then, ultimately, delivering value faster," she said.
Customer obsession, to be sure, is the first leadership principle of another Big Tech firm, Amazon. The tenet encourages employees to start at the customer and work backward, much in the way JPMorgan's product transformation starts with a customer-facing product and works backward to organize its team.
Then the bank set a road map — a catalog that identified 25 product lines, like cloud computing and artificial intelligence and machine learning — and realigned its budget to those lines. For each product line in the catalog, JPMorgan prioritized the order of which would migrate to the new structure and appointed a general manager to function as a startup CEO who is empowered to make decisions.
"The fundamental change that they undergo is the decision-making and the skill set on that team," Panpaliya said.
Once those building blocks were laid, JPMorgan instituted a quarterly business review, "moving from an annual cycle of looking at our investments to a quarterly cycle," Panpaliya said.
The bank also appointed a "cabinet" of stakeholders, which varies from product to product, to sit in on the quarterly evaluation. The cabinet has a say in where prioritization should be and where the strategy should be headed, and it analyzes feedback from real customers to see whether the bank is moving in the right direction.
During those business reviews, general managers evaluate their strategy, mission, vision, and purpose. They are appraised on their prioritization and how they're thinking about the investment and their road maps. And, of course, they assess their talent and the structure and sentiment of their teams.
In pursuit of product officers and managers
As JPMorgan undergoes the transformation, it has put an emphasis on a new kind of technologist: one that fuses business and technology for the customer experience.
In September, the bank promoted its consumer and commercial banking chief information officers Rohan Amin and Anish Bhimani to chief product officers of its consumer and community banking and commercial banking divisions, respectively. And the bank will continue to appoint chief product officers and heads of product to focus on the product and experience, Panpaliya said.
JPMorgan's transition to a product-oriented mindset has also shaped the bank's approach to recruiting.
When hiring its general managers, for example, Panpaliya said JPMorgan looked for "different dimensions" in candidates than it might have in the past. For one, the bank prioritized business and customer experience alongside technical leadership skills and "the ability to build products with the right risk and regulatory constraints."
And for product-specific roles, Panpaliya said JPMorgan also assessed how well candidates "are able to discover problems and then bring the right design, engineering, product expertise to solve that problem."
