push my product teams is to be very transparent in those conversations with our key stakeholders and with our finance partners, with our executive team, so that everyone knows what we're thinking, what we're looking through and why we have a point of view.
But to own that point of view, feel empowered to own that point of view, and be able to defend it.
If someone says to you, why do you think that's the right decision?
I would make a different decision.
You should be able to be comfortable having that point of view and defending it.
Getting that strategy alignment upfront, I think empowers everybody to feel like Like they own this problem together.
I always joke with my product teams that there is no right place for an idea to surface.
Anyone should be empowered to create ideas, to generate opportunities, but it needs to be aligned with a strategy.
And we all need to agree this is where we're moving.
Now let's create all the opportunities and ways we might move in that direction.
And that should be a team sport, right?
So idea generation shouldn't come from one person or two people.
It shouldn't come from product only or the general manager only, etc. And that's, again, part of the ecosystem we're trying to build here.
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 Perry.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Our special guest today is Jameson Troutman, the head of product for small business at JPMorgan Chase.
Chase. Jameson leads teams building innovative solutions across various domains like payments, data, and digital, all aimed at empowering over 7 million small businesses with Chase for Business.
We'll dive into how Chase is solving problems for many different customers and how they get alignment across the organization to do that, which includes everyone's favorite topic, budgeting.
But before we talk to Jameson, it's time for Dear Melissa.
This is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions.
Go to dearmelissa .com and let me know what you want me to answer on an upcoming episode.
Hey, product people, I have some very exciting news.
Our new Mastering Product Strategy course is now live on Product Institute.
I've been working on this course for years to help product leaders tackle one of the biggest challenges I see every day, creating product strategies that drive real business results.
If you're ready to level up your strategy skills, head over to productinstitute .com and use code LAUNCH for $200 off at checkout.
Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa, our company just went through layoffs and my team shrunk by 40%, but leadership still expects us to deliver the same roadmap because they think AI can make us faster.
I'm struggling with how to communicate what's actually possible without seeming like I'm making excuses.
How do you reset expectations and build roadmaps when resources get slashed?
This is a little crazy because if you don't already have an AI capability that is making you 40 % faster, it's hard to let go of 40 % of the people thinking that you might get there.
So one, it sounds like they did this a little bit prematurely and maybe it wasn't fully baked out and it wouldn't be the first company that I heard of that has done this.
And a lot of them are walking it back now.
I think Klarna was one of the examples where they laid a lot of people off and they're hiring them back.
When you come into the argument here, there's two folds.
One is about capacity planning.
So you need to explain that when we created the original roadmap, we had a certain capacity based on the team side and we planned it for that.
Now we have a different capacity, which means that we can't take all of this on.
And you have to present them with trade -offs.
We could do this, or we could do that.
And this is how far we can get towards our goals, or this is how far we can get towards our goals if we do the other one.
But that's where you just matter -of -factly say, this was planned out of capacity with our team.
We no longer have that capacity.
Now, when they push back and they say, oh, but you can use AI, if you don't have that capability already built in, and it's not making you faster, it hasn't actually increased the efficiency, there is this huge learning curve that's going to take place where you're actually figuring out what the tools can do, how much it can actually increase your capacity or allowable time, right?
To be able to do this and what kind of efficiency gains you can get.
Either way, you're not gonna be able to deliver that same roadmap if you don't have that capability already there.
So you have to walk back and show them what's realistic.
You need time and space to figure out how AI might help you become more efficient.
And that's not to guarantee that it will make you 40 % more efficient, right?
It's going to give you some kind of lift, but a lot of teams are not seeing that these crazy outlandish ideas are really coming through with how much we can actually save with time with AI.
So we want to be strategic about what AI capabilities we actually enable that will make us efficient.
We want to explain that we have to get up to speed and explore that.
And we will come back to you with an understanding and with a plan on how it's going to make us more efficient.
But at the same rate, we can't deliver this roadmap the same way that we did.
it. Now we need to build in the time for planning and for understanding these AI capabilities and seeing if they can make us faster.
Do you want us to do that first or do you want to do roadmap planning first?
Either way, if they just say do it all, like that's not an answer.
So you have to show them that it's a trade -off.
You can pick this or this, or if we just keep working in a linear fashion and we don't make these trade -offs, you're just not going to get what you want at the end of the day.
And that's the sad reality of it.
At the end of the day, you can hope and pray that that everybody can deliver on all the things that we want them to deliver on, but that's never the case.
So it's, do you want to be disappointed now?
Or do you want to be disappointed later when you thought we were going to deliver it, even though we warned you we weren't, and you're just going to be upset when we get there at the end of the year and everything is not delivered?
Or we plan for it now and we make sure we make the most strategic bets and really make sure that the most important things get done and we pull them forward if we have to, so we can make those trade -offs now.
