Episode 144: Banking 2.0 or How to Drive Change and Scale in Financial Organizations with Anish Bhimani, Managing Director and Chief Product Officer at JPMorgan Chase, Commercial Banking

In this episode of Product Thinking, Anish Bhimani, Managing Director and Chief Product Officer at JPMorgan Chase, Commercial Banking joins Melissa Perri to share his insights on how product managers can scale and lead digital transformation in commercial banking. They explore the importance of building a customer-centric culture, the challenges of shifting to an outcome-driven mindset, and JP Morgan's digital evolution by mixing innovation and tradition.

You’ll hear them talk about:

[10:55] - Managing business operations at scale provides unique challenges and opportunities, especially with JP Morgan Chase, who are interacting with almost half of US households and overseeing about a third of the US economy daily. Successfully implementing product management strategies in large-scale companies differs from startups. However, for JPMorgan Chase, the mindset shift from simply executing tasks to solving core business problems has been critical. The journey is still ongoing, but the company noticed a change from traditional multi-month deliveries to agile sprints and from strict requirements to problem-solving, design thinking, and product discovery.

[14:00] - In the finance industry, the concept of a product has gradually evolved beyond classic payments, loans, and credit cards. Today, there are four main types of products: financial products, experience products, business engines, and business platforms. However, the lines between experience and financial products are increasingly blending, especially in consumer banking. Customers care about their overall experience as they care about their money. As a result, the entire customer journey is essential to product consideration.

[17:33] - Product managers have to focus on the outcomes they strive to achieve rather than deliverables. In essence, products vary and each has a dedicated PM. However, many often support other products instead of focusing on their own and compromising their needs. Therefore, the major challenge lies in transitioning from a deliverable-focused to an outcome-driven mindset. Also, your primary focus should be to align everyone toward the same organizational goals.

[22:58] - In product management, balancing long-term outcomes and short-term outputs is essential. An uneven strategy might lead to friction among teams. Moreover, implementing OKRs can help in setting clear goals and measures. However, you must simplify and focus on a few metrics that drive business outcomes. But it all starts with customer experience, as operational efficiency often follows naturally.

[34:07] - Successful product leaders have to balance business knowledge with technology and product knowledge, as well as understand coding basics. JPMorgan Chase mixes long-standing employees with external hires to nurture a diversity of thought. The company might face cultural challenges and compliance requirements, but the benefits outweigh the negatives. Also, as business and strategy merge, JPMorgan's strategy evolves to build a more holistic customer-centric digital experience.

Intro/Outro - 00:00:01:

Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.

Melissa Perri - 00:00:39:

Ever wish for total alignment with executives, the end to those never-ending debates, results that make everyone sit up and take notice, amplifying influence across your organization, the secret, it's not just about managing, it's about facilitating. Level up your ability to facilitate clear, powerful conversations with stakeholders through Voltage Control's facilitation certification program. Learn more and get $500 off at voltagecontrol.com/product. We'll be putting that link in the show notes for you as well.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. So for the past eight years, I have been working with a lot of large software enabled companies, many of them Fortune 500, Fortune 50 companies. Who have been on a digital transformation journey. One question that I always get them when they're starting to incorporate product management or trying to figure out how to scale it is, how does everybody else do this? And sometimes it's really hard to find those stories. So I am really excited to be able to bring you one of those stories today. Straight from J.P. Morgan. So today we're going to be joined by Anish Bhimani, who's the Managing Director and Chief Product Officer at J.P. Morgan Chase, where he has global responsibility for digital strategy, digital transformation, and product development in commercial banking.

But before we hear about Anish's story, we're gonna turn to our Dear Melissa segment where you can write me in any question that you have about product management, product strategy, anything, and then I answer them every single week. So if you have a question for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what you're thinking. This week's question is about digital transformation, so let's hear what they have to say.

Dear Melissa, Product Designer here and long-time advocate for adopting contemporary product practices and driving cultural change. I've worked with a number of organizations that are in the middle of their own digital transformations, and I've been surprised at how shallow and underdeveloped their business and product strategies are. I often see strategy articulated as revenue and retention targets combined with very specific feature deliverable goals. My passion is for adding vision, purpose, and intent in between those. So my question is, how? What have you seen work? How can I help leadership see the value in focusing on outcomes versus something that's very prescriptive?

So in a lot of organizations, what you're seeing is that they're missing what I call the missing middle in my strategy framework. And that means that they usually have a very lofty vision. They have some high level targets that they want to hit, and they just have a whole laundry list of features. And what's happening is that they're not developing this portfolio vision or this product strategy and kind of bringing together how the business is going to be manifested through the software. So how do we reach our business goals through software goals? And a lot of times, too, those business goals are poorly articulated. We'll just see revenue, retention metrics, things that are super high level, but they're not saying how. And what's missing there is what I call intent. So when I talk about business goals, we talk about them in strategic intent form. And what that's basically saying is that we want to go after certain business targets, but they're qualified in a certain way. So it's about attacking a certain persona, right? Attacking a certain market, going upmarket, going downmarket, moves that really affect the entire business, not just the software team, but it helps us prioritize and understand what we are prioritizing from a business perspective.

