Discovery research and UX design for a CEO-priority relationship intelligence system — embedded across all six Lines of Business with the world's largest institutional asset managers. Three months of fieldwork before a single pixel of the solution was drawn.
Institutional asset manager relationships sit at the centre of the firm's revenue. Yet the richest client intelligence in the firm — context, commitments, history, intent — lived in personal notebooks, private spreadsheets, and email threads scattered across three hundred Managing Directors. No single source of truth existed. The business consequence was measurable, the operational risk material.
Give every MD and VP a single trusted place to document and share client intelligence — so the firm retains institutional knowledge as people move, retire, or change roles, and every Line of Business acts on a complete picture of the relationship.
A discovery phase embedded a senior cross-functional team — including PhD-level researchers — across all JPMC Lines of Business. The mandate was simple and uncompromising: understand the problem before designing any solution. No wireframes were drawn in the first ninety days.
Within a senior cross-functional team alongside PhD-level researchers and wireframe designers, I owned the part of the work that determined whether the discovery would actually land at the top of the firm: the synthesis layer, the artefacts, and the operational scaffolding that made forty-two simultaneous stakeholder relationships tractable.
The final concept is not a generic CRM. It is a relationship intelligence platform built around the specific way JPMC's MDs actually work — designed against four principles, every one of them grounded in a unanimous research finding. The design brief writes itself when the discovery is right.
The discovery produced five unanimous findings that became the non-negotiable requirements for a firmwide relationship intelligence platform. The artefacts produced — the hierarchy map, the in-interview probes, the executive readout — were used directly by Managing Directors and the executive sponsor team for strategic decision-making.
The work demonstrated that the right design question for JPMC was not "how do we build a better CRM" but "how do we earn the trust of MDs who have spent twenty years perfecting workarounds." Every element of the final concept — cross-LOB visibility, auto-populated records, live mandate pipeline — traces directly to a named finding from over forty stakeholder interviews.
PROJECT PAUSED AT EXECUTIVE LEVEL FOR STRATEGIC REASONS · NOT DESIGN OUTCOMES