That's the way that you're really going to want to present it.
And then you're going to want to add into that roadmap, that time to understand how AI can make us faster.
That should have really been done before the layoffs.
And I hope a little bit of it was, but if it wasn't, now's the time that you got to put it in there too.
So I do not envy you this conversation that you have to have, but that's the one that we have to go forward for because we have to be realistic.
And that's what you have to remind them of.
I can lie to you and say, we're going to do this all.
And you're just going to be disappointed at the end of the year.
The reality here is that we can't do it all.
So let's make sure the most important things we can do happen now.
And let's make those trade -off conversations and have that conversation today instead of in a year when we're all upset and we didn't get the most important things out.
So I hope that helps and good luck with that conversation.
Now it's time to talk to Jamison.
Welcome to the show, Jamison.
It's great to have you here.
Thanks for having me.
I'm super excited. I'm very excited too.
And it's exciting to talk to somebody who is building things for small businesses because I'm a small business myself.
So I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey in product management and what led to your role today.
Yeah. And thanks again for having me.
My name is Jamison Traumann.
I'm head of product for small business here at Chase.
And part of that gives me the opportunity to spend a lot of my time with people like yourself who are running small businesses all around the country, really trying to solve customer problems, generate and build a business that addresses those needs, and also hits at their passions and the things that they love to do every day.
And my product teams get to build products and services across omni -channel experience for those small business customers that really helps them and empowers them to achieve those goals.
That's really exciting.
What led you at your role at J .P.
Morgan up to taking over small business stuff today?
Yeah. So I've been in around product for a long time.
It wasn't necessarily always called product at Chase.
And we've been obviously going through transformation that many companies have over the last 10 to 20 years, but I really found it exciting and I've always found it exciting to take a customer problem, dissect it, understand how to best address that problem, and then to go work with our partners to build solutions to address that.
And I've done it in multiple lines of business, in our Chase organization, across multiple financial products, credit card and in loyalty and in other places.
And I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to take over the responsibilities for managing a small business product ecosystem.
And that's just been really amazing to get to be so close to such an amazing set of customers and really help them drive their businesses forward. And it's such a big scale for Chase as well.
You have over 7 million small businesses that you're serving out there.
How does that scale change the way that you think about product decisions?
Yeah, we do support 7 million, more than 7 million customers all around the country.
And that's also really dynamic and interesting because different parts of the country and different businesses and different verticals have different needs.
And so that makes building products quite interesting, but also quite challenging at times.
We have bigger small businesses and we have smaller small businesses that are just starting out.
We have small businesses that have employees that they pay to help drive their business.
We have some small businesses that is just a single person running the business.
We have small businesses with multiple locations, with single locations.
And so that dynamic nature of our client base makes it, like I said, challenging, but also really exciting.
And so we spend a lot of time trying to break those different customer needs down into common and shared performing capability components that we can then build and then tweak or scale in some small way to address a specific need of a specific vertical, but it still lets us optimize and create efficiency in the way that we build, right?
We can't build custom products for every segment, every customer, every political, and that's a fun challenge.
And we don't always do it perfectly.
And sometimes we always make the decision to take on a little bit of tech debt to solve something that needs to be delivered quicker.
But that's really what I find fascinating about our space is trying to solve that such a diverse customer base and doing it in an efficient, scalable way across development and product.
How do you think about the trade -offs between all these different segments that you serve?
Of course, when we build products, we don't want to be everything to everybody, right?
We want to think through prioritization or where we should focus our efforts and how we make things great for these, you know, these different needs.
What's your philosophy and how do you keep your teams on track and make sure you're not like spreading yourself thin, building all of the things?
Anyone who works in product knows prioritization is one of the most important and one of the hardest things to do and to get right.
And so we try to very aggressively focus on it as a key part of what we do.
And so we infuse this concept that everything we're working on should have first gone through a rigorous decision framework to decide that it's something we want to work on.
But then even within that, we may prioritize an area that we need to go after.
So for example, we just launched a new invoicing product for small businesses.
We did not have a solution to help them facilitate faster money movement, faster collections from their customers.
And we thought that was a place that we could play effectively.
We had a right to play.
We thought it could drive value for our customers and for our franchise.
And so we decided to prioritize that as an area.
But the criticality and the important part that we stress in our product teams is that's the first step of prioritization.
The next step is all the other stuff that comes after that.
What's the target segment that we're building this product for?
So to your point, we can't build it for big clients and small clients necessarily at the same time because there's features that one might need more than the other.
We can't necessarily build it for our custom vertical that might have very specialized needs.
And so we have to decide what's most important in that MVP or that initial set of build.
And that's all still part of that prioritization discussion.
How big of a scope?
How fast are you going to be able to move?