So for example, instead of saying that you want to increase ARR by 20% next year, you want to say that I want to increase ARR by 20% next year by going upmarket and moving into the enterprise and finding five proof points, right? So five logos that we can actually capture for that. That's giving us some more intent. That's saying that we're focusing on the enterprise versus the Mid-Market versus individuals or whatever else you have. And that might be your number one priority. Normally there's not more than three strategic intents. If you're not sure what your strategic intents are, they might be locked up in one of your leaders' heads. So I would go to them and ask them, say like, hey, I know you want us to increase revenue next year, but I've got two situations. Like, should we go after this type of persona, this type of customer, or that type of customer? Which one do we believe is going to drive more of our revenue? Because that's going to help me prioritize what our maps are looking at, what our vision is for. Like, who is our customer? Who are we actually serving there? So you can go and ask the leaders questions. And clarifying questions like that might make it more apparent what the strategy is.

Sometimes strategy is just stuck in their heads, and they haven't written it down. Sometimes it's not there at all. And if it's not there at all, they are going to have to do a lot of work in the organization to actually figure out what you want to go after using data. So I want to look at cohort analysis. I don't want to understand who we're serving now, if that makes sense in the future, how the markets are reacting to that, what our technology is capable of, all to form this huge product strategy. Now, as a UX architect, which you mentioned to me in your email, you might not have the power to do all those things, but you can definitely start a conversation and bring up those points. So say, who do we want to focus on? What's our most important customer? So you can definitely ask those questions. So ask things like, who's the target audience? Who's the person that we really want to go after? Who are our customers? Who are our users? How does this change our business? Are we going to stop what we're doing now? Are we going to evolve into something else? Are we continuing with it? What type of innovation do we actually want to bring to people? What kind of problems do we want to solve?

Start asking these questions and see if you can pull out a strategy that might be hiding somewhere and put some form to it. When I work with a lot of leaders, I'll get them to write down these things, or I'll write it down for them and then put it back in front of them and say, is this the way that you want to go? And that usually clarifies it. Now, one thing, too, with digital transformations is that you want to look to see if your leaders, especially in product areas, with the product vision, portfolio vision, are actually capable of doing those things. And that's why it's really important to have some product skills baked into the mid tiers and upper tiers of organizations doing digital transformations because they need to know what's required in a portfolio strategy or what's required in a product strategy. So it also look and see who you have in the organization who might be capable of doing these things and trying to get them on your team. And that's really a hard part for people going through digital transformations because we need strong product leaders that are going to lead the teams, set the strategy, rope them all around that to actually usher a lot of this through. And without those people, it becomes really hard to do it, or we need to educate them. So we need to take two approaches by either hiring in people who know how to do it or educating the people we have in those positions so that they can actually create great strategies.

So that's why I'm actually really excited for you to hear from Anish today, who does have a great experience in product management. And he's going to be talking us through how he led digital transformation in commercial banking and how he thinks about product strategy too in his part of the organization at J.P. Morgan Chase. Welcome, Anish.

Anish Bhimani - 00:07:40:

Hey, welcome, also really glad to be here.

Melissa Perri - 00:07:42:

Great. So you are a Chief Product Officer of a very large bank. Many banks are considering, do I have a chief product officer? It's kind of new, I feel like, for some places. How did you end up in this role?

Anish Bhimani - 00:07:55:

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. My background was actually in Cybersecurity, of all things. So it's not necessarily a natural path, but I spent most of my career being in Cybersecurity, aspiring to be the CISO at a large global bank. Got that job many years ago, and I remember thinking to myself at the time, I was like, huh, you know, there aren't too many bigger jobs in Cybersecurity, short of government, which I didn't really have an interest in. So I remember talking to my boss at the time, who was the CIO of the firm, and I said, look, I could be more than happy doing this job five or 10 years from now, but only because I chose to do it, not because it's the only thing everybody thought I knew how to do. And he looked at me, he's like, well, nobody thinks that. And I was like, huh, well, maybe it's just me then. The message I took from that is, like, the more narrowly you define yourself, the fewer doors are open to you. So we laid out a path, and what would you like to do? I was like, well, I'd like to run a technology organization. So we laid out a path for me to move into a CIO role, basically, at J.P. Morgan, the divisional CIOs, or what people call probably CTOs in other organizations, so leading application development and other things like that. So I moved into a role as CIO of our corporate sector, and then into commercial banking nine years ago. And then increasingly, what you've found, not surprisingly, in the technology organization is, we were largely, I'll call them order-takers, you can call it a feature factory, but just people were just lobbing demand over at us, left and right, and we were just forced to try to keep up.

So I remember saying to our CFO, and CEO at the time, I was like, this is nuts. You can't do this way. I remember, well, at one point, we were being asked, we had all these transformation teams all over the place, and product development Team, and Reengineering teams, and other things like that, none of whom were talking to each other. And we found ourselves, one day, being asked to build a kid-you-not for different digital onboarding solutions by different teams that had no idea the other ones exist. So I went to our CEO, I said, I need a partner. I need somebody who can rein this all in, put together a strategy, lining up with the business heads, and figure out what are the things we wanna be able to offer to customers. And took about a year of convincing them back and forth, and it was, ah, you guys are fine, tech guys will figure it out, et cetera. And when the light bulb finally went on, and realized we were not nearly as structured as we could be, and we weren't focused around customer outcomes and things like that, it was very much a, oh my God, you're right, we absolutely need that. You do it. He's like, well, what do you mean? He's like, well, I can find other technologists, but you need somebody who understands the business, who understands technology, who can speak to both folks and has the credibility of the various business heads. So that was 18 months ago. It's been one of the best moves I ever made, and it's been a blast.

