Goldman Sachs
Categories: data science, information visualization, interaction design, product strategy, user experience research
Date: July 2013 – June 2015
Skills: interaction design, visual design, contextual user research, information visualizations, simplifying the complex, financial markets, change management, negotiations between various stakeholders, moving at the speed of the markets.
Highlights
The summer of 2013 was amazing time to start my tenure in Goldman Sach’s Technology Division. Within months of joining the whole division had been restructured and reorganized from silos for each business unit into cross functional platform teams. I had the opportunity to witness and also participate in the transition to help define the way that the Technology Division served the business and ultimately our clients.
Three initiatives stand out as having been instrumental to my professional development:
Goldman Sachs Marquee is the client facing portal that serves the Securities Division customers with tools, analysis, and an automated trade processing. Surprisingly, quite a lot of trades are still negotiated and processed manually. Marquee was an attempt to smooth some of the friction by providing insights directly to clients and thus freeing up the Sales teams to facilitate more deals. I was a lead designer for five of the initial products and had a hand in consulting on the implementation for the remaining ten products. Facilitating the design needs for such a disparate suite of applications to feel like a cohesive whole required: developing domain expertise about the products, teams, and end-users we were serving; understanding the workflows within and across products to create seamless end-to-end experiences; and negotiating the balance between specific product team desires and the opportunities for sharing and reuse of common workflows (i.e. the process to clear a trade). This was the project I most enjoyed during my time at Goldman; not only was it highly iterative and experimental – an extremely creative process – but the stakes felt very high, as if we were running an internal start up. As a result, I was intimately involved in watching the unfolding of and contributing to the product’s evolving strategy. This was the project where I really got to sharpen my design skills.
UX/UI Toolkit was the Angular-based UI framework that was owned by the User Experience team to help create a consistent look and feel across the organization’s products. While creating styles and guiding principles for good design is nothing new for an enterprise UX team, this initiative, to deliver our styles in a modern programming language, was. The success of this project was the result of many things, including: remarkable timing as the tech organization was transitioning to shared services, experimental use in some of the initial Marquee products, and a decision to internally open source the project, so that deviations from the standard styles could be identified and blessed if their edge case was deemed worth. I’m extremely grateful to have played a hand in helping shape these living standards, not only because I bore witness to the tremendous effort involved in specifying so many micro interactions but because I have a greater appreciation for the give-and-take that is necessary to allow standards to flex to or hold firm against the whims and desires of product teams. This project helped me deeply integrate the lesson that it really does take a village to build a UI framework.
Public Speaking on UX was a wonderful part of my regular work. When I first joined Goldman the User Experience team was only eight people, serving a technology team of over 10,000. Workshops and regular tech talks were the best way we knew how to scale our tight resources. This was a boon for me because I love public speaking on topics that I’m passionate about, which afforded me the opportunity to learn to hone and tailor my teachings based on the audience at hand. Building on this body of knowledge I was able to present both internally and externally on a range of topics, including: user research methods, design thinking process, scaling small design teams through reuse of patterns, and information visualizations as a way to reduce complexity.
I’m incredibly grateful for the time I spent at Goldman Sachs because I not only got my first taste of Design (with a capital “D”) in an enterprise context, but i also had the opportunity to witness, participate, and learn from large structural changes to the way the organization thought about how it did business to best serve its customers. An invaluable lesson that has informed how I think about ongoing product evolution and strategy.