What do you think the value unlock is if you target that vertical or that segment versus if you target a different one?
And we try to balance the art and science of that, right?
We try to apply analytic rigor and really focus on the data and the research and what the customer's telling us.
But we also need to empower our product managers to use judgment as well, right?
Have that sort of other part of that art and science to be able to make some calls where they think we need to trust ourselves and what we know and lead into a space.
And so it's an ongoing, constant balancing act.
But I also find it to be one of the most important and, to be honest, some of the most fun parts of the job because it really shapes your roadmap, your strategy, and where you're trying to go with your business.
That judgment piece is so critical, too.
Just this week, I was having a conversation with another large enterprise about their product managers were frustrated because they felt like everybody was asking them for some super, super specific data.
And they weren't trusting their judgment when they looked at the whole picture and said, we need to go this way.
How do you encourage that culture or encourage people to have judgment in your product also to trust that judgment and listen to it when you go forward?
Yeah, and it is an ongoing push and pull that we have with our business partners, with our leadership team.
What we try to do is I break it down and we try to focus on three primary things.
First, let's make sure we not lose sight of the customer and what the customer is telling us.
So we try to really make sure we put the customer at the center.
It's great that everyone will have an opinion and a view on what they think the right answer is, but it's important to make sure we know what the customers are saying.
And so we really try to focus a lot on that upfront discovery, a lot on that customer research, and that can be quick.
It doesn't have to take months to do.
It can be done in an hour or a day, but making sure we don't lose sight of the customer.
I think the second equally is important, making sure that we don't lose sight of what is the business unlock that we're trying to achieve.
Are we driving revenue?
Are we reducing complaints?
Are we trying to take expense out of the system?
What's the OKR? What's the key result that we're trying to accomplish by delivering whatever this is?
And there may be a primary and a secondary, but you want to make sure you're clear on what those are.
and really being focused on making sure that you don't lose sight of bad goal amongst complexities prioritization and scope the third piece is to balance the speed and complexity of the build with unlocking those first two things right and that's sometimes the harder part which is where i find a lot of the art starts to come in and the judgment we try to empower product managers to have I can unlock this two sprints earlier but it might not get these three things or do I wait to get those three things and then unlock it two sprints later or that may be an easier decision because it's only two
sprints what if it's two quarters I can unlock this now or I can wait to the end of the year to get you the other five things and so that's an ongoing kind of challenge and what I push my product teams is to be very transparent in those conversations whether key key stakeholders, with our finance partners, with our executive team, so that everyone knows what we're thinking, what we're working through, and why we have a point of view.
But to own that point of view, feel empowered to own that point of view, and be able to defend it.
If someone says to you, why do you think that's the right decision?
I would make a different decision.
You should be able to be comfortable having that point of view and defending it.
And then I think the last thing I would just add is, it's always amazing when we get the chance to build products that actually actually make an impact in the market and in the lives of our customers and help them grow their business.
But we also build a lot of products that internally help us do a better job of servicing those clients, right?
They support our bankers who are out every day meeting with clients or they support our servicing representatives who are taking a phone call from a client.
And so we also try to balance the external customer with the internal customer.
And that sometimes means you have to make different decisions, right?
Because we maybe all unlock the value to an external customer quickly, but it might create a really, really awful experience for a banker who's trying to service that customer.
And we have to decide if that's really worth it or if we need to take a different path.
It sounds like there is a lot of customer insights that go into your prioritization and into what you're building as well.
Can you tell us about a time when you discovered a new customer insight or something surfaced up that completely changed your direction or made you sit back and say, hey, we should be doing this instead?
There's lots of examples that I could think of.
One comes to mind, which is very top of mind right now, because we have a product that we just launched and we're really excited about that product and starting to scale and we're starting to build some new capabilities out around that product.
And one of the things that we had to decide was how do we think about the speed at which money can move through that payroll product.
And there's lots of variations, faster payroll and next day payroll, and there's lots of terms out there in the market.
And we had to think through what we wanted our product to be able to do and how that we want to think about that experience.
And it was interesting.
We went in from our perspective, right?
We believe we are one of the best, if not the best in the industry at moving money.
That is one of our core jobs that we do is we do that all day long at scale, billions of dollars moving on a regular basis.
But at the same time, our assumption was that we wanted to create lots of choices and lots of options for customers because we have lots of options and choices for them today, right?
They can pick and choose and they can decide what they want to choose.
And we think that is a competitive advantage in the broader money movement space.
But when it comes to payroll and the customer that we're designing that payroll product for, it's not a large employing 30 employee type of business that we're designing for.
It's someone that is just getting to the point where they may not want to run payroll out of a spreadsheet anymore and they want to digitize that experience.
And so for that customer, the feedback that we heard very early on, which was a little bit more surprising to us, was that their focus was more about making the money movement part simple and easy, right?