Melissa Perri - 00:10:37:

Amazing. So you kind of talked yourself into this role, trying to find somebody else. Love it. You've also been at J.P. Morgan for over 20 years. What keeps you there?

Anish Bhimani - 00:10:47:

Yeah, you know, if you would have told me when I joined the bank that I'd still be here 20 years later, I would have said you were nuts, right? But it's not far and away, it's an easy answer. It's the people. The quality of people that you get to work with is unbelievable, right? You're never more than one or two steps away from the world's expert on one thing or another, right? I also think that what I love is being able to do things at a scale where you can really make a difference. One in two US households has a relationship with J.P. Morgan Chase, right? About a third of the U.S. Economy passes through us every day, right? So talking about building things at scale, I remember when I was running security, you get 99.9% of everything done. Okay, great, only a thousand things left to do, right? So being able to do things at a point where you do have to engineer things for constant uptime and scale and $10 trillion a day and other things like that. So a combination of people and just the challenges, right? I was CTO of an internet startup back during the dot com days and I feel like I get more challenges on more technical challenges and more client challenges here than I ever did as part of a startup.

Melissa Perri - 00:11:50:

I love hearing you talk about scale too, because as I was getting into product management and teaching people about product management, especially banks and other financial institutions, a lot of them started going, can you actually do this at scale? Or is what you're teaching us for startups? Like, oh, that's for startups, that's for growth stage companies. We don't need product managers at banks. And I heard this for years and I think we've come away from that now, which is fantastic. But it is definitely a different animal running product management at scale like you are doing. So can you tell us a little bit about the journey and the transformation that you led commercial banking through to get to the state in product management?

Anish Bhimani - 00:12:30:

Yeah, let me be very clear. It is a journey we are still very much on and will be for years to come, right? Somebody once told me is the farther you go, the longer you realize the road actually is, right? So it's one of those journeys that never ends. I think if you look at our journey, and I think it's not uncommon with a lot of large organizations, it started in the technology organization with the Agile transformation called a decade ago, right? And you saw people moving to, hey, we wanna get away from these big multi-month delivery efforts and move to much smaller two-week sprints and retrospectives and doing all that kind of stuff too. And that was great for the technology organization. The business didn't really move along with it, right? So you still had a lot of these people, okay, great, here's my list of requirements. Go do your agile thing and we'll figure it out. And what I would say is that even in the early days of large companies, banks, or otherwise adopting product management, it became a little bit of just a different way of doing builds, you know, better than anybody, right? That the build is only one part of the broader efforts. So the biggest push we've had more recently is, okay, great, yes, we need to align ourselves in products. And yes, we need to have cross-functional teams with product and designers and engineers and data people and other things like that. But equally, you need to reframe people's views around, don't build me something, solve this problem. So that's been the big change, is focusing on things like product discovery and focus on things like design thinking and iterative changes. An MVP is not a 1.0 build that takes you nine months, it's the quick and dirty two week thing. And that's the biggest challenge, is not so much changing the way the engineers work or even some of the product teams, but changing the way the business thinks about what we're doing.

Melissa Perri - 00:14:16:

And I think that's the hardest part for a lot of places, right? Is like getting those mindsets shifted to what actually is product management. And one thing I run into a lot, and one big question I get a lot in this podcast too, is like, what is a product as we talk about it in banking or in a financial industry, right? Like something that's more software enabled. How do you think about that? Like what's a product for you?

Anish Bhimani - 00:14:40:

Yeah, you know, it's interesting and we get this a lot, right? So when people think of products in banking, they think of payments, they think of loans, they think of credit cards, they think of other things like that. The way I think about it, Melissa, is that we have the construct I use is there's four kinds of products that we support. There are financial products. What does the customer actually buy? There are product experience. How does the customer consume them? That could be digitally, it could be through a banker, it could be through a service task, anything like that. There are what I call business engines or how do we fulfill those products, right? Those financial products. And then there's platforms, which underlie the whole thing. And what I would say is the line between financial experience and product products is very rapidly getting blurred, especially at the low end of commercial banking and consumer banking that happened decades ago, right? But if you're a startup or you're a small business or whatever, you care as much about how easy it is to use something or what the value added services are as you do about the transaction itself. Nobody has ever said, I love my bank, my payments always get there. But it is how do you think about that full end to end experience? And the thesis that I use at the bank is the experience is the product.

Melissa Perri - 00:15:58:

I think that's good. I really like that. And I like to do this metaphor too, where I'm like, you don't really buy a credit card just because it gives you credit. Like you get a credit card because it's easy to pay the bills and you can get points with it and all these different packages on it. So when you talk about the experience. It's everything you interact with around that financial product. You're looking at that.

