Be Brave

The experience at JP Morgan Chase taught me to be out-spoken and take initiatives on projects, ask for things if that are not provided to me in time, speak up about things that are not working, suggest alternatives, if possible, communicate to upper management if there are any blockers. More importantly, be an advocate for the users, try to involved them as much as possible in design reviews and speak for the users’ interest in meetings with stakeholders.

 

Be Flexible

Because the design team works like agent model with different product teams on different projects, we need to be flexible to adapt to different product team’s way of working, some of the product owner has more experience working with designers and some has less so we need to be prepared to teach them how to work with us. Sometimes we are not involved in the initial product exploration stage and the solution is more or less provided to us, sometimes, we are given a short timeline, so we need to be flexible and know how to handle different situations.

 

Be Ready to Learn

Due to the complex nature of the business of a bank, we are constantly learning new things, when we are given a new project, the first thing we do after we take on a project is to learn about the context of the project, how the specific part of the business operates, speak with the users and learn about their daily work and the challenges they face etc.