Right. So the options were overwhelming.
Just make it easy. Like, just simplify it, boil it down.
Don't confuse me. I appreciate the concept of many choices and many options and let me customize, et cetera.
But for this specific job and this specific need, simplicity is better.
And so that's just one example.
There's many more I could talk about where from our perspective and our view and some of the strengths that we think we bring generally to the small business market with our capabilities for that particular product and that specific customer segment that didn't quite manifest itself the same way that we thought it might in our research. That's really interesting.
And I've definitely seen that where it's like, let's build all the choices first instead of let's make it really targeted.
When I'm thinking about these small customers you're talking about too, and this payroll product, and I imagine the goal, right, or hopefully is that they grow into some of these larger customers too.
How do you think about the way that you develop products and how you help those customers through that customer journey?
And is it something where it's like, now you move on to this next product, or is it like, how do you enhance their experience as they get ready for things and like meet them where they are?
Yeah. And meeting them where they are is a really big principle of ours as we try to build products.
But to your question, we have to think about, you'll hear our CEO, Jamie Diamond and talk all the time that we can bank a business from day one all the way up until they are the largest business.
And as a franchise, we really view that as a competitive strength.
And we have internally the organization that allow us to support those customers as they evolve through their life cycles, bring new products and services to the table as they evolve.
In the small business space, we have a sort of smaller microcosm of that, right?
Because we We service small businesses from day one up to maturity, where it makes sense then for them to transition to their commercial bank.
And that transition is both human and technology supported.
But in order to do that, to your point, we have to have a product continuum that can support that evolution.
And so that's a lot of what we try to focus on is how do we think about the product continuum and the capabilities as you move through that journey.
And as you can imagine, some capabilities work for many segments, right?
You could be a one -person show as a small business owner and still need this product.
And then you might have 50 employees and be $20 million, and you still might need that product.
Wires is a good example.
You still might need to wire somebody money.
So that product needs to work for both the smallest of small businesses and the large small business.
And then there's other basic capabilities where you might not need them at the smaller level.
So we offer really robust capabilities that let you entitle certain people to transact on your account.
And we think that's a really great product that we offer.
If you're a single sole prop business owner, you don't necessarily need to entitle anyone else to manage your account.
You are managing your account.
But you get to some point where you might now have a bookkeeper and maybe three or four employees and you want one of them to take care of bill payment.
And so you might need to entitle a person or two then to transact.
So in that case, you may not need that product in all stages.
stages, but what we need to do as we build products is make sure that we're creating the seamless connections that as you progress, you can turn those on or turn those off, upgrade your product or change your product configuration to make that work.
And that's an ongoing challenge, right?
Our technology isn't always configurable to make that as easy as we want it to be, but that's the constant balance we're trying to find as we talk about our, again, back to our product continuum.
continuum, how do we be clear on what we think those phases are and what features are most relevant, but then flexible enough that people can also navigate a little bit as necessary.
It sounds like there's a big data component behind the scenes too, right?
Like making sure that you know that customer, you're tracking the customer across the products, across these different areas where you might, like you said, might move to the commercial bank one day.
How do you think about the underlying data structure of what you're building and where that brings brings value back to the product too.
Yeah, data powers everything.
And it's not just in the AI environment we're in now.
Well, before the right structure of your data, making sure it was stored in the right place and in the right way that it could be usable and accessible, ideally in real time.
All of those factors have always been important in our product management ecosystem.
And again, that's an ongoing journey, right?
We are definitely still on the journey to modernize our data, make sure we feel like it's accessible and structured in the right way and streamed real time into all the right channels.
But we've also made a ton of progress there.
And I think that's enabled us to move quicker in achieving some of those product outcomes because you can focus on the experience and the platform capabilities, and you don't also then have to focus on modernizing the data as well.
And so what we've been trying to do is take the data modernization piece out and treat that as a discrete set of things that we have to do back to our prioritization discussion.
our discussion, we've prioritized that as a critical component, almost to everything we're trying to do.
And then in addition to that, we've identified other priorities that we want to go deliver.
And that foundational build and that foundational capability that we've been working on for a little bit is allowing us to more quickly spread those data insights together to unlock the value.
So I'll give you a great example.
We just launched, about nine months ago or so now, we launched a new product called Customer for insights to our small businesses.
And it's a really amazing prop, accessible through our digital channels, whether it's on the web or on the mobile phone.
And it gives the small business customer access to specific customer data that informs who's shopping in their stores, information about the frequency and the timestamps of those visits.
If they process payments with us, that data is specific to their locations.
They don't process payments for us.
We've aggregated a bunch of our data together in an anonymous way.
So it's not your data, but it's an aggregated view of customers in your general area and how they are interacting with merchants like yours.
