How we built a viral internal product 

Technology teams have many complex processes and many tools to support these processes. The teams that build these tools are excited to release them. However, when they’re released to employees, they’re often met with questions like: “Why should I adopt to yet another product?” “How will this new tool help me?” “Where will I find the time to learn your product and train others to use it?”

Yet, as product managers we hear: “Can you build another one just like this?” “It’s very easy to use, and I love it!”

How do we get these reactions? Instead of focusing on specific use cases for the business or lines of code released, we focus on end-customer needs. We are devoted to our internal customers in the same way a consumer technology product manager is. Users love our products, because we solve their most pressing business problems and ensure a seamless customer experience.

The Opportunity

Product managers at large companies get lots of ideas from lots of people in the form of emails and phone calls and elevator conversations. The requests they receive can range in their level of detail and, oftentimes, are duplicated. To keep track of these requests, product managers place them in a spreadsheet or on their Jira, making the platform too cumbersome to manage.

The Solution

As managers in JPMorganChase’s Product Tooling organization, our team is responsible for the tools that enable product managers to get their jobs done more efficiently. Sometimes we find it useful to build products rather than buying something off the shelf to meet our needs, and often products we purchase must be adapted to fit into the JPMorganChase ecosystem. After doing significant analysis, many practitioners find it more cost effective and productive to build some critical tools themselves.

One of the tools in Product Tooling handles feature requests. We gather these needs by creating a standard format, which is very similar to a standard agile story, with questions like:

• As a _____________(who is this for?)
• I want to_________ (what does the user want to do?)
• So that __________(why do they want to do it?)

Previously, internal stakeholders focused on the what and the how. Product managers were faced with comments like, “I just signed a deal with a new customer, and they need us to support the XYZ file type.” Requests like this don’t give product managers the information they need to make decisions. They quickly can become overwhelmed with a pile of sticky notes, emails, and spreadsheets. Now, customers can capture all this information and prioritize the most important features.

By envisioning a product manager’s goals and what would be needed to accomplish them, we create a channel for internal stakeholders to tell us what they need and why. Then we refine, combine, and prioritize that work. This allows teams to gather more ideas and prioritize only the very best of them. As co-founder and former Apple CEO Steve Jobs  said, “Focus means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”

The Outcome

These products enable product managers to collaborate with their customers in an effective way and manage their product backlog at JPMorganChase. We’ve heard from employees about how helpful this tool has become in managing Jira backlog or feature requests, enhancing their experience as product owners.

Lessons Learned

We’ve learned that in order to build a great product, we needed to do the following:

• Engage and Refine: Work with users to understand what they need. Our tool is just a starting point to engage with users and refine their requests.
• Simplify: Build simply and iterate. There’s a temptation to build something complex that tries to meet everyone’s needs out of the box. It’s sometimes better to build a simple solution that solves a specific user need, but allows for expansion into other solutions as more data becomes available.
• Iterate: Start again from the top.