Summary
Join us for a wide-ranging conversation on how we are building a thriving team of designers empowered to drive digital transformation at scale. Hear about our challenges and lessons learned. We will talk about team building, employee engagement, design thinking, and design maturity.
Key Insights
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Design at JP Morgan Chase serves as a strategic agent of digital transformation by centering client-centric innovation despite legacy technology and culture.
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The Access platform is a 15-year-old treasury management tool used by global companies, now undergoing modernization to improve end-to-end user experience.
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Cultural change and collaboration across product, tech, and design teams are tougher than process changes in adopting digital-first mindsets.
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Ruthless prioritization, learned from mentor Deborah Danielson, helps leaders focus on impact amid many competing demands.
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To scale design teams effectively, blending senior mentors with junior designers promotes growth and cost efficiency.
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Pair design, inspired by paired scholarship traditions, is a promising but still experimental practice to elevate quality and speed of design work.
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Onboarding new designers involves supported partnerships like buddy systems and group learning pods focused on domain knowledge and peer collaboration.
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Transparency using design ops artifacts, weekly updates, and clear roadmaps builds alignment and stakeholder trust across large, distributed teams.
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Managing burnout requires openness, flexibility, empathy, and pacing, especially given pandemic-related role collapsing and remote work challenges.
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Executive sponsorship combined with bottom-up enthusiasm is crucial to embedding design thinking as a widespread organizational behavior rather than a checkbox training.
Notable Quotes
"Ruthless prioritization is the outcome of focusing on what uniquely leverages your skills and impact."
"Banks have 144 years of technology baggage that make digital transformation a complex cultural as well as technical challenge."
"Design isn’t here to save the day, but to see things through to the next day."
"We’re all paddling in the same boat and even a slight rhythm mismatch can tip it over."
"Change behavior isn’t magic; it requires ongoing coaching and support beyond initial training."
"Having a growth mindset means continually inviting input and checking egos at the door."
"It’s normal not to hit the ground running in our complex domain, and that’s okay."
"Feeling like you’re making a difference today, and seeing that impact, keeps designers motivated."
"Empathy means being in it with people, but not so much you lose your own center."
"Design thinking is less about methods and more about behaviors—being empathetic, curious, imaginative, and collaborative."
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