And that data is all structured in a way that makes that accessible and possible as a product delivery.
If we hadn't modernized that data, we couldn't deliver that impactful insights product to our customers.
And the experience part on the front end is sometimes the easy part.
what's the chart look like?
And what's the navigation look like when you're navigating around the experience?
But again, we invested heavily in making sure the data infrastructure was there to power that experience.
I think that's such a cool way to think about innovation too.
You're collecting all this information, right?
But what can we do to come back and actually power our small businesses and make them better at what they do?
So you're taking all that data that you would have on the transactions and just putting it back into into the hands of your small businesses to use.
So there's a lot of interesting innovation baked into that.
I'm curious how, like, how do you think about this innovation and these new features, these new products?
How are you kind of managing for that?
And as a business too, at scale, I know you've led a big part of the Agile transformation to get people to think more in products.
How'd you think about budgeting for that too?
And managing like that portfolio of products across it?
Cause I see that as a huge issue and a huge blocker for people or for large organizations that are trying to move to a product mindset of how do we actually make sure that we fund innovation correctly?
We're thinking about the portfolio correctly, and we're not stuck in this project mindset.
Yeah. And it is a challenge.
And we've been on this product transformation for a number of years now.
And I did have a fortunate opportunity to lead that for a number of years for us at Chase.
And it was a massive transformation in scale across all of our Chase franchise, not just small business, across our entire Chase franchise.
franchise whether it's the consumer banking franchise or the credit card franchise or home lending organization etc and we stood up a product architecture we played structure and teams around that to your question one of the biggest items we spend a lot of time on is how do we think about the allocation of capacity or said differently the budget associated with these organizations in this ecosystem and what we tried to do as a first order principle was move away from this this idea that we can identify a thing we want to go do, budget for it and then deliver it.
And when we flipped it to, and the mindset we really focused entirely on was how do we want to distribute the capacity that we have across the organization, whether that's product management capacity or design capacity or data capacity or technology capacity, how do we distribute that across that product architecture so that we can then empower the teams that have accountability for that capacity to then prioritize what I think is most important, organize that work, do the discovery, and then deliver against that roadmap.
And we have mechanisms in place to portfolio manage that ecosystem.
So it's not an accountability without oversight, right?
So our product teams are accountable for demonstrating how they're using their capacity, what they're delivering, what it's returning for the business, how it's addressing customer problems. But we're also trying to balance that with that empowerment, right?
And giving them the ability to being closest to the customer and closest to the problem to make decisions around what is the next best thing to pick up in their backlog.
And so when it comes to budgeting, very specifically, we try to think about budgeting in terms of capacity, right?
So it's funding the thing, it's funding the capacity needed to deliver against an area or a domain or a set of capabilities.
The thing specifically in that that gets delivered is a function of prioritization within that capacity.
And again, to my point earlier, we do have mechanisms to rebalance that capacity across the portfolio when needed.
Maybe we need to rebalance a little bit more to really go after a specific problem or a specific opportunity.
And that allows us to manage that in the portfolio.
So it's not a static decision, but at the same time, And we don't want to be in a world where we're constantly swinging budget around every month or every quarter because that impacts speed, it impacts your subject matter expertise and your quickness to deliver.
And it takes some value of letting delivery happen closer to the customer and pulls it away a little bit, which risks potentially not fully addressing that customer problem.
There's also in a lot of large organizations, when we feel like our annual planning cycles, where I see people, we've got the budget for this year.
that means we have to get every single thing done this year, right?
Like December 31st is a cutoff.
We're done now. Move on to the next initiative.
How do you balance that kind of like continuous nature of product development?
And we're like, not everything's going to be done within this calendar year or even this quarter with the realities of managing a large corporation saying we do have to say what we're like, we have to know roughly what we're going to spend here.
How do you balance those things?
It is hard to your point.
We operate on an annual budgeting budgeting cycle like many large corporations.
To your point, we have to put a number in the box and we have to be able to hold ourselves accountable to how much we spent, et cetera.
But I think it goes back to my point from earlier.
While you have an annual budget that you have to manage against, that decision at the top of the house can be made.
Am I going to increase that total bucket?
Meaning I'm going to spend more on product and technology delivery over the next year.
I'm going to spend the same amount.
Am I going to spend less?
It's a micro budget decision that you can make them, how you then break down that budget, convert it into capacity, right?
Humans and capabilities, data storage costs, space, et cetera, how you convert that into a budget can be more nimble and flexible.
And it then requires you to make sure that you've got accountability for components are as you break it down.
Again, you don't empower a team with a set of budget and capacity and not hold them accountable to demonstrate what they've delivered.
But that next level down is, well, we really apply a lot of the nimbleness or try to apply a lot of the nimbleness to that budgeting process.
