From Siloes To Systems: Using Design To Power Up Business Agility

Morgane Peng at UXDX Europe. Video: https://youtu.be/--pvh4ABrfg

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

From the trading floor to design

[00:00:02] My name is Morgane. As Katherine said, I'm a (does it work? Yeah) design director in a 150-year-old bank. And most especially, I've been working in corporate and investment banking for 10 years. And I know what you're thinking. That's a long time, right? I actually have a secret.

[00:00:29] That's not Pikachu. I just try to squeeze it into every one of my presentations. I actually started working on the finance side, in business. Don't worry, this is not what the talk is about today, but this is what I was doing. It's my thesis, and I actually started working on the trading floors in London, Paris and Hong Kong. And I have to confess that back then I was a victim of those very complicated, siloed and disjointed interfaces.

[00:01:00] But back then as well, it was pretty cool. Complexity was something we had to deal with, and the more screens you had, the better. We had eight screens and that was really cool. But that was back then, because everything changed with digital transformation and the spread of the fintech mindset. You have to really imagine that for the first time ever we could give clients access to our system. For the first time ever they could use the same tools as our sales, traders and analysts, and that really was a game changer.

[00:01:38] Because of that, we had the rise of the user-centered mindset. And what is really fascinating to me is that this really put design in the spotlight of design strategy, business strategy and business overall. And this is my talk today. I'm going to share our story in this process and a few lessons, obviously, that we had along the way.

[00:02:09] But maybe one last thing before we start: who knows what corporate and investment banking is? Show of hands. Ah, not so bad. Okay. Just to make sure you know what it is, and for the other people, I'm going to go through a little definition. Don't worry, that's the only definition you will see in my presentation.

What corporate and investment banking is

[00:02:32] Okay, it's not as mainstream as personal banking, but what you really have to think is it's more like a bank, but for corporates and organizations. We provide financial services for corporations and financial institutions, and it can really range from startups to regional banks. When I was working on the trading floor, I was doing client presentations. It could be for farmer co-ops or it could be for a regional bank. It's really the spread. It's really, really diverse.

[00:03:08] Let's say, for example, that you start your company. Who wants to start their company one day? A few people. Okay. To start a company, what do you need? Funding, right? You may go to venture capital, or maybe you'll go to capital markets, you may have, I don't know, loans, and this is what you will need to start your company. And let's say a few years down the line you expand to more countries. What you need now is to pay everyone on time in multiple currencies. It's better to be paid on time. For that you will also need financial services.

[00:03:46] And let's be crazy: let's say you're super successful and now you're thinking of acquiring, buying a company. For that, again, you will need financial services. This is the whole range of things that happen in a company's life, and as I said, today clients have direct access to those tools. I'm going to show you a glimpse of what it is, so you can have a better idea of the tools that we give to clients today and the tools that we work on as the design team.

[00:04:17] Video. Yes.

A ten-year challenge

[00:04:49] Okay. How did we get there? As I said before, I've been in this industry for 10 years. Let's do a 10-year challenge. Do you remember that thing that happened at the beginning of the year? Who did it? Not me. No, me neither. I'm sure you know, but at the beginning of the year there was this trend on social media and everyone was posting pictures of themselves 10 years apart. I propose to do the same thing, to see how life has changed in 10 years.

[00:05:27] Do you realize that 10 years ago the average smartphone wasn't smart at all? We had Snake on Nokia, and obviously today I'm not even sure what that thing is anymore, but I definitely spend more time on Mario Kart than calling people. Also, I don't know if you know, but Netflix was around 10 years ago, but they were doing rental by mail. And when I say mail, it's physical mail. They were sending you DVDs, and they were praised for that. Obviously, today everything is streaming.

[00:06:01] And well, 10 years ago we were already spending a lot of time in front of a screen, and that is just increasing. I think that's the stat for the United States, but I'm pretty sure it's the same. And you know what? A lot of those hours, if you're working like me, are spent in front of a screen at work. And when you look at what was happening at work 10 years ago, we had maybe something like that. And well, in a lot of business-to-business and business-to-employee industries, it feels like nothing really changed. Do you relate? Yeah.