Anish Bhimani - 00:16:19:

Yeah, it's actually, it starts with, hey, you know, I think I might need some capital to grow my business. How do I find out about it? What are the options for it? Where do I go research the background of that? And then it gets to the, all right, what are the offerings that you have? And how do you allow people to self-service that? Whereas historically, it would have been call one of our bankers and set up a meeting and you do other things like that. So it is that full end to end. From when do you first think about something? So how do you find out about it? How do you make your purchasing decision? How do you onboard to that product? How do you consume the product? How do you get support for the product? How do you think about loyalty or building community or whatever? And then at some point in the future, if you decide to off board from a product, hopefully we hope that's not the case, right? What does that look like, right? So it is that full end to end view of the life cycle of how the customer thinks about it, not just how the product manager thinks about it. Tony Fadell has a great book out for people that haven't read it called Build, which really explores this in great detail and it's something I recommend to anybody.

Melissa Perri - 00:17:17:

Where I see people get tripped up is when we start talking about this end-to-end experience being the product, which I totally agree with you on, then they go, so what are the boundaries of a product manager, a digital product manager? What do they do? Are they experience managers? I've seen some companies call them experience managers, but then they also have product managers and gets really convoluted with all these different areas. How do you think about setting up your teams and what product managers oversee, how they work with business people or UX designers or other places around that?

Anish Bhimani - 00:17:51:

It's a great question. Let me start with, I think increasingly, the boundary between product managers and business people is rapidly getting blurred as well. Huge believer, obviously, in OKRs and other things like that as well, but the biggest challenge has been getting people to think about what are the outcomes we're trying to deliver, not what are the deliverables we're on the hook for, right? Go back to that framework I talked about before. You have financial experience, product products, business engines, and platforms. Each of those types of products have product managers associated with them. So financial product managers might be measured on things like revenue, as well as things like customer satisfaction and other things like that, but they equally have to care about what's the onboarding experience for that as well. Onboarding itself is a product for us, and we have an onboarding product manager who's measured on things like cycle time and customer satisfaction and other things like that. So it's really about finding the right measures of outcome that support the business goals, right? So we have our business goals at the top of the commercial bank, those cascade down to objectives that we have across the product organization, that cascade down to the individual product lines, that cascade down to the individual products. But a lot of it is getting all of those different product teams, and we have effectively 16 product lines that go across those four areas. A lot of their objectives have actually nothing to do with their individual product, they're in support of other products. And that's the hard it's getting people to be willing to naturally subordinate some of the things they would have done for their own product in the name of the bigger goal for the business, right? And the hardest change we've had in this whole exercise and this whole transformation that we're doing hasn't been about getting people to change the way they think about building or to get more of the product mindset or even things like discovery and spending more time with clients, which has been a challenge. It's been that it's been shifting to that outcome- driven mindset. Because we, like so many other big companies, are so set in our ways of, all right, there's a project and you deliver the same thing on June 14th, not June 12th, but June 14th. And is the project red? Is the neighbor's a green? And what's late? And what's your deliverable? And where are my savings? Those habits die hard. The one thing that I would say we're laser focused on right now is getting those outcomes right and get everybody marching in the same direction behind a common set of goals for the organization.

Melissa Perri - 00:20:10:

Besides history of meeting all these deadlines and being accountable for it, why do you think people have a hard time thinking in outcomes? What have you seen be the thing that people resist and what have you used as ways to get them to be more outcome oriented?

Anish Bhimani - 00:20:26:

I think there's two answers to that. Number one is everybody loves to say, It's okay to fail. Till you actually do. And then all of a sudden, everybody comes out of the woodwork and how could you let this happen? And for every one person doing something, there's six people telling them they're doing it wrong and things like that as well. The other thing I'd say, Melissa, is the challenge with outcomes is you can't escape accountability. There's a lot of sort of human nature that says, well, wait a minute, I did my part. My project was green. I delivered this thing. The fact that we didn't get the outcome for the customer, it's not my fault. I was like, well, wait a minute, that's why we're here, right? How do you put the customer at the center of everything we do and make sure that they are getting the outcome they need? If you do your little part building this widget or this feature and nobody uses it, what the hell was the point? And what I say to the team all day long is basically fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And it's really easy to say, all right, I have a solution. I'm going to get building. I know how to build and that's what I fall back on. I build it and nobody uses it. We haven't solved the problem. We are much less likely to fall down on execution, in terms of how we do the development or other than like that, than we are to execute flawlessly against a solution that solves completely the wrong problem, solving the first place. So how do you get people thinking about what's that problem I'm trying to solve? And how do I know when I've solved the problem? And that's hard because you got to spend the time doing discovery, you got to spend the time with the customers and make sure you understand what their problems are, not just the problems you think they are or the bankers think they are or anything else like that. Then you have to come up with a solution, then you have to deliver it, then you have to drive adoption, and then you have to realize the business outcomes. It's harder and there's a certain theme with a lot of people is like, boy, I don't want to do that, that sounds like work.

Melissa Perri - 00:22:19:

Yeah, that's true. You have to wait to get the outcome. There's all these lagging indicators. So everybody's like, well, I want to know now if I was successful so I can move on, right? Instead of thinking in product terms, like project terms, of, OK, I did it. Let me just kick it over and it's done now. So I see that friction happening as well.

Anish Bhimani - 00:22:40:

Yeah, that's fair. I do think there's probably a happy medium we have to get to, which is as much as we want to get away from deliverable-based measures, there is a certain amount of that, right? If you want to see this outcome by the end of next year, you have to work backwards from that, but there might be deliver this capability in November, so you can roll it on in December, so you can start to see progress in January, and you can iterate around that. And as much as we want to get to a purely outcome-driven model, there is that nice balance you have to get to.