And that's where I said before, we may have, we feel really great about all the investment we're making to help our customers fight fraud as an example, but it's an ongoing struggle, right?
The fraudsters are always coming and trying to find angles and opportunities to go and try to put our customers.
And so we're trying to constantly balance balance, how do we make sure that we have the right capabilities and we're putting the right amount of investment against that area, et cetera.
And that sometimes does require us to shift resources quickly in response to something we're seeing.
And then when that response is addressed, we have to decide then, are we leaving those resources there to keep working on the next thing?
Or are we shifting those resources back to what they may originally would have been working on in some other area?
And that nimbleness, we try to treat as an ongoing, but at the portfolio level as a quarterly activity, right?
So every quarter we're trying to make sure we feel balanced across the broader ecosystem while holding ourselves accountable to that top line budget, right?
So all of it's within agreement on how much we're going to spend.
The breakdown of what we do individually under that is where we try to provide more flexibility.
Yeah. So it's at a much higher level than just funding what the team building.
It's all the way up.
Yeah. And you know, the challenge with budgeting is you have to account for both the investment side of your your budget, plus all of the production and infrastructure side of your budget.
And so that sometimes is a challenge because you can't always fully predict, I'm going to build this new capability.
I know what I need to build it.
But we may get surprised that the data storage costs are more expensive than we thought, or the production infrastructure needed to support that application may be more expensive than we thought.
And so there's always opportunities and risks in your budget that you have to manage through every day.
But again, within the framework, the idea is it's sort of still give the teams the necessary flexibility with oversight to try to make those decisions locally.
When we talk about budgeting too, I see something that comes up that's about that like GM business mindset, right?
Back towards we have platform and capability teams as well.
So when we are making decisions about, as you mentioned before, where do we invest?
Do we invest in like small businesses or the 500 person businesses?
we might have people on the business side who are accountable for goals in that side.
What are the conditions for success to make that kind of platform capability and portfolio structure work there when especially a lot of organizations were oriented where it was like the GM got the budget and they could build whatever they wanted within their stuff and not have taking that away a little bit?
To me, the first step in success in that ecosystem is to have open communication and dialogue with your business partner.
That, to me, is table stakes.
And where I found it not working, there may be other reasons why it doesn't work.
But one of the core reasons I've always found it not working is because there's not good communication, there's not good clarity, there's not good connectivity between the product team and the business stakeholder, the general manager, or whoever is the key person on the business side trying to drive a strategy forward. So that, to me, is the first most important thing.
I think the second thing, and this is where I go back to the very beginning when we talked talking about prioritization, getting alignment on that prioritization as hard as that may be unlocks a ton of speed.
So it's a matter of where do you want the pain to happen?
Do you want it to happen upfront when you align on your key results that you're going to try to drive, your outcomes you're trying to achieve, and what are the tactics at a high level that you think are the most effective to achieve that?
If you spend the time doing that upfront, it's not meant to be a static thing you can revisit it and keep it evergreen and ongoing investing time in that process then lets the team feel more empowered to just go right and the decisions then that bubble up during that tend to be smaller they're still hard to make am I building this feature or not building this feature that's still an important decision to the communication part that you talk to your partner about but that's a very different decision than am I building this thing at all And so a lot of times where I also see things fall down is where there
is a belief of alignment on prioritization, but in reality, they haven't invested the time in actually ensuring that there is alignment on priority.
And so the issues that surface appear maybe in other ways or for other reasons, but they do go back to, I don't agree with what you're building.
And so as long as you can get that up front as well, I think that unlocks a lot of speed and capabilities for the team.
And then the last thing I would say is we really try to empower product teams that think like an owner, right?
They should think end to end.
They should understand the P &L.
They should believe that they have accountability with their business partner to deliver that outcome.
So we also try to really encourage them not to think about this as being someone passing the baton or throwing their hat over the wall for them.
We're both in this together, and we both have an accountability to achieve this together.
And so that kind of empowered mindset hopefully drives the product team to feel like they can have those hard conversations with the general manager if they have to.
Or vice versa, the general manager can have the hard conversations with the product manager because they're in it together.
In that lines of communication, which I think is so important and figuring out the prioritization part, how do you get started with that?
Are you going and just starting the conversation?
Should you be bringing something to your GM to explain what's going on?
Do you do it on like cadence?
Where do those conversations kind of happen?
We try to create some structure around that within the organizations.
I mentioned earlier a couple of our products, I'll give you another example.
We've spent a lot of time investing in faster payment capabilities within our ecosystem.
So that again, back to my earlier conversation, that our small business customers can really choose how quickly they want a payment delivered therefore by what method they want to send that money movement.
And while that flexibility, as I mentioned earlier in the payroll product example, might have created a little bit of overwhelming feeling.
What we hear from clients outside of that payroll concept is they love that flexibility for them broadly managing their business.