[00:06:46] It feels like something forgot to happen in this space. If you're a new joiner, obviously you will love it the first time, and then when you think, okay, now you have to use this, you will cry a little bit. And then when you realize you have multiple tools that are all like this, you will just be overwhelmed. And definitely me, 10 years ago, when I first joined finance, that was my reaction. This is me 10 years ago.

[00:07:19] But don't get me wrong, because 10 years ago technology was already there. You need technology to build systems that can engineer products worldwide. But the difference is that as a user, nobody really cared for you. What I mean by that is you had to go through a lot of training to use those tools, all this. If you have those sticking around, that's probably a consequence of that. It took me a long time to realize that the reason why the screens were so complicated was not because of the business. It's just because nobody really took care to understand, to design them for the user, and even less for the client. The screens, I would say, were designed around the IT system and the processes, not with the user in mind.

How work flowed in silos

[00:08:16] I'm going to do a little drawing so you can get the experience that I was having 10 years ago as a trainee. Obviously that works for finance, but I think it works for a lot of industries, such as healthcare, education, construction, etc. Here's the client, Mr. Client. He has a request. It will go to someone like a banker. Then the banker, or me, will go, for example, to the analyst and say, "Hey, okay, what's the view on the market? Send me the view on the market." Then I will go to the engineer: "Okay, that's the view on the market. What can we do? What kind of product can we engineer?" The engineer will go to the trader: "Okay, what are the rates doing today?" And then we'll go back and forth.

[00:08:58] And then I will go to the middle office and say, "Okay, what's the portfolio valuation? Can I get an update on that?" And everything, hopefully you can see it with the little drawings, was super manual. Everything was mostly email-based, or at least manual, and I would have to copy-paste everything into the presentation and send it to the client. As you can see, at each point there's a risk that you can lose the information or deform the information. And sometimes that happened: you would finish something and then realize that the client had changed their mind, but nobody updated you.

[00:09:33] And this is simplified, because what you really have to see here is that instead of having one person, you have teams, and sometimes you have the mini versions, like the trainees or the juniors. This is the whole ecosystem that is bubbling around. And this happened not only for one division: these bubbles, these silos, were happening at multiple levels in the organization.

[00:10:03] And the last thing is Big Brother controls. What I mean by that is, obviously as a bank, but probably in a lot of industries, you have controls and regulation, and what was happening is that for every single touch point you also had to make sure that it was compliant, etc., etc. I remember what I had to do as a trainee at the end of every week. I had to manually upload every single client presentation I made to a system, and back then there was no drag and drop. I had to open a file, type my attributes, browse for the file, attach it, and do it again. A bit like if you had to do that for every single email you sent today. That would be horrible, right?

From silos to a system

[00:10:51] What has happened today? I'm sure you all have smartphones. You all have maybe an iPad or something. You got used, in your day-to-day life, in your personal life, to the convenience of having access to everything, anytime, right? Everyone has this in their pocket. And people were like, "Hold on a second. I have this in my pocket. Why do I still have to deal with those horrible screens at work? What happened?"

[00:11:27] It took us some time to realize, and to put in place the process of saying, that it is no longer acceptable to isolate your user in your application. People in their professional life should expect to be able to check the fund valuation at the bus stop if they want to. If they don't want to, they can still do it at work, but if they want to, they should be able to, right? And that's progress. Little by little we saw more and more websites for the clients. First maybe just to give some financial information. Then maybe for them to access directly the research papers that before we had to send manually by email. And little by little that went to the point where today you can trade. You can tap directly into the banking system to trade your position.

[00:12:18] If I update the drawing, it's more something like that. We still have Mr. Client, but all the interactions that happened before in silos, we want to put them in a system. It's like a loop, because when you're in the system, and obviously that's across all the departments of the organization, you can build on top of the ideas, you can do more, you can be more creative. And obviously, if you still want to keep in touch with your banker, you can do it, right? Obviously we still have a lot to do. Nothing's perfect, like everywhere, but definitely that's the vision.

[00:12:59] You may like the source. This drawing was presented by our top management to journalists for investor day. The vision is: you have to think system, you have to be in the system. Now, you're like, okay, it's easy to say. I can draw that as well. But to make it really happen in a large organization, it's hard, because we have to change, we have to adapt. We have to adapt three things. We have to adapt our mindset. We have to adapt the way we work, the organization. And, surprisingly, we also had to adapt our design craft. This is what I'm going to share now.