Melissa Perri - 00:23:08:

I'm so happy you said that because I do see that be an issue. I think when people are learning product management for the first time or going through these transformations, it's like they skewed so far to outcomes. They forgot that outputs actually get you the outcome at the end of the day. So I've seen infighting happen where people start yelling at them like, no, we can't talk about the solution. You can only talk about the outcome. Like we can't talk about the solution. And it'll go a little bit back and forth. So I love that healthy medium. How do you make sure that people are balancing that? What kind of methods of reporting or looking at progress do you use to say, hey, here are the things that we're doing and this is how we're tying it back to outcomes?

Anish Bhimani - 00:23:47:

This is a journey that we're on. But we started with, all right, what are the big major objectives we have across the organization? And for us, it's basically three high-level themes. It's deliver a great digital experience to our corporate customers, deliver a great digital experience to our real estate investors, and give our front office all the tools that they need to better serve our clients. Those are the high-level ones. That breaks down to a set of 11 more specific objectives, things like onboard a customer in 24 hours or be able to reduce the cycle time for loans or things like that. When we did that, you just try to strike this balance between doing everything top down and doing everything bottoms up. So then we asked everybody, OK, what are you working on and how do you measure the progress? Just getting people used to that idea of those measures. And they came back with a set of KRs for their objectives that they had, which was great. The problem is there were 341 of them. And I was like, well, wait a minute, we can't be... And by the way, only less than half of them had targets unless half of those were being measured. I was like, all right, you don't have 341. You have a lot less than that. One more thing, which is if you took those 341, how many of them actually mapped up to those 11 objectives we had? About half. So what's the other half of the organization doing? So then we took another crank of it and that 341 came down to like 140, about 80% of which mapped to the top. So that's great. There's always gonna be 20% of things that come up and life gets in the way and that sort of thing too. But then you look at, all right, Of all those things in there, how many if we do them all?

Do we actually get the benefit that we expect from all these objectives? And the answer, unfortunately, was no. There's a lot of good stuff in there. Again, there are a lot of good ideas. Everybody's got a good idea, right? We're long past the days of funding bad ideas, but it's how do you get the focus on those down to the handful of things that I refer to as the difference makers? If you get these things done, you make a substantial difference in the business outcomes that we have. So it is very much that. It is that OKR framework, but it's getting it down to a handful of measures that really matter and clearing everything else out. So if you look at a lot of organizations, they get very focused on operational efficiency, right? And, okay, how do we do this faster so I can reduce the number of operations people I have doing something else like that? It's like you can't lead with that. You lead with customer experience. How do I deliver a much better customer experience? And let's use the onboarding. If I can onboard a customer in 24 hours, they get a much better experience. And to do that, I have to do so much automation and Process Reengineering, other things that you get the operational efficiency anyway. So don't measure 20 different things. Measure the one. In that case, cycle time of onboarding. And everything else flows from there. So it is a handful of metrics that really make a difference. We have about 40, which is still a lot, but it's a hell of a lot better than 341.

Melissa Perri - 00:26:46:

Yeah, definitely progress there. What I'm hearing from you is you started by first yourself like setting the objectives at the top. And then you asked everybody how they were meeting those objectives and you bubbled it up and then you reconciled and then had discussions about it. Is that how you went about setting the strategy the first time?

Anish Bhimani - 00:27:04:

Yeah, that's exactly it. It's a top-down meeting bottom-up, right? Because what you don't want to do is dictate everything top-down, because then you're basically saying, hey, go build this for me. And then you're not getting the value of, with thousands of engineers, let's get them involved in the process and get them talking to customers. And if you say the goal is to, all right, we want to go take that hill, to use a military analogy, or we want to achieve that goal, how are we going to do it? I have no idea. That's what we're all here for, but let's figure it out together. But it is aligning on those North Star objectives and then clearing out all the other work and all the other things that don't align to those objectives, right? Because there's no shortage of demand still coming in from random parts of the organization. I think the biggest change for a lot of our newer product managers or people that are new to the role entirely is this is not a demand-driven approach, right? It's a top-down, objective-driven approach that is constrained by capacity. Here's the capacity you have. What can you do? And we have consciously constrained capacity, not because of a resource issue. That's a lot less of our issues, but because of focus issue, just to get people back to what are those things that matter most.

Melissa Perri - 00:28:13:

Yeah, I think that's really important. One thing I observed in a lot of companies is when they went through agile transformations, they basically put a product owner over every single little tiny component in their portfolio. They looked at what they had and then they said, let's put a team over everything. And then these teams got huge. And what happened was they basically came back with 10,000 objectives of what to do. And all of them were small and all of them didn't really matter. So how did you think about with this organization managing that capacity, right, not keeping it from spiraling out of control? How did you figure out what the right size should be?

Anish Bhimani - 00:28:52:

Yeah, we are still working through that again, to be clear. That's a common theme you're gonna hear a lot during this discussion. Let's start by limiting the number of things that we are focused on and care about, and then limiting the capacity. We just said, this is the number of people we're gonna have. And we started with my partner, who's in my old role in CIO. She and I sort of sat down and said, okay, how fast can we legitimately and responsibly grow an organization? How fast can we hire and backfill attrition? And we're in this hybrid model, and how can we matriculate people and bring them into the firm and actually have them be constructive? And that's the number we're gonna aim at. Then it becomes basically a portfolio allocation model to say, what are the areas that are gonna have the biggest impact? Oh, and by the way, we're going through cloud migration and we're modernizing our environment and other things like that, so we have to count for that. And you sort of do a top-down asset allocation model and say, all right, here's the amount of resources we're gonna put on this product area or this overall and then journey for a client or things like that. What can we get done with that? And then it's an iterative back and forth. The biggest challenge around that has been getting out of the annual budgeting cycle, which is the, hey, it's September, everybody lob in all your demand and then it'll be too big and we'll just haircut it by some arbitrary number and everybody will complain and you don't get that lined up. And that's something we still sort of struggle with.

Melissa Perri - 00:30:11:

What have you been doing to take steps towards making it work with the budgeting process or giving you a little bit of flexibility there? Are you like very constrained by it or do you have some room to do things?

Anish Bhimani - 00:30:23:

I think the biggest thing that we get people to realize, more in the business than in the engineering groups, is that you're not funding a project, you're funding a long-lived team that is going to be here in perpetuity. So you're funding capacity. So what we started doing probably two years ago is we have quarterly product reviews with the product team basically looking at, okay, how are you doing against your goals? What do your roadmap look like? What's the incremental demand? How do we think about what additional capacity do you need, et cetera? And we try to adjust that quarterly. So we'll make adjustments in sort of April, July, October, where is she going through, set now as well. And we do that on a rolling basis. In April of 23, we're making changes to our forecast for 24. So then come the annual budgeting cycle, we've already baked that in, but we can back it up with here's the outcomes that we need to get to. Right. Whereas before it's a little bit of, well, I need 50 people to do this project and then they'll go away. Well, first off, it'll take longer than you think. Second off is they never go away. Right. So the third is, are we building the right capacity in the right places?

Melissa Perri - 00:31:37:

Yeah, that seems like it makes it a little bit more continuous too, and it's not just like a mad dash at November to set everything, and that helps.

Anish Bhimani - 00:31:45:

We still have a little bit of that challenge because old habits die hard. Because there is still a view in parts of the organization, but wait a minute, if I don't ask for it in September, I won't get it in November, and then when I need it in June, you'll tell me I can't have it. So there's a little bit of, you have to build trust with the organization that we're going to be able to do something off cycle when they need it. I think what we've basically said is we will absolutely do that if you're making the case for I have a history of meeting my outcomes, I have a history of doing things efficiently, I have a history of delivering well, and not just I need more people, I need more people.

Melissa Perri - 00:32:20:

Yeah. So as the chief product officer, you kind of have to deal with... Telling everybody else in the organization how this works, right? Managing this team, building up this team, and setting the strategy. What's your day-to-day look like? You know, as a chief product officer of a large financial services.

Anish Bhimani - 00:32:40:

I don't know if there's a common day out there, but I try to spend as much time with the individual teams as I can. I spend a lot of time in one-on-one conversations with my peers who run the various businesses. I don't spend as much time as I would like, but I try to spend as much time with customers as I can directly and hear from them directly around that. There is still a good amount of just get out and meet with people in person to help drive the overall message. I would say my job is one-third evangelist. Right, one third strategist, right, and one third execution. But the way I would look at it is, my goal is to build a community of product managers who think this way, and to help the business make that change, to be able to think differently, to be more capacity-driven, not demand-driven, to be more outcome-driven, not output-driven, to be more, the bankers have always been customer-centric, but for a lot of the product and the GDTs, to be more customer-centric, put the customer's needs ahead of everybody else's, and everything else will flow from that. So a lot of it is, I said a third evangelist, might be a little bit higher on where I think about it, but that's a big part of where I spend my time.

Melissa Perri - 00:33:50:

So you mentioned this a little bit before, and I want to get your take on it. In these transformations and banks, a lot of times people are coming from the business side, like financial product side, let's say, and becoming product owners or product leaders too for the first time. How are you thinking about structuring your organization to bake good product management practices in and level those people up? And what does a product leader, I guess, look like at J.P. Morgan, like higher up? What are they overseeing? Is it just technology? Is it that whole experience? Like what's that actually look like?

Anish Bhimani - 00:34:22:

For all of our products, we have a product management team, an engineering team, a design team, and a data team, team of data scientists, et cetera. The data science is a new app that we had. I am responsible for the product teams, the design teams, and the data teams, and I have a peer who's responsible for the engineering teams around that as well. Melissa its, you can't have somebody in this role who understands, is a deep subject matter expert on the business, but has no idea how technology works. And you equally can't have somebody that spent their whole career doing development, but doesn't understand how loans work, or payments work, or other things like that. So you wanna find a right balance between deep business knowledge and technology knowledge and product knowledge, right? So when we first started this, what you saw was, as we had a push for our technology organization to get much more technical, and you saw a reduction in the number of BAs and project managers, and we had a lot of those people sort of land in product roles and just rebadge themselves. I said, well, that's not what this is, right? That's just people trying to find a different role and sort of reading the tea leaves and things like that. What I've said is, for every person that's in this role, these product management roles, they need to, first off, have a basic understanding of coding, right? You have to have written code some point in your life, even if it was in school, right? My kids, you can't graduate high school in the state of New Jersey without taking a programming class anymore. It's got just a basic skill that everybody should have. See, a lot of people's like, oh, I'm not a techie, I can't code. Well, then, I don't know what that means anymore, right? So that's number one.

Number two is, we have tried to make sure that everybody has a basic understanding of the business, how the business makes money, why you care about operating deposits versus non-operating deposits, and why bilateral loans are different from syndicated loans, and that kind of stuff as well. Even if you're in a platform role, you have to understand what those sort of things are. And third is, we're doubling down on product management training and the things like that. We're doing a lot of coaching work and the things like that. What I will say, though, is we have had to balance the organization with people that have spent a long time at the bank with a lot of external hire. The organization is probably about a third of the organization is from outside the financial industry entirely, hence the focus on financial product training and the things like that. About a third of the organization is long time J.P. Morgan people, or I wanna say a long time. I don't know what long time means anymore, but let's say more than five years at the bank or things like that. And then about a third are from other parts of the industry, from other firms that are doing something similar to we are.

Melissa Perri - 00:36:57:

What have you seen by doing that balance? Like what kind of benefits are you getting from it?

Anish Bhimani - 00:37:02:

You get good diversity of thought. You get people that have been product managers in tech companies that are very good at pushing the boundaries and very good at getting people to think differently. And we've had a huge influx. And we built a design team basically from scratch in the last five years. And they get people to think differently. I'm a big believer in co-locating teams. And contrary to many other people, I do believe in the value of sitting physically sitting together in an office. And when you have that connectivity around there, it rubs off on people from that point of view. At the same time, you have people that have the ability to navigate the firm. This is a big place. It takes a while to figure out how to get things done. So that balance of people that know how to navigate the firm coupled with people that think differently is very powerful. It does create challenges because you do get the inevitable culture clash. And you get to the, I don't understand why I have to do it this way. This is big dumb bank stuff. And some of it is. And some of it we are immune to because we're seeing it forever. But some of it is, no, that's not big dumb bank stuff. That's the Federal Reserve requirements or the OCC requirements or things like that that we have to get to. So there's a little bit of challenges there, but the good far outweighs the bad.

Melissa Perri - 00:38:13:

That's really nice. That's impressive that it's up there. One of the things you also mentioned when we were talking about this was how business and technology are getting super intertwined. And I think that's why you just said, you need to have somebody who knows tech and somebody who knows the business. When you're thinking about setting strategy for the commercial bank, what does that kind of look like? And what's your role as a chief product officer in that? So if you're looking long-term commercial banking, this is where we want to go, here's our vision. What do you do to figure out what's going to get done?

Anish Bhimani - 00:38:43:

The strategy for the business is set obviously by our CEO and our management team, of which I'm a part, and that's something we do on a regular basis. We'll have long-term goals. We want to grow the innovation economy business to X size. We want to expand internationally. We want to increase our deposits by Y, or whatever those sort of goals are. Then you say, okay, what do we need to do to do that? It's like, well, more recently, a good example, in 2023, obviously the banking industry's been through a lot of turmoil in the first part of the year. With what happened to Silicon Valley Bank as an example, I think it really drove home for everybody the value of a much more digital set of offerings, a much better customer experience, a much more customer-centricity of things. So it was very clear, okay, you want to grow an innovation economy business. That begins and ends with a much stronger digital offering and much more tactical bankers, as you think about that. So what we did also is this has been a very traditionally banker-led business, a very what, in software, you might call more of a sales-led approach than a product-led approach. What we laid out on the back of everything that's happened over the last couple of years is said, look, fundamentally, you want to achieve all these goals. You want to serve the customer the way they want to be served, not the way we serve them. So the way I think about it, there are three ways we're going to serve customers, that their customers want to be served. Number one is you have a group of people that want to call a banker and just have them take care of it. I don't know, I call Melissa and she just takes care of everything for me. We call that a banker-led approach. Fine. Then we have a large majority of customers that basically say, I want to do as much as possible myself, but when things get really hairy, I want to call somebody who understands me, who understands my business, who understands my industry, who knows my goals and my hopes and my dreams and my aspirations and all that kind of stuff as well. And we call that banker-assisted.

Then there is a group of customers increasingly that we're seeing now as we grow our startup business, so things that are basically take a view, say, whatever you do, don't make me talk to a human being, I just want to take care of all myself and it should be done now. And we call that digital first. And all three of those are perfectly valid ways to drive things. The challenges traditionally, and I think this is true for commercial banking as an not just at J.P. Morgan, he says, everything we've done has been around that banker-led approach. There's always a person involved. There's a person involved in implementations and onboarding and setting up meetings, and you can't do that full end-to-end digital experience that I talked about before. And you can't take a purely banker-led approach and turn it into a digital first approach. But you can absolutely take a digital first approach and turn it into a banker-led approach. So the big challenge is when we set those overarching goals, in terms of revenue goals or diversification goals or other things like that, is how do we need to change the way we work? Whether it be in the way we are sales process, or whether it be in the onboarding process, or whether it be in service or other things like that, not just the front end experience, but the full all the way back into the operations and other things like that. That's where we get involved. To say, if the goal is to grow the innovation economy business, okay, to do that, we need to be able to onboard much faster than we do. To do that, we have to totally rethink our product implementation process.