And that flexibility and the simplification of how we present that to the customer was something that we spent a lot of time building.
But prior to building it, we had to decide from a strategy perspective, what do we think is most most important to our small business customers.
And in this case, we know that moving money, accounts payable, accounts receivable, we hear it in our research all the time, is one of the top pain points that small businesses talk about every day.
And we do surveys on a regular basis.
We talk to one -on -one customers and bankers who are sporting customers.
And it's always consistent.
Anything you can do to make accounts payable, accounts receivable easier for me, speed up and simplify my cash flow management, management, that's a big win for me.
It saves me hours. It lets me spend more time on my business.
Getting alignment around that insight back to the research and the customer problem, but also then aligning on that being a strategic imperative that we want to then go invest in is a joint team sport.
So that wasn't a product manager deciding or a general manager deciding.
It was us partnering together to decide as a business that we think that's an area that we want to put this on.
And so back to my conversation earlier, getting that strategy alignment up front, I think empowers everybody to feel like they own this problem together.
I always joke with my product teams that there is no right place for an idea to surface.
Anyone should be empowered to create ideas, to generate opportunities, but it needs to be aligned with a strategy.
And we all need to agree this is where we're moving.
Now let's create all the opportunities and ways we might move in that direction.
And that should be a team sport, right?
Right. So idea generation, idea creation shouldn't come from one person or two people.
It shouldn't come from product only or the general manager only, et cetera.
And that's, again, part of the ecosystem we try to build here is really empower that back and forth connectivity.
Yeah. To me, that is one of those make or break things like the teams who get those pieces of how do we collaboratively do this?
They move a lot faster than the ones who don't.
Then otherwise, it's just like a bunch of inviting.
fight it. Everyone's idea is always going to be the best idea to them.
And you have to find a way to be open and build that trust and collaboration across the team.
Someone else's idea may end up being the best idea.
And how do you get everyone to buy into that?
And it kind of comes back to reinforcing this concept that's been coming up, I feel like over and over again in the age of AI, which is, you know, there was this whole product managers are going to disappear because AI can can just do user stories.
And now we're going back to, well, it's these human parts of product management that are actually really hard parts on it.
When you think about AI, though, I'm curious, how do you see the role of product managers changing?
And what should product managers be thinking about when they think about AI in the future?
Yeah, no, it's a great question and something we spend a lot of time on and have been for a long time, not just in the last couple months when a lot of the noise and market buzz has started to build and build.
So we've been anticipating this transformation coming for quite a while but to your point as i mentioned at the very beginning product management is definitely an art and a science there is a science aspect of it and even within the science aspect of it there are repeatable easily automatable parts of that science but then there are also quite complex nuanced and detailed parts of that science as well so there's a big part of the product management job to your point that very much much relies on human judgment, very much relies on the collaboration and the partnership we talked about earlier,
and very much relies on a deep understanding of the business's priorities and the customer that we're trying to solve.
And so we've been trying to think about AI and encouraging our product teams to think about it as a way to automate and simplify the things that you do that distract you from spending the time on those important things.
And so if you had 10 hours hours to spend on things and you could now spend one of those on these sets of things as opposed to five of those, what would you do with those other four hours?
Well, you would be able to think more deeply about the strategy.
You'd be able to spend more time with customers in discovery, for example.
You might be able to go deeper on a piece of analysis with your analytic partner that you wouldn't have had mind share to think about in the way that you can now.
You may still automate those things with AI.
So you might do a detailed customer feedback analysis, show me all my complaints and let me dissect those and understand the big trends.
You still might use AI to make that quicker than it might have happened when you had to do it manually.
But someone still has to decide that that's the thing that's important to do.
And if you don't have the time as a product manager to think about those important areas because you're so bogged down in story writing and making sure you have your definitions of done and definition of ready, clear, and all of those nuances, or you're dealing with production fixes and challenges, et cetera.
Again, you just run out of time in the day to spend on those more impactful things.
And so what you need to build that ecosystem where we're always asking the question, can I get leverage on this job or this task that I have to do by leveraging our our internal AI tools, and we've built some really impressive and very exciting AI tools internally at Jake Morgan Chase that all of our product managers are starting to lean heavenly into that really do start to let us move away from some of those, automate them, complete them more quickly, and again, give them more time back in their day to focus on the more I think that's so important.
When I go in and I train product managers and I ask them what their Their biggest issue is, it always comes back to, I don't have enough time because I'm writing these stories or I'm answering these questions or I've got to pull through all of this analysis and stuff.
And that's where it's such a huge opportunity for AI to come free us up.
So I'm really excited to hear that you guys are focusing on that too.
You know this from your conversations, I'm sure too.
One of the biggest time saves is just being able to automate recording of what's going on out to your key stakeholders.
