Career Stops with Felix Cheng
By: Next at Chase Editorial Team
The Career Stops series chronicles the twists and turns that members of the Chase team take on the journey to their current roles with the firm. This week, we’re following Managing Director, Wealth Management Advisor & Service Experiences Felix Cheng’s journey from architecture to digital design.
Stops 1, 2 and 3: Building a foundation in design (Miami, Philadelphia, Los Angeles)
Graduating from high school, I knew I wanted to make a positive impact in people’s lives, but I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to study. I defaulted to starting college as a pre-med student. What is amazing about the United States college system is that there is room to explore! I followed my inner questions and took classes that resonated with me. This eventually led me to architecture grad school, a design degree that tied all my interests together.
Architecture has given me a foundation in systems thinking, in different scales simultaneously, and is the basis for how humans experience a built environment. As a design leader, I use that toolset to build my team’s culture, collaboration processes, and a cross-discipline dialogue among design, technology, product and data.
During an internship while at grad school, I worked at an architecture firm that pushes the boundaries of materials, sculpture and space. The big lesson I learned there is to solve the foundational problems first, and then you can “play.” Even with their radically shaped buildings, the principal spends the first few moments solving the practical things that make up a building: hallways, bathrooms, ventilation, and other programmatic requirements. If you do that efficiently and quickly from the get-go, you get to spend the rest of the time addressing the emotional aspect of design to add surprise and delight elements to a building’s experience.
Stops 4 and 5: Same principles, different canvases (San Francisco)
After graduate school I moved to San Francisco, where my professional career wove between the worlds of architecture and digital design. As a young professional, it was exciting to be part of the tail end of the dot com boom, applying my training in architecture to the emerging field of information design at an eCommerce consultancy. After a few years, I joined an architecture practice that focused on building community housing in the Bay Area.
The context and problems might be different, but the toolset that one has as a designer remains the same: carrying the end-user flag, asking the right questions, understanding customer problems and their intersections with business problems, and solving these at the appropriate scale. Whether you are designing a building, a system workflow or a native touch interface, you are ultimately addressing the variability of human experiences, along with the diversity of expectations, needs and abilities.
Stop 6: An academic interlude (South America)
As a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia doing academic research, I learned first-hand while working with the local communities how to do more with less. It was eye-opening to focus on appropriate technologies and using what’s at hand, rather than always pushing for the most “advanced” technology solution. When you go to the cities of Manizales and Pereira, where they use timber bamboo to build bridges and large-scale buildings, you see the ingenuity of using available materials — like joining structures by using wine bottles embedded in concrete or doing beautiful knots with rope — to make beautiful structures.
Stops 7 and 8: Transitioning from external to internal design (New York)
Invigorated by my time abroad, I settled back in New York as a design director at a digital agency. I worked on a lot of projects across industries, from automotive to kids’ shoes, from healthcare to travel. Even when switching contexts, there are certain human-centered fundamentals that matter. These are the heuristics that speak to how humans use technology, their problems as customers, and what businesses need to solve these to figure out a product/market fit for their goods and services.
To explore problems deeply, I decided to take an in-house design role. It was an opportunity to stitch a whole system of experiences together, rather than one-off projects for different clients. I was lucky to grow up as a leader here. I got my unofficial MBA there, learned to become a general manager that set direction and was responsible for a team’s P&L and culture. Their framework for performance, onboarding and leading people is something I still apply daily.
Today, to be a successful design practitioner and have a long career one must be fluent in the business and focus on impact. It is not as effective to just be the design specialist and be a designer that executes on pure design and user problems. As the profession matures, designers must own business problems, so they need to think like a modern product manager, always looking at the intersection of product/market fit and speaking about the work in the language of the business.
Stop 9: Managing Director, Wealth Management Advisor & Service Experiences, JPMorgan Chase & Co.
What I love about my current job is that everyone is focused on making a positive impact on the financial lives of nearly 80 million customers. That is very powerful. It is fantastic to be part of a large product and design organization with peers and leaders that can bring their cumulative experience to the table. Our job as directors of the firm is to solve business and customer problems, creating the space for our teams to do their best work and have a meaningful effect on the lives of our customers. My team co-creates internal systems at scale that allow our employees to spend more time with their customers.
Chase also provides many opportunities for employees to give back to our communities. Case in point: our design team is currently applying all our internal know-how through the Chase Force for Good initiatives. We are part of a volunteer effort to assist Grassroots Grocery, a non-profit that is tackling food insecurity in New York City. It has been so personally fulfilling to use the same skillsets used to solve large-scale problems at Chase and apply it to help a nonprofit!
A phrase I’ve heard and love is “define success like you are working on your eulogy, not your résumé.” This is about making life and career choices that focus on positive impact on people and how they will remember us, not achievements that sound good. My professional journey in design, through all its twists and turns, has given me opportunities to live that, every day.
Like what you’re reading? Check out our latest opportunities in design.
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