Incubator
JPMorgan Chase is famous for its fortress mindset. Great digital product managers must adopt experimental and maker mindsets to innovate within highly regulated environments. Incubator created a unique and adventurous learning environment that turns brilliant new financial professionals into great product managers.
“Because that’s the way it’s always been done around here”
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Highly regulated banks are extremely risk-averse. New employees are much the same. How can we teach new product managers the right way to innovate, when they will be joining teams that, themselves aren’t yet practicing world-class product discovery techniques?
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We created an environment that rewards new ways of working. We architected the program, and designed every interaction, to create a safe environment for new professionals to grow and make mistakes. We prioritized learning over product outcomes and wildly succeeded at both.
Lab Monkey, who doesn’t really know why he beats up anyone who tries to eat the banana
Imagine telling an Ivy League graduate with a a finance degree that their job is NOT to come up with the solution, but rather, to fall in love with the problem? Or worse, imagine telling them to not use slides, and instead “tell their stakeholders a good story”. They aren’t going to hear you, and if they do, they are going to only pay lip service to the principles you are espousing.
How do you make them believe in the user-centered product discovery practices that are necessary to innovate, when those principles go against their experience, and sometimes, their strengths?
This was the question, and it took two tries to get it just right.
In the first 5 month iteration of the Incubation Program, we divided the 36 Analysts into 6 teams and gave them room to experiment, just-in-time coaching, social learning, and a mandate to grow. We focused on three principles:
The project outcomes were good, but our research showed that the learning outcomes, and some parts of the experience, could be improved.
After completing the above research, which included interviews, retrospectives, ideation workshops, and surveys, we discovered this core insight: Overwhelming pressures to conform, succeed immediately, and outpace peers interfered with our program’s learning objectives.
To be clear; the first iteration of the program’s project and learning outcomes were powerful, 4 out of 6 Projects went to production and the stakeholders uniformly praised our analysts’ maturity and growth. But we wanted more.
Seeking radical improvement, I gathered a combination of Program owners and Alumni and directed concepting sprints. After multiple rapid interations we elevated two guiding concepts.
First was the “practice lap” concept which later became implemented as the Two Campaign Model. We divided the total Incubation Period into two ‘campaigns’ and insisted that a prototype must be built during the first campaign. By making it impossible to get things entirely correct, much less complete, in the first campaign, we normalize concepts like sacrificial prototypes, incremental development, building to learn, and failing fast. This model also allowed us to scaffold our curriculum with more hands-on instruction up front, and then more explicitly shift emphasis to self-direction and exploration.
The other defining concept was dubbed “Submersion”.
Our research showed that despite being challenged to work differently, they often didn’t have the confidence to take the leap of faith. The space wasn’t safe enough, and the incentives weren’t strong enough.
The concept duggested that we design the program fractally, such that every interaction, sprint, and campaign and the program itself has an explicit, “We are going deep to explore” moment, and an explicit, “Let’s come up and discuss how this might have been an artificial learning technique that would will have to adapt to the real word”. The inside joke was that we never asked them to do anything that wouldn’t work in the ‘real world’, we just had to trick them into succeeding.
Impact
We are currently delivering Incubator S2C2. (Seasons 2, Campaign 2) and all indications are that we will improve last year’s Product adoption metrics to over 70% production and adoption rates.
Successes include the corporate adoption of improved new-hire onboarding procedures, external DevX experiences, and International Insight dashboards
This is remarkable for a Product Incubation program.
But I am most excited about the success of our third concept, “Top Gun” which I did not mention above. Top Gun is our belief that we can quickly give the primary coaching and program improvement roles to recent alumni. This is creating a rich community of Associate Product Managers responsible for managing this program as a Product, driving continuous discovery and improvement, and ensuring aggressive upskilling and integration of new employees. This is a huge win in the battle to create a culture of innovation.
70%+
Product Success Factor