Lesson one: mindset

[00:13:38] First one, mindset. What I mean by that is it's hard to work in a team. It's even harder to work between teams. I'm sure I don't need to ask you questions about this, but you all have examples of team dramas, right? And the thing is, when you look at the evolution of design, there's a clear trend of the need to build things together, this collective intelligence. We started from the really basic notion that we had interfaces. Okay, cool. Then we were like, okay, but they need to be intuitive and the flow needs to be okay. We started talking about user experience. But a good user experience in a single touch point, or just in a feature, doesn't mean much, right? We had more and more of the whole thing, not just digital touch points: customer experience, employee experience, service experience. I'm sure you all know this. I don't need to go into details.

[00:14:39] And when you think at scale, having a great service experience in one business is good for the business line, but you expect this to be seamless across the organization, right? As a client you will say, "Hey, I don't understand why this is so good and this is so bad, and why should I use a different login, or why should I see different screens?" What you're really targeting is to have this platform experience at the brand level. And this is what is tricky, because to do that, sometimes it means that you will have to share things in common between departments that don't really talk to each other, but a lot of the time they share the same clients.

[00:15:25] To give you an example, think about Nike. Today Nike is a system. You can customize your shoes on the app, get the shoes in the shop, log your shoes into the running application, and then they get your data from your running to improve the products. This is an example of a loop and an ecosystem.

[00:15:47] And another thing we had to realize is, well, alone you go fast, but in a system the problem is that sometimes you develop something that may already exist, or maybe sometimes you're doing something that makes sense locally, at your level, but doesn't make sense at a system level. You can think about single sign-on, you can think about the design system, all this. And one day we had a product owner who told me, "Oh wow, it's nice not to reinvent the wheel this time." And I was like, okay. And it's true that on his project we reused a lot of the components from the system, things that already existed, things that people in other parts of the organization were working on. And this is the little shift of mindset that is really, really happening.

[00:16:35] What we have today, at least for our platform called SG Markets, is that everyone has the same single sign-on. I know it seems a no-brainer, right? You expect that. But you really have to think that this is the first step, because when you have a single sign-on, that's the first step of trust. As a division or project, you accept that other people are taking care of your user login and identity. That's really the first step of trust. Then you have a design system. The idea is that once you've used one of our services, you've used all of them, and that also means we need to put things in common, and not everyone just creates their own design system or Sketch libraries on their own.

[00:17:23] And the last thing is we have to have a platform ecosystem. What I mean by that is all services share some common components. We have the same account center, we have the same system of important notices, and if you want to jump from one service to another, you can. This is the whole architecture that we're building: all the back-end systems should be talking to each other. Today it's really those three capabilities that allow us to think collaboratively at scale and not in silos.

Lesson two: the organizational model

[00:18:00] And that brings me to my next lesson, the model, the organizational model. To make it happen, what we had to do is... This is the team, the design team. Yay. We are half in London, half in Paris. On top of everything, should designers code, should designers understand business, whatever. On top of that, what we do, as part of our mission, is we infuse design, but we share whenever there's a common pattern. What we are building with all those stakeholders is this common shared knowledge, and we are making sure that the strategy and the vision of the platform are spread throughout all the projects that we do.

[00:18:48] To do that, what we try to say is that for every single project we need a trio. Obviously there are a lot more people working on this, but at least someone from the business side. We call him or her the business owner. They know the business. They are the one who takes the final decision, according to the product vision. We have someone from IT, because obviously if you design wonderful screens but there's no back end, what are you going to do, right? You're just wireframe monkeys. We need someone who can assess the feasibility of the data, and we are working with very complex systems, so that is compulsory. And as I said, finally we have someone from design, someone who knows the design system, the use cases and what is happening elsewhere.

[00:19:36] Whenever it makes sense to have a shared design pattern, we share it, and sometimes even more than design: sometimes we're going to share even a piece of code, or sometimes there's a component we can reuse directly. And what is worth mentioning is that between all those people there is no direct hierarchy. If you look at the organizational chart, you won't see it. One day someone asked me, "But hold on, Morgane, what happens if, let's say, the business owner is a managing director and the IT or the UX person is just an analyst?" Well, nothing happens, because everyone has a clear mandate, they have a clear scope, and they bring expertise to the table.

