Internal Tools

JP Morgan Chase

Redesigning internal tooling at JP Morgan Chase, reducing average task completion time for critical operational users driving deals from closed to live on offer walls.

RolePrincipal Designer

Duration8 months

Team4 designers, 10 engineers, 3 PMs

Year2023

Read Time3 min read

Team reviewing data and process diagrams together

The Challenge

JP Morgan Chase's operations teams relied on a suite of internal tools built over a decade of incremental additions. The tools were functional but fragmented — operators regularly navigated between several different applications to complete a single workflow. Tasks routinely took far longer than they should have — simple processes stretched across multiple systems and manual steps.

Discovery

I embedded with three operations teams across different business lines for two weeks each. We documented 40+ workflows end-to-end, mapped tool dependencies, and conducted time-motion studies to identify the highest-friction touchpoints.

Core problems:

Context switching — operators toggled between several apps, re-entering the same data across systems
No unified search — finding a customer record required knowing which system held which data
Alert fatigue — operators received a high daily volume of notifications with no prioritization, leading to critical items being missed

Internal user audit — 12 pain points across 5 sub-categories, 27 unused fields, and redundant save-to-enter restrictions mapped across the first five screens of the offer-setup flow

End-user field audit — roughly 240 fields exist across offer setup, about 100 are used, and only 11 data points surface to the end user, informed by around 20 editable fields

"I spend more time finding information than actually acting on it. The tools fight me instead of helping me." — Senior Operations Analyst, 8 years tenure

Framing the Strategy

Rather than redesigning each tool individually, we proposed a unified operations workspace — a single interface that orchestrates existing systems behind a coherent experience layer.

Design principles:

One workspace, many systems — abstract system boundaries away from the operator
Task-first navigation — organize around what operators do, not which system holds the data
Proactive intelligence — surface the right information before operators have to search for it

SERVICE BLUEPRINT · OPS WORKFLOW MAPPING

Intake

Processing

Fulfillment

Reporting

MERCHANT

Submit campaign briefForm + asset upload

⚠ Unclear field requirements cause 40% resubmission

Review proof of conceptApprove creative + targeting

⚠ 3-day average wait for first review cycle

Monitor live campaignReal-time performance view

Download final reportPost-campaign analytics

OPS TEAM

Validate submissionCompliance + completeness check

Multi-step approval routingLegal → Brand → Finance sign-off

Configure targeting rulesAudience + scheduling setup

Generate custom reportsAggregate + format delivery metrics

PLATFORM

Campaign DB

Workflow engine

Ad server

Analytics layer

BLUEPRINT OUTCOME

Identified 4 critical handoff failures between merchant submission and ops processing.

Mapped 7 redundant approval steps that could be collapsed into role-aware automation.

Surfaced reporting gap: ops teams had no visibility into campaign performance until post-mortem.

OPS TOOLING · SERVICE BLUEPRINT · LEADING U.S. BANK · 2024

Planning and process notes on a glass wall

The Solution

TWO-TRACK DELIVERY · QUICK WINS + FUTURE STATE

TRACK 01 · QUICK WINS · 0–60 DAYS

NO BACKEND REQUIRED

Terminology standardizationConsistent field names, offer states, and campaign status language

Nomenclature updatesAlign platform labels with how ops teams actually communicate

Process state visibilityClear signals for where users are and what action is needed next

UI completion cuesProgress indicators and approval stage tracking surfaced in the UI

TRACK 02 · DESIGN PROVOCATIONS · FUTURE STATE

ALIGN BEFORE ROADMAP COMMITS

Reimagined approval workflowCollapse multi-step routing into intelligent role-aware automation

Unified ops dashboardSingle-pane view of offer lifecycle state for all active campaigns

Embedded data terminology layerContextual definitions at point of use, not buried in documentation

Proactive exception alertingSurface issues before the ops team discovers them manually

OPS TOOLING · TWO-TRACK DELIVERY APPROACH · 2024

Results

Reduction in task completion time40%

Missed SLA items, via prioritized surfacingFewer

Applications consolidated3 → 1

Operator satisfaction with the consolidated workflowHigher

Reflection

This project taught me that the best internal tools are invisible infrastructure. Operators don't want to think about which system they're in — they want to complete their work. By treating the system boundaries as an implementation detail rather than a user-facing concept, we gave critical operational users hours of working time back.

The hardest part wasn't the design — it was the organizational change management. Consolidating several tools meant working with several different teams, each with their own roadmap and priorities. Design leadership here meant building consensus through shared outcomes, not mandating a solution.

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