The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has created “new math” — not a revolution in arithmetic, but a formula that gives the product team clarity on their next priority.
“Recently, our team wrestled with balancing business and technology priorities,” said Heather Nichols, director and head of FedNow product delivery. “It seems straightforward, but in the day-to-day, teams are inundated with requests, and high-performing teams don’t like to say ‘no!’”
Nichols and her team found a shorthand — “We called it ‘FedNow New Math.’ We had a bit of fun,” she explained.
“We worked on a straightforward formula that gives teams clarity on their top priority for any given program increment,” added Nichols. “The name stuck, and now everyone across our organization knows what we mean when we talk about ‘new math.’”
Nichols shared the story to demonstrate what she feels is the ultimate hack for a product manager who needs to bring order to a chaotic system.
“Start small,” she explained. “Try to simplify and clarify as much as possible.”
Nichols added that creating a formula that helped the product team identify top priorities was “a small adjustment, but it simplified and clarified a complex issue,” she noted. “You don’t have to create complex solutions that solve every issue at once. Sometimes focusing on a simple solution that solves one pain point can go a long way toward minimizing chaos for your teams.”
Built In Boston spoke with Nichols about what other tools, tips and tricks she uses as a product leader.
As part of the central bank of the United States, the Boston Fed works to promote sound growth and financial stability in New England and the nation.
What tools do you use to minimize chaos in your day-to-day work?
For day-to-day refinement and planning of product development, we use a whiteboarding tool for collaboration, ideating and planning; a design tool for UX design; and an application lifecycle management platform to organize and track progress on feature development.
Our whiteboarding tool is great because it’s flexible and easy to navigