How Our Technology and Branch Garage Teams Innovate and Collaborate to Create Better Chase Experiences
By: Anatoliy Lelikov, Senior Director of Software Engineering
What do you picture when you hear the name “Chase?” If you visualize a brick-and-mortar branch with the blue octagon logo, you are not alone. Our branches are the local face of Chase in communities across the country and we have continued to expand to serve people locally. In the era of online banking and mobile apps, customers value our branch footprint and appreciate the ability to complement an in-person experience with the things they can accomplish through technology.
Technology also powers the experience inside Chase branches and helps us serve customers and get more things done. While some of it may seem invisible, the complex underlying systems support everything from banker workstations, apps, tablets and office equipment, including servers and databases, to ATMs, cash recyclers and specialized software distribution mechanisms, all are operating on a shared network and often interconnecting with one another. Software updates are pre-staged in the branch first, then deployed to the devices during off hours to avoid any customer service interruptions.
Managing this day-to-day to keep the branches open and fully operational is no small task but it is critical to the bank and our customers. All technology teams at Chase follow rigorous multi-layered testing and certification practices, ensuring their individual components are secure, functional and performing.
Still, we always ask “have we done enough?” when there is typically a couple dozen technological changes being rolled out into branches in any given week. The ability to “test drive” them all together becomes very important.
But where and how?
A Development Environment with “No Walls”
Chase Branch Garage is a unique product construct created nearly three years ago with a “no walls” approach, where multiple technology groups and branch employees work together as a cohesive team, cross functional team of SMEs coming together with a customer-first focus to ensure the delivery of best-in-class workplace technology to branches. The team leverages hypothesis driven methods of data analysis and advanced telemetry systems, overlaying it with user feedback to drive early identification or resolution of issues and successful scaling of technologies.
A Unified Team
The Branch Garage implements all three concepts of the Garage methodology:
- A cross-functional team — a group that can cover all aspects of the domain and can make decisions without encountering any administrative overhead.
- A common focus on business outcomes — the team must be passionate about solving business problems and improving customer experience as its priority.
- An environment that allows experimentation — for both the team’s culture and the actual ability to operate in a ring-fenced pilot environment that provides good representation of their overall user base.
Our unified agile team consists of SMEs from different organizations (app development, infrastructure engineering, network support and operations). Together we focus on protecting the quality of customer and employee experiences in branches. The team operates a pre-production lab with a set of dedicated branches equipped with the tools for us to pilot all technological updates.
These Garage branches have been outfitted with network probes, device telemetry agents and UX observability tools to obtain the most detailed level of metrics that provide significant insight into the network and systems, including process performance, bandwidth consumption, application connectivity, payloads, packet data and more. The Garage engineers compile this data, analyze it, generate reports and overlay user and customer feedback and experience to help pinpoint issues with stability, scalability and application performance before they arise. Our team meets with branch staff regularly, conducting open mic calls where we review upcoming changes that are about to be piloted in the Garage branches and gather feedback from bankers on changes that have already been implemented. The branch users’ point of view and feedback is the most important test.
We are constantly reinventing and figuring out more effective ways to achieve our goals. We started as a single team catering to all lines of business operating in the branch, as it allowed us to cross-train our staff and mature our interaction with products as we grew the team. It also created a close, tight-knit culture of a startup that sometimes can be challenging in a large organization.
Four Phases Across Labs and Branches
Within the Branch Garage we employ a four-phase process.
In the first phase we conduct early feasibility assessments in the Branch Innovation Lab, a dedicated development and testing environment for the Branch Garage program. The environment of the lab is well suited for ideation, building proof of concepts and working with vendors. A fully isolated lab provides a safe place to conduct experiments without risk of impacting any internal systems. The projects that run through this phase define the future of the branch and typically target a long-term roadmap of 2–5 years. Not every initiative incubated in this lab will end up delivered to actual Chase branches, but those that pass muster will be handed over to the Product teams for full development. We stay in touch with these teams throughout the process up until they are fully implemented and ready to enter phase two.
The second phase also involves a lab that is quite different in its structure and purpose. The Branch User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Lab focuses on near-term initiatives that are ready to move into production. It is set up to closely match the current branch environment and its technology. Here the Garage team focuses on closing the gaps that could remain after typical User Acceptance Testing. These gaps are often associated with potential cross impact between multiple pieces of technology that operate in the branch. The Garage employs different system agents and network probes to gain a deep understanding of these technology interactions and to also establish baselines that can be used for future comparisons.
The third and fourth phases progress into Production branches, starting with a small group of Pre-Pilot branches, followed by a group of Pilot branches. Here we overlay application and device telemetry with feedback from actual users. We get bankers’ weekly feedback to learn how new features are performing. Once a feature attains full Garage Certification it is cleared for General Acceptance (GA) to roll out to all Chase branches.
After operating successfully in the current model for nearly three years we see increasing demand for Garage services, which requires us to adjust our existing processes. The number of projects taken through the Garage has doubled every year, creating a new challenge to sustain this volume without overwhelming the team and our pilot branches.
We are solving the challenge by expanding the Garage and optimizing its productivity. To handle the project load growth, we have increased the Garage footprint to nearly 50 branches, which are representative of every segment of population that Chase services across the country and every format of our branches. Yet, expansion alone cannot effectively solve all our problems. What we realized is that often we do not need two phases of production pilots, but we do need a sufficient pilot duration and the ability to conduct multiple pilots concurrently. Splitting Garage branches into several groups, each dedicated to an individual technology product, will bring more focus to these pilots, improve overall throughput and reduce bankers’ fatigue. The general open mic calls we host with our branch staff will evolve into dedicated, focused sessions allowing more time and deeper engagement between product leads and their user base.
Of course, the ability to operate as a cross-functional team would remain the cornerstone of our approach. When I ask myself “what is the one thing that makes us successful,” the constitution of the team plays a huge role in enabling us to perform this function. We have a talented group of engineers and product owners who are very passionate about end user experience while our bankers go out of their way to provide us with relevant feedback. Bringing them together and enabling them to operate as a single team makes all the difference.
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