Sal Criscione | Financial Advisor

At a Glance

Project Name: “The Financial Advisor Ecosystem Playbook”

Challenge	Product teams were operating in silos, lacking a unified understanding of the distinct needs across different advisor lines-of-business. This knowledge gap led to inconsistent designs and redundant, costly discovery efforts for every new project.
Outcome	Developed a comprehensive "Ecosystem Playbook" that codified the nuances of each business line. This strategic resource transformed how product teams approach design thinking and serves as the definitive foundational reference for the organization.
My Role	Lead UX Researcher
Timeline	2 weeks per study, iterative over 9 months.
Methods	Stakeholders Interviews, Secondary Research, Shadowing End-User
Impact	Eliminated redundant discovery research for new workstreams; established as the primary onboarding resource for product teams.

Business Context

Financial advisors help clients achieve their long-term goals by investing their assets.
A client is a Chase customer who invests their money with a Chase financial advisor.

J.P. Morgan Chase employs over 5,000 financial advisors.
They serve over 2.8 million households.
They manage over $1 trillion in assets under supervision.

Challenge: Product had no visibility to its users

Within a complex organization like J.P. Morgan Chase, product teams lacked a unified, high-level view of the financial advisor ecosystem. This fragmentation created critical knowledge gaps in two key areas:

Business Misalignment: There was a fundamental lack of clarity regarding the three distinct financial advisor businesses. Without a shared understanding of how these business lines were intended to integrate, product teams were building in silos rather than supporting a unified strategy.
User Role Ambiguity: The ecosystem’s complexity was obscured. Product teams lacked a comprehensive map of the diverse advisor roles, as well as the critical support roles that enable daily operations. This meant features were often designed without accounting for the actual people executing the work.

My Role & Responsibilities

As the Senior UX Researcher, I spearheaded this foundational initiative while maintaining a full pipeline of active research studies. My responsibilities included:

Stakeholder Synthesis: Facilitating deep-dive interviews across three lines of business to bridge internal knowledge gaps.
Strategic Communication: Translating complex business logic into a visual "Source of Truth" deck for cross-functional teams.
Project Management: Self-initiating and managing this high-impact documentation project alongside my primary research roadmap.

The Deliverable

I synthesized my findings into a comprehensive foundational deck that serves as the organization’s "Source of Truth." The financial advisor's playbook components included:

Ecosystem Map: A visual hierarchy of the three advisor channels and their respective roles.
Market Segmentation Strategy: A breakdown of targeted client tiers for each business line.
Workforce Scale Analysis: Quantitative data on role density to help teams prioritize high-impact features.
Comparative Matrix: A side-by-side feature set and constraint analysis for every role.
Contextual Intelligence: Documentation of business history and service offerings to provide necessary domain expertise.

Line of Business

I mapped the Chase Wealth Management ecosystem to clarify the hierarchy between business channels and their specific advisor roles. This visual served as the foundational blueprint for product teams to identify primary and support users accurately.

Target Market

This visualization maps the target demographics for each advisor channel, highlighting how they collectively provide end-to-end market coverage. By identifying these segments, I helped product teams visualize the "full-spectrum" strategy, ensuring our digital solutions addressed every customer tier without gaps in service.

Number of Roles

This headcount distribution chart visualizes the scale of each advisor role across the organization. By quantifying the user base, I enabled product teams to prioritize features based on reach and align their roadmaps with the firm’s projected workforce growth.

Business & Roles

This comparative matrix outlines the operational constraints of each role, including physical location and client investment thresholds. By clarifying these distinctions, I helped teams identify the specific environmental and financial contexts in which our users operate.

Solo vs. Team

I categorized our workforce into four distinct advisor archetypes based on product access and team structure. By defining these solo and team-based dynamics, I enabled designers to build scalable features that support both independent workflows and high-volume, collaborative environments.

The Impact

This has helped everyone by,

Standardized Institutional Knowledge: Established a "source of truth" that aligned product teams on advisor roles and business objectives.
Strategic User Targeting: Empowered teams to accurately identify primary and secondary users, leading to more intentional feature prioritization.
Accelerated Innovation: Eliminated redundant discovery phases, allowing teams to bypass foundational questions and focus on high-maturity problem-solving and innovation.