JPMorganChase Innovation, Technology & Agility

How do you make sure all teams are on the same page when creating a product roadmap? 

Alignment and agreement are crucial when creating product roadmaps to ensure focus on customer value and appropriate planning and resourcing for teams. 

There are a few strategies that I leverage in my work. First, I make sure everyone is clearly aligned on the product vision and objectives, which is based on both long- and short-term customer needs. 

It’s also important to work cross-functionally early on. Since product teams don’t work in isolation, it’s important to have all key stakeholders involved in planning. This could mean having design, research, engineering and operations representatives in a workshop to gather input and build shared understanding. This helps ensure everyone is aligned on changes and aware of potential blockers or unexpected workloads.

It’s also key to maintain a customer-centric approach, leveraging the voice of customer activities — such as feedback, user testing, beta users, surveys, interviews, focus groups and analytics — to create personas and prioritize work according to the demand and impact to customers. 

Additionally, I define outcomes and metrics to guide development. Outcome-focused roadmaps are my favorite. 

Lastly, I make sure to maintain regular communication as well as accessible and clear documentation.

How do you maintain this alignment throughout the development cycle?

It’s crucial to maintain regular communication as well as accessible and clear documentation to keep the alignment throughout the development lifecycle. I prefer asynchronous communication tools, such as initiative webpages, emails and chats, which allow everyone to contribute and be informed, regardless of factors such as time zone and work location. Having great documentation alongside communications is also important. I maintain two different roadmaps, internal and customer-facing, since customers don’t care about items in a backlog that don’t produce direct value for them. Ensuring all these are accessible and transparent reduces queries and extra requests.

Additionally, defining outcomes and metrics to guide development redirects the focus from features to customer achievements, allowing for easier alignment and prioritization across teams and stakeholders. Establishing key performance indicators allows for progress tracking, course correction and cross-team alignment. It’s important to have transparency and visibility into the prioritization and feature requests already existing, so the customers and stakeholders can truly understand the needs of the product customers.

Do project needs change during the development process? When this happens, how do you reprioritize the product roadmap and keep teams aligned?

For sure. I’ve never been involved in a project or product where needs stayed completely the same during the development process. Successful product managers review and update their roadmaps often, with many of us doing it at least once a month or once a quarter at most. Roadmaps can and should change in response to learning, customer demands, shifts in the environment and external activities on occasion.

Roadmaps are communication tools. I recommend several tips to help keep teams focused during change, including impact analysis. Assess the impact of the change on timelines, teams and resources and compare it to the impact on customer needs and adoption. Additionally, use a prioritization framework, such as RICE, to determine where the new feature should go in planning and secure agreement with the other stakeholders and teams. Also, make sure to update the product roadmap to include the new feature if agreed upon. 

Lastly, communicate changes. Send a note to customers and stakeholders to explain the change and its value, ensuring everyone understands the new focus and alignment to the product vision and outcomes.

My personal mission is to help ensure that the firm can fully and continuously capitalize on AI capabilities for its technology infrastructure business. The reason for that is to increase value in three dimensions: efficiency, efficacy and the risk posture of JPMorgan Chase’s technology infrastructure. What we’re helping the firm do is think about what the future of each technology product looks like with AI integrated.

What’s your professional or academic background? How did you break into the tech industry?
I earned a finance degree from the University of Virginia and began my career in banking before pivoting to serve as a special agent in the FBI. That chapter sparked my interest in technology, offering unexpected opportunities to leverage innovations for enhancing investigations and saving lives. When I explored roles outside the FBI, a technology leader at JPMorganChase recognized my drive and gave me an opportunity, believing in my ability to upskill and learn in the absence of traditional credentials.

The highlight of my 14-year service with the FBI was serving as an operator on the Hostage Rescue Team, where I took on collateral duties that introduced me to product and project management – building the night vision goggle program and modernizing navigation and rebreather systems for closed-circuit diving. Realizing my ambition to work in cybersecurity, I looked to the FBI’s Cyber Division where I built partnerships, led cyber threat intel sharing and managed incident response against sophisticated threat actors. As a senior leader in the Operational Technology Division, I guided teams delivering mission-critical capabilities and innovation, including hardware and integration for the FBI’s body-worn camera program.

How did you learn how to use AI, and how do you apply it to your work?
As I transitioned from the FBI to JPMorganChase, a mentor encouraged me to immerse myself in emerging tech – especially AI. Beyond what I learned in my own research, I’ve benefited from the firm’s AI-forward culture and internal resources which include foundational overviews, lectures and demos to help employees learn how to use AI responsibly. I became an early adopter of JPMorganChase’s award-winning LLM Suite, a proprietary generative AI platform which I use regularly to refine executive communications and ensure tone, depth and structure align with audience needs. I now lead a global team of cybersecurity architects supporting a portfolio of internal products, external apps and cloud infrastructure, much of which leverage or host AI/ML functionalities. Conventional security patterns don’t always apply, so we use AI to structure review frameworks, generate threat models and build and query a corpus of published work for quick reference. These tools are helping us scale security, develop new architecture patterns and uplift the firm’s tech ecosystem.

What do you consider the greatest benefit of leveraging AI? How has it positively impacted the work you produce as a whole or your career?
In product security, we’re seeing material benefits from AI. First, it’s dramatically improving the precision and speed of our written communications – refining executive updates, decks and talking points and saving hours of manual effort. Second, AI is helping our team rapidly upskill and close knowledge gaps, enabling real-time understanding and faster, more accurate responses to complex engagements and security questions. Third, we’re using the firm’s AI Threat Modeling Co-Pilot (AITMC) to help us better standardize and scale security reviews across numerous AI/ML-enabled apps. AI is reducing toil, automating legacy processes and freeing our architects to proactively engage with product teams, business stakeholders and vendors to focus on securely enabling emerging tech and legacy infrastructure. From a career perspective, I think it is opening the door for rapid learning and prototyping and going to provide incredible opportunities for those who take the time to learn and leverage it.