[00:20:28] Also, as we say, sharing is caring. There is no such thing as, "Oh, this is my design, I don't want to share it. This is my interface, don't steal it." Whatever we do, it's in the system. If it makes sense to reuse the same pattern somewhere else, we do. And the other thing, as we like to say, is we design with, not for, which means everyone needs to contribute. If we need business insight, if we need to know about the API, we are not the ones who are going to go around and do their part, if you want. We're going to ask them to do their part of the job. And there's no design until everyone has done their job, or at least everyone's aligned on what needs to be done.

Lesson three: adapting the design craft

[00:21:14] And talking about design, this is my final lesson, and probably the one that surprised me the most. I wasn't really aware of it at the beginning: we had to adapt our design craft. To explain that, please bear with me for a minute. I'm going to share a mistake that we made at the beginning of our journey. I'm going to use the example of forms. When you design forms, and I'm sure you all know this, there are a lot of rules that you can find, a lot of golden rules, such as, "Oh, forms should be in one column," or, "Oh, you must put all the labels on top and align them there," and, "Oh, if there are fewer than six options, show all of them." Really? I hope people are laughing.

[00:22:07] We were like, okay, great, let's take all those golden rules and put them on a project, and they're going to have the wow effect. It looked something like that. This is a simplified example, but we tried to apply all of those golden rules. First demo, and I quote, that's exactly what the person said to us: "Oh my god, this user experience is terrible. We don't want that." And then you're at the point of: are they just too used to the old system, or maybe they're going to get used to this? But the reaction was so strong that we knew we got it wrong. We went back to the drawing table.

[00:22:48] What is really happening here? In a lot of business-to-business, business-to-employee settings, again, you're part of the professional space, right? What is really the design intent? Let me share an example. Maybe you'll be more familiar with this. Anyone recognize this? Yeah. Okay, cool. Photoshop, right? My question to you is, how would you feel if every time you wanted to change a text or whatever, you had to scroll through a one-column form, with everything written explicitly, and you had to scroll super long to do everything? That would be annoying, right? There's a difference between forms when you're a professional and you want to be efficient and quick, so we have to keep you in the flow, you want to stay in the flow, and when you're filling in a form for, I don't know, your taxes, for example, where you're not so sure about the process and it's "please explain everything to me step by step."

[00:23:48] That was the example to say that today we have those kinds of screens, and they make sense in the context of the user. This is a tool that is used by our traders and sales, and we give it to financially sophisticated clients. In the context of their daily work, they need to be able to screen. Those are different currency pairs. They have to screen the market, they have to see all those currency pairs. And in the context of their day-to-day work, what is most important is the last digit. And as you can see here, the last digit is bigger, because that's what they care about.

[00:24:28] And this is to say that there's a need for complexity. We can't oversimplify everything. But now you may think, okay, but what happens if you're not so sophisticated, if you just have a simpler need? That happens, right? And we know that clients with simpler needs, who are maybe working in small or medium corporates, would be afraid of this. They said that to us: they're afraid of this kind of screen, because it's so complicated they feel they're going to make a mistake. In our platform, the SG Markets platform, we also have a simpler version of this, which is step by step. You can't get it wrong. There's just one side, you can't trade the other way. Everything is clearly laid out for you, and this is what we give to people who have less sophisticated needs in terms of foreign exchange.

[00:25:22] And as of today, we keep this example for all our new joiners, to explain that there is no absolute good user experience, because the reality is that design is driven by intent, by a purpose. What defines a good practice or golden rule is really dictated by your user context.

Wrapping up

[00:25:51] All right, I'm almost there. Wrapping up. Change can happen in large and traditional organizations. If you're working in one of them, keep pushing. Also, we have to embrace complexity, as you have seen with the last two screens I've shown you. We have everything from very simple needs to very complex needs, and this is the whole range of design challenges that we have today. I guess it's also one of the things that makes it interesting for us to design for.

[00:26:25] And I think if you really want to think about systems, you can't hide away from this. You have to work on mindsets, you have to work on the organizational model, and you also have to work on design craft. Maybe on this note, I hope that I did share some lessons, and I hope you found it interesting. For sure I'll be hanging around, so if you want to talk more about it... If you want to read us, we have a Medium, like a lot of companies. Is it working? Yeah. We share about our everyday life, we also share about the things I covered a bit in this talk, and we also share about our projects, such as the design system. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you.