Melissa Perri - 00:42:06:

Okay, so you've got a very intertwined software and financial strategy, right? Everything like kind of goes hand in hand here. In some organizations I've seen, it's not been that, let's start with that. We're like, we'll do the financial stuff over here and then we'll just like kick over requirements, you know, IT mindset back to the product team. Do you have, like, are your product people under you also like the business people? Are they the ones overlooking that entire experience end to end, let's say, if it's doing a financial service for a client or are you partnering with somebody on the financial side too as like, let's say a Product Leader or Head of Product of the area?

Anish Bhimani - 00:42:44:

Yeah, there's not a clean answer there. So our team worries about the experience and as I said, from the time either the customer thinks about doing something or the banker has a lead from a conversation with the customer up until the time the customer is fully up and running and being supported and things like that. That's what we're responsible for. There are a handful of groups that have responsibility for product revenue, some of which are under us and some of which are not, but that's something we're still working through. I come back to the, you see it is increasingly difficult to separate the actual financial product from the experience, right? Lending is a perfect example. If I look at large complex loans, every single one of them is a little bit bespoke. It's very difficult to build a fast digital experience when the experience is different every single time because the nature of the deals are. So you're never going to build a streamlined digital experience for a billion-dollar loan, but you can absolutely do it for a five or 10 million dollar loan that has a certain number of variables around it. The way this comes together is sometimes you have to put guard rails around the nature of the financial product that you're offering to enable the experience. Right? So you can say, all right, here's the sort of standard offering we have for startups, let's say. And if you want that, you can have it right away. You can be up and running in a day or two. If you don't and you want to negotiate every little piece of that, that's great. You're going to be a month, right? And you give people the option, right? Depends what's more important to you. So I think increasingly, like I said, you're seeing those roles come together, the financial experience and the product products.

Melissa Perri - 00:44:24:

When you're looking at the future of banking and the future of software in banking, where do you think it's heading? What are you excited about for the next 5 to 10 years?

Anish Bhimani - 00:44:33:

I think it's exactly what we've been talking about. We talked about tech and the business changing. And the first thing I love is we've gone past the, well, IT says this, right? As soon as you hear anyone say somebody calls it IT, like they're in a different place than you are right now. So now as you people see referred to it as Tech or engineering or other things like that, you see that changing a little bit. I think you start to see, there's nothing that happens in banking that is not technology driven. And I think the recognition of that has been very important. One of our CPOs and consumer that also came out of a CIO role and actually a CISO role before that. So I think you're starting to see much more technology, literacy, and fluency in the leadership of the business more broadly. I think that I said before that the experience is the product. And I think that is taking hold across the business, right? That experience could be through a bank or it could be digital, et cetera. I think the next big step is how do we leverage all of the data that we have to deliver value added services that customers can't get anywhere else, right? So the power of putting business leaders and product leaders and engineers and data scientists and designers together to deliver that great experience for the customer, I think is super powerful.

Melissa Perri - 00:45:45:

I'm really excited about that too. It sounds like a great future. So my last question for you, there's a lot of companies out there who are considering having a chief product officer who've been through a transformation, financial institutions, any large companies, I think, that are on this journey. What's your advice for them, for somebody stepping into that role as a first chief product officer and kind of getting this started?

Anish Bhimani - 00:46:08:

The first thing I would say is it's a lot harder than it looks from the outside because old habits really do die hard. So I'd say it begins and ends with top-down support. I mentioned earlier it took about a year to get the management to convince them that this is something we need to do. So you've got to have the buy-in of all of the existing teams that are out there because otherwise you have the chance of running into what I refer to as organ rejection. It's like, oh, wait a minute, the organization chews you up and spits you out. So you've got to have the buy-in of that senior leadership team around that. The second thing is you can't parachute people into these roles. You have to find, as I said, people that have done product roles in other organizations, people that are deep engineers, people that are deep business people, and sort of use that to cross-pollinate the organization. And the last thing I'd say is it takes time. We're about three years into it and we've got a long way to go, right? So these things don't happen overnight. Like I said, where you see them working, it really does start to sing to you.

Melissa Perri - 00:47:03:

And I guess I lied. One more question. What have you seen as the benefits, too? Of you stepping into the CPO role? Like what has changed for the better across the commercial banking?

Anish Bhimani - 00:47:13:

Yeah, I think we're able to achieve those outcomes faster. I think getting focused on what is it we want to see for the customer. We're able to get there faster because you don't have a lot of negotiation back and forth. I think we also had a situation before one of my colleagues called it everybody fell in love with their part of the problem, as opposed to looking at that full end-to-end customer view around that as well. Those are probably the two biggest ones. I think also we still have work to do, but getting the product teams and the engineering teams feeling like they were one joined up team has been really powerful in the places where we've gotten that. We still have, again, a few places where we don't quite have that close partnership yet, but that's been a big, huge effort as well.

Melissa Perri - 00:47:52:

Well, that sounds like a really good reason to try to adopt this role at any company that is thinking about it. So thank you so much, Anish, for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they go?

Anish Bhimani - 00:48:03:

Yeah, probably the best way to reach out is on LinkedIn. I have a love-hate relationship with some of the other social media aspects these days, so LinkedIn is the best place to reach me.

Melissa Perri - 00:48:10:

Great. Well, thank you so much for being with us and thank you for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. Make sure that you hit that subscribe button so that you never miss an episode. We'll be back next Wednesday and we'll see you then.

Stephanie Rogers