A good product manager should always be sharing results and updating leadership on what's happening, producing a roadmap that's clear and concise and sharing where things are changing, et cetera.
But all those things take time to create.
And so that's just one tactical example, right?
If you can automate more of that away, the production of those things makes it easy to do.
And then you can actually spend time thinking about what insights am I seeing in this that I want to talk to my partner about.
Let me deep dive on this results in this part of the product that maybe I wouldn't have time to deep dive on because I was just working on creating the summary of what was going on in the product.
Yeah, absolutely huge.
I'm sure I would love something like that today, which would be great.
Now I'm like, what can I go do to automate that?
We've been talking about the product management processes, but of course, industries are changing on this as well.
Well, when you're looking at the future of tech and these trends, what are you excited about?
What are you keeping your eyes on?
And what do you think people should be paying attention to?
Obviously, a lot of the focus right now is on the agentic AI space, which we're very excited about.
And we've been leaning into that.
And we have some use cases that we're currently leveraging today.
And we have some more in pilot and coming in the future, both for external facing customer experience, but also a lot of internal facing experience.
How do you empower an engineer to have a series of agentic AI agents that work with them to automate and improve their efficiency of delivery and build, for example?
So that's certainly an area that we're very focused on.
But a lot of what we also are excited about is getting back to the customer insights that we talked about at the beginning.
Our customers are constantly telling us they would like us to do to make it easier for them to run their business.
And so a lot of what we're continuing to hear goes back to data, right?
So how do we harness all of the data that we have about our customers?
And how do we, yes, of course, apply AI to it to help the consumer and us take advantage of that.
But also even outside of AI, how do we leverage that to help them make better decisions about their business, cashflow forecasting, nudging them in the experience when there's something in their account that we think they should be aware of, and they should take action on that maybe they would have missed otherwise?
How do we think about the right marketing lead to not sell them a product they don't need, but to actually address a need that maybe they didn't even know they had?
Do you realize that you could actually send that transaction in a different way, that money movement in a different way that actually might better address the problem you're trying to solve?
So, you know, core might be called, you know, we're marketing to you a new product, but the reality is we're trying to address that customer need.
And all that personalization and data -driven insights is another area that we're leading very heavily into, both from a customer product perspective.
I mentioned the insights product, but also from an internal employee perspective as well.
How do we make the person supporting that customer smarter, more easily able to react, allow them to provide more insight and advice?
How do we help our bankers become even more amazing than they already are today by making more data more easily accessible at their fingertips?
So those are the other areas I would say around data that we're also watching and leading headwindings.
Well, I'm excited to see these all roll out because I'm sure it's going to help me too as a small business.
And Jamison, my last question for you before we part, what advice would you give to your younger self?
It's a great question.
For me, one of the big things I've learned as I've progressed in my career, the importance of asking questions and being curious.
And I wish earlier on, I was more curious about some of the things I worked on when I was earlier in my career.
I felt like I was a little bit more focused on getting the thing delivered than understanding what it was I was delivering.
And so I really try to, and we try to really encourage all of our product teams, understand Understand the why behind what you're working on.
Understand the impact it's going to have on the customer and the business, not just what the thing is that you're building, the technical architecture of what you're building or future components of what you're building.
And I wish I'd spent more time in some of my earlier roles really digging deeper into those kind of why and strategy components.
Now I get to do that a lot.
my organization now in my role managing the Pilato product team, but I really try to make sure my product managers are doing that as well, right?
It's not just me as the leader of the organization, it's them day -to -day feeling curious and empowered to be curious and carving out space to be curious.
So that's one thing that comes to mind.
I'm sure there's many others, but I think that curiosity in product managers can unlock so much value and deliver better products for the customer if you carve out the space for it.
Yeah, I think that's so important for a lot of product managers out there listening.
I see them go, well, if I'm not in charge of strategy yet, I'm just not going to think about it.
I'm not going to worry about it.
I'm not going to be curious about the business.
So I'm so happy that you mentioned that.
It's definitely great.
Well, thank you so much, Jemison, for being on the podcast. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go?
So obviously on LinkedIn, you're certainly welcome to find me there.
And And we also have a great resource that we make available that shows all of our products and services that we offer for our small businesses.
Again, we support 7 million small businesses all across the country.
So you can go to Chase for Business and Chase for Business will lay out all the products we talked about.
Many of them I talked about on this call, but many others that I didn't.
That's another great way just to learn about all the things and all the interesting things we're building in our product teams. That's great.
And we will put those links on our show notes at ProductThinkingPodcast .com.
Thanks so much, Jamison, for joining us.
And thank you to our audience for listening.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. And in the meantime, go to DearMelissa .com and let me know what product management questions you have for me.
I'll answer them on the next episode.
We'll see you then.
