In January 2023, SMBC identified a critical need for transformation in its operational workflows across the Americas. Operations teams were relying on outdated systems that hampered agility, reduced competitiveness, and created inefficiencies. The pressing question was no longer whether a change was needed, but how to implement that change in a way that unlocked new value for the business.
Our challenge was to redefine these workflows—not just by making incremental improvements, but by completely rethinking how operations contributed to the broader strategic objectives of the organization. Through deep discovery, validation, and incubation phases, we sought to understand pain points, inefficiencies, and untapped areas for innovation. The goal was to generate new product ideas that could be tested, refined, and developed into minimum viable products (MVPs), all while targeting a
Operationalizing AI product discovery stages, within Innovation.
In January 2023, SMBC recognized the need to transform its operational workflows across the Americas. Outdated systems hindered agility and competitiveness, prompting an urgent focus on implementing change to unlock new business value.
I initiated a process to discover, validate, and nurture innovative product ideas tailored for the operations team. By securing seed funding, I led the product development of these concepts into proofs of concept (POCs), ultimately increasing our goal from 20% to 70% in time spent.
This process was not merely about product creation; it focused on defining the operating model for GenAI product innovation.
Strategic Alignment.
I envisioned three integrated models to achieve the objectives. The first, Product Discovery, identified the operations team as our customer, centering our efforts on uncovering ideas and opportunities. This seamlessly connected to the second model, Product Leadership, which aligned with our strategic goal of operational efficiency. Here, I elevated Discovery to a functional level, alongside platform engineering, product management, and data science. Lastly, the third model, Design Strategy, emerged, driven by a culture of collaboration. It emphasized research, ideation, evaluation, prototyping, and testing, ensuring each step was deliberate and thoughtfully interconnected.
To refine our customers' ideas, I reimagined the traditional product pitch funnel as a structured journey, guiding seven teams to craft compelling narratives for C-suite executives. This helped teams distill their ideas, refine concepts, and align with business strategy and buy-in.
- Helped teams distill their ideas
- Refine their concepts collectively
- Align with business strategy & buy-in
My team carried this out over six weeks, additionally I paired the business teams with their respective C-Suit members stakeholders for feedback and alignment.
- Coached 20+ employees on product innovation
- Introduced strategic management frameworks
- Early feedback, helping shape and validate the idea
Refining Customer Ideas.
Design Strategy and Adaptation.
Throughout the six weeks, as we delved deeper to understand and refine the ideas, various needs emerged. To address these, I tailored the design strategy team's capabilities, ensuring the right support was in place for each requirement. The outcome was a first-place winner: a product idea centered around enhancing workflows for Project Managers by simplifying access to ServiceNow data, allowing users to search, summarize, and generate results effortlessly.
How to Maximize Product Value?
The question now evolved into a broader ambition: how might we extend the value of this product, reaching beyond the initial single customer and user base identified in our discovery? To achieve this, I curated three workshops designed to guide the team in uncovering a wider array of potential customers across various domains. The workshops surfaced an intriguing blend of needs: predictive insights, personalization, and productivity. While the predictive and personalization aspects demanded robust AI ethics frameworks—beyond the organization’s current readiness—I directed our focus toward the productivity theme. This approach not only aligned with existing capabilities but also enriched the original product’s value.
The outcome was a new product concept named A.I.D.A. This marked the team’s initial step in crafting a compelling product brief, which deeply resonated across the organization. A.I.D.A. provided a clear direction that aligned stakeholders, ensuring that everyone understood the objectives and priorities. It also began shaping a strategic perspective on a critical decision: whether to pursue standalone GenAI products or focus on embedding features within existing offerings.
Aligning Strategy and Stakeholders for GenAI Product Development.
To truly grasp the product experience, I opted to focus deeply on a single stakeholder instead of broadly addressing all. This approach allowed us to uncover richer insights, refine the experience, and create a more intuitive product. It also ensured that our design choices were strategic and impactful. As we made decisions, we maintained a level of abstraction to accommodate a broader customer base, ensuring that features were interchangeable and adaptable across different domains.
To achieve this, I guided the team through secondary research that explored feasibility and identified the moments that truly mattered. These moments included challenges such as difficulty finding relevant project updates, locating processes and statuses in ServiceNow, and accessing accurate information for decision-making.
Product Research & Design.
Product Blueprint
Alongside designing the tangible prototype, we created a "Product Blueprint" to map the team's thoughts, assumptions, hypotheses, and the necessary experiments to be conducted. This blueprint served as a central reference, providing a clear view of the product, its proposed roadmap, and the path to achieving it, with all known experiments outlined. It seamlessly connected to the epics and user stories, offering a single snapshot that illuminated the complexities, obstacles, and overall scope. This approach ensured a shared understanding and aligned direction for the team.
Figure 1.1
ESG Booster Portfolio View
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Users can view a holistic overview of their entire investment portfolio, including detailed insights into their ESG scores.
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Users can view their current portfolio's overall trending ESG score and compare it to last year's performance.
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Users can view their score benchmarked against various industrial averages, including the Dow Jones.
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Users can view a holistic overview of their entire investment portfolio, including detailed insights into their ESG scores.
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Users can view their portfolio's holdings percentage, with outliers flagged for discrepancies between benchmarks like Refinitiv and Yahoo Finance.
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Users can select companies of interest to drill down into their ESG outlier scores and see the differences between benchmarks.
The product experience was organized around highlighting outliers in ESG scores. This helps users pinpoint areas of concern and opportunity within their investment portfolios. Low ESG scores may indicate risks such as environmental or governance issues, prompting reassessment or divestment, while high scores can highlight strong sustainability practices and potential investment opportunities. Identifying these outliers enables users to rebalance their portfolios by mitigating exposure to high-risk assets and investing in high-performing companies, while also encouraging deeper due diligence to understand the underlying factors influencing ESG performance.
#2 Powering real-time insights for truly green investments.
The comprehension of risk and reward in REITs, properties, and tenant relationships needs improvement. Current solutions lack deep insights into commercial property volatility and associated risks, leaving asset managers and analysts disadvantaged. VisualRE, a data-driven tool, addresses this gap, offering enhanced insights and early risk detection for proactive risk management and portfolio optimization in real estate.
Indroducing VisulaRE
The comprehension of risk and reward in REITs, properties, and tenant relationships needs improvement. Current solutions lack deep insights into commercial property volatility and associated risks, leaving asset managers and analysts disadvantaged. VisualRE, a data-driven tool, addresses this gap, offering enhanced insights and early risk detection for proactive risk management and portfolio optimization in real estate.
Figure 1.2
VisualRE Portfolio View
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Users can quickly view the top-priority message regarding their real estate investments, highlighting how tenant loans are impacting portfolio loans.
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A prioritized list of other real estate investments is also available at a glance.
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The system proactively recommends real estate to add to your watchlist based on sentiment analysis.
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The module card pattern related to the system's displayed messages is highlighted for analysis.
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Users receive a notification for review and analysis whenever there is a market change affecting their real estate investments.
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Each card represents prioritized data points for the user's real estate investments. The debt-to-asset ratio is visualized on a clockwise gauge, ranging from positive to negative, allowing the user to quickly assess exposure levels. These cards can be further explored to reveal details on reputation and total revenue, while also providing recommended next steps.
The product experience includes a sentiment analysis indicator that monitors loan and property performance, alerting users when intervention is needed. Predictive analysis provides numeric scores to anticipate property and tenant defaults, as well as covenant violations. Advanced property watchlist tools offer a view of tenant characteristics, economic factors, and stressors at various levels. Additionally, users can intuitively visualize their real estate portfolio with graph-based tools that display exposure, risk, and relationships in a single view.
Digital Compliance
PRODUCT—
In the realm of regulatory compliance, organizations struggle with the complexity of evolving regulations from agencies like FINRA, SEC, and ESMA. Manual tracking leads to overload and compliance risks. Digital Compliance offers a modular platform, DigitalComp, powered by data science, to streamline tracking, centralize information, and manage documents efficiently. It aims to empower compliance professionals with proactive and organized compliance management.
PRODUCT CHALLENGE—
Figure 1.3
Digital Compliance Monitoring
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Continuously displays subscriptions and data ingestion from key regulatory agencies across all operating geographies, providing a quantifiable metric count for tracking.
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Users can add specific topics of interest to their compliance watchlist, enabling them to easily identify new and evolving regulatory mandates.
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Compliance and regulation notices are accessible through a prioritized list that displays key updates and changes for easy review, with potential risks highlighted.
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Associated rules with the notices can be queried through natural language, allowing users to ask questions directly. The benefit is that the aggregated Q&A for the company is displayed and searchable, making it easier to find relevant information and gain insights quickly.
The product experience offers continuous data from regulatory agencies, automates the analysis and categorization of new regulations, and provides a searchable Q&A library for internal staff. It employs advanced graph and NLP techniques to visualize key regulatory events and compare changes in documents over time. Additionally, it enables compliance officers to manage and categorize notices from multiple regulatory bodies, ensuring comprehensive compliance management.
WillPower
PRODUCT—
In personal and asset management, individuals struggle to organize and secure diverse digital assets and documents. Existing solutions lack centralization and security, leading to potential issues. WillPower addresses this gap by employing blockchain-based technology for secure storage and organization. It streamlines asset management, instilling confidence in safeguarding digital and physical estates.
PRODUCT CHALLENGE—
Figure 1.4
WillPower Mobile App
Figure 1.4 Product Experience: WillPower
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PRODUCT CHALLENGE FIVE—
In financial services, advisors lack a unified view of clients' financial landscapes due to fragmented data sources. 360+ addresses this by amalgamating data from various sources to provide a holistic understanding of clients. With data science capabilities, it tracks portfolios and analyzes past behavior, empowering advisors to deliver tailored investment suggestions and services.
WHAT WE ACHIEVED—
Applied new business models to address key challenges within the buy-side and sell-side, framing market disruption
The aim was to optimize processes, elevate decision-making capabilities, and offer in-depth insights. Whether tackling issues in ESG investing, real estate analysis, compliance management, or customer insights specific to finance, the products underscore the critical requirement for unified, secure, and data-driven product experiences. These product ideas are envisioned to cater to the dynamic needs of the evolving buy-side and sell-side industries.
Ambition—
Outcome—
Increased Efficiency
Revenue Growth
Improved Decision-Making
MORE RESULTS—