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January 1 — 3 min read
You might be wondering how you got here, a fair question these days for anyone intrepid enough to enter an actual URL into a search bar. A blog? What is this, 2007? Yes, this is indeed a blog about technology, product, design, data and analytics, and what it takes to build a career at one of banking’s most innovative organizations. The Product & Experience and Technology team (that’s us) at Chase was among the first at the firm to undergo a massive agile transformation, and it taught us a lot, both about what we were already good at and where we could modernize our practices even further.
It’s probably fair to say that, at this stage of our modernization journey, we’re not just one of banking’s most innovative organizations – we’re one of the most innovative product and technology organizations, period.
In an era when even agile buzzwords have become a post-modern form of corporate technobabble, that may sound like a hollow boast from a heritage financial services institution with origins going back to 1799. We haven’t just put the product-aligned, agile window dressing on our offices and continued to operate like a cascading waterfall. We dug into our teams, our processes and our products to find opportunities to become truly agile, meaning, among other things, that engineers get involved early and often in discovery and design drives innovation. We organize ourselves around our products, not our business units.
The key to our agile transformation has been building cross-functional teams with clear accountability and the autonomy to make quick decisions. Our teams are not isolated, so our engineers, for instance always know the best ways – and reasons – to build, test and manage software that solves real-world problems.
Thinking about how we can work as a cutting edge, product-driven organization has made one thing very clear – technology both within Chase and the firm more broadly is not an afterthought, and it’s why we’re such a great place for technologists, product owners, designers and data leaders to build their careers. Members of the Product & Experience and Technology team have the same kind of direct customer impact as startup employees, just at a much larger scale and with all the resources of the largest bank by market capitalization in the world. We have a huge catalogue of more than 100 products, offering members of our team a ton of opportunities to innovate and positively impact our customers.
What you’ll find on this blog depends on who you are and why you came here. If you’re an engineer or data professional just starting your career, you’ll find countless examples of Chase engineers and data professionals whose work connects directly with our customers from their first day on the job. If you’re a designer coming from another industry, you’ll see how design is part of the engine that makes our customer experience hum, not just the paint on the exterior. If you’re a product owner immersed in the lingo of Silicon Valley, you’ll see that there’s a truly product-aligned organization underneath the scaffolding.
Our journey to becoming an agile, product-aligned group has been a success so far but it’s far from over. We’d like to invite you to join us, even if it’s just for some light reading between meetings, as we give you a glimpse into the future of banking and show you what’s next at Chase.