A firmwide governance platform that consolidates NBIA and PSCM workflows into a single, standardized risk-assessment and approval experience — improving efficiency, transparency, and compliance across Lines of Business.
Client
JPMorganChase
My Role
Senior UX Designer
Domain
Fintech · Risk & Governance
Year
2025 – 2026
Duration
6 months (Aug 2025 – Jan 2026)
Tools
Figma · Mural · UserTesting · Confluence
Overview
The New Product Assessment (NPA) platform was launched at JPMorganChase as a firmwide solution to streamline the approval process for new products and product changes. Two long-standing workflows — NBIA (New Business Initiative Approval) and PSCM (Product/Service Change Management) — were being run as separate, disconnected processes across multiple Lines of Business. NPA unified them.
The platform consolidates both workflows into a single experience, enables end-to-end tracking, risk assessment, and governance, and improves efficiency, transparency, and compliance across LOBs. I joined the program as a Senior UX Designer, partnering with product, engineering, and risk stakeholders to design specific workflows within the broader experience — including risk assessment, task management, and the approval-tracking surfaces.
The Challenge
Before NPA, getting a new product or a change to an existing product approved at JPMorganChase meant navigating a maze of disconnected systems. Different LOBs had built their own tools and processes over years of incremental changes — and the cost was being absorbed silently across the firm in the form of slower time-to-market and weaker governance visibility.
Multiple disconnected systems across LOBs — Each Line of Business had its own approval tooling, with no shared data layer. Risk teams couldn't see a firmwide picture without manual reconciliation.
Manual and inconsistent workflows — Approval paths varied by LOB and even by product type. The same kind of decision was being made differently depending on who initiated it.
Redundant questionnaires and approvals — Initiators were answering the same risk questions multiple times across different systems. Reviewers were reviewing the same content multiple times in different formats.
Limited visibility into risk, tasks, and approvals — No single view existed for an initiator, a reviewer, or a governance lead to see "what is in flight, where is it stuck, and what risk does it carry."
No unified standard for risk assessment — Without a standardized rubric for evaluating risk across LOBs, decisions were inconsistent and compliance reporting was a recurring fire drill.
Research
A firmwide platform only succeeds if it absorbs the reality of how the work is actually done — not the idealized version in a process document. Our team ran a structured discovery program in the first two months, focused on understanding every role that touches an NPA submission.
20+ moderated interviews with initiators, reviewers, risk SMEs, and governance leads across multiple Lines of Business to capture how each role experiences the current process.
Cross-LOB current-state and future-state journey maps for both NBIA and PSCM, identifying every handoff, delay, and redundancy across the end-to-end approval lifecycle.
Heuristic audit of the existing LOB tools — documenting the duplicated fields, conflicting terminology, and broken handoffs that the consolidated platform needed to resolve.
Collaborative workshops with risk and compliance stakeholders to align on a single, firmwide risk taxonomy that the platform could enforce by design.
Moderated UserTesting sessions on mid-fidelity prototypes with real initiators and reviewers — three rounds of iteration before engineering committed to the build.
Embedded risk and compliance partners directly in design critiques so the platform's risk-assessment surfaces were validated continuously, not retrofitted at the end.
Key Insights
Insight 01
"I answer the same five questions in three different systems." Redundant data entry was the single most-cited frustration. Every duplicate field was eroding trust in the platform's value.
Insight 02
"I don't know where my submission is or who's blocking it." Visibility into approval status — not the approval process itself — was where the platform could deliver immediate, felt value to initiators.
Insight 03
"Risk reviewers and product owners speak different languages." The same field meant different things to different roles. The platform had to translate without dumbing down — terminology was a design problem, not a copywriting problem.
Insight 04
"Governance needs an audit trail, not a static report." Compliance leads weren't asking for prettier dashboards — they were asking for an evidentiary record of every decision and who made it.
Design Process
The design work was structured around three principles that came directly out of research: ask once, reuse everywhere, show status by default, and standardize risk without flattening it. Every interaction had to defend one of those.
Role-based personas for initiators, reviewers, risk SMEs, and governance leads — grounded in real workflow observations across LOBs.
Prioritized problem statements, design principles, and a shared firmwide vocabulary that risk and product partners signed off on before we sketched a single screen.
Cross-functional design sprints with product, risk, and engineering — exploring multiple workflow patterns before converging on a unified information architecture.
High-fidelity Figma prototypes, three rounds of moderated usability testing, and continuous risk-partner critique throughout the build phase.
Design Decisions
Three design decisions had the greatest impact on how the platform feels to use day-to-day:
Unified intake with smart reuse — One questionnaire intelligently scopes to NBIA or PSCM based on the answers given. Previously-submitted data auto-populates wherever the firm already has it, so initiators are never asked the same question twice.
Live approval-tracking surface — Initiators, reviewers, and governance leads each see a tailored view of "what is in flight, where it is, and who is blocking it." Status is communicated by default, not by request.
Standardized risk assessment, role-aware presentation — A single firmwide risk taxonomy is enforced under the hood, but the way risk is presented adapts to the role — initiators see plain-language prompts, risk SMEs see the underlying rubric and evidence trail.
Impact
Early post-launch feedback and platform usage data showed meaningful improvements on the dimensions that mattered most to the program — speed, completeness, and visibility.
↓ ~40%
Reduction in average end-to-end approval cycle time across consolidated NBIA and PSCM workflows
↓ ~55%
Reduction in redundant data entry — initiators no longer re-enter information the firm already holds
↑ ~30%
Improvement in first-pass submission completeness, reducing the back-and-forth between initiators and reviewers
Key Learnings
Consolidation is a UX problem before it's a tech problem. The technical lift of replacing legacy systems was significant — but the harder work was aligning four LOBs on a single vocabulary, a single risk taxonomy, and a single mental model of "what counts as an approval."
Standardization succeeds when it stays role-aware. A firmwide standard fails the moment it ignores the fact that initiators, reviewers, and risk SMEs experience the same data differently. The win was a single underlying model with role-tailored surfaces.
Visibility is the highest-leverage feature in any workflow tool. "Where is my submission?" was a more frequent and emotional question than any approval logic. Investing in clear status communication paid back across every role on the platform.