How JPMorgan measures the success of its software engineers

At JPMorgan’s 2024 investor day yesterday, technology played a key role, and it wasn’t just about generative AI. Discussing infrastructure modernization, the bank provided a number of metrics it uses to measure productivity and success, as seen in the slide below:

If you want to stand out as a productive engineer at JPMorgan, it seems you’ll need to do a few things:

Click here to subscribe to our technology newsletter 🔧

Rush

When working on JPMorgan product teams, pace is everything. On-time rollout of new features is a key metric, and JPMorgan employees have managed to reduce delivery times by 20% over the past two years.

Product also seems to be a popular area to work at JPMorgan right now. In addition to many fintech initiatives, product employees receive significant rewards; Zoia Kozakov, VP of Product, was recently named to Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list this year.

Be agile

Not all banks are equally committed to the agile methodology, but it appears that JPMorgan wants to stand out as a positive supporter of the agile approach. Over 90% of teams are implementing agile practices and over 60% have changed their success metrics to reflect the agile methodology.

Speaking yesterday, Mary Callahan Erdoes, CEO of JP Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, said that at JPMorgan “it’s not about being agile; existence agile.” Researching agile principles and making sure you’re applying them effectively can help you perform well on these new metrics.

Be safe

Engineering mistakes can be costly, which is why JPMorgan takes the time to both fix them quickly and avoid them altogether. The key successes in this measure included a 12% reduction in the number of incidents without consequences and a change success rate of 99.98%.

The focus on codebase security is similar to that of Stripe, a fintech giant with over 50 million lines of code. Its founders, the Collison brothers, compare code changes to a progressive allergy test, making small and gradual changes to avoid significant errors. Taking a page out of their book can help you achieve your productivity goals at JPMorgan.

How effective are these metrics?

There are many bad metrics when working in software engineering, and few agree on which ones are good, but in general, productivity metrics should focus on results. Product delivery time and code security are two positive examples. However, being fast and being safe can sometimes be at odds with each other, so it’s important to strike a balance.

Agile metrics are a bit more confusing. JPMorgan doesn’t say exactly what its “improved” agility metrics are, and there are many of them. Generally speaking, these metrics focus on delivering value to the customer, but it’s very easy to get agile wrong. Still, it’s better than using lines of code.

Have an insider story, tip or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, Whatsapp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Click here to complete our anonymous formor email [email protected]. Signal also available.

Please bear with me if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: all our comments are moderated by humans. Sometimes these people may be asleep or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. Eventually it will – unless it is offensive or defamatory (in which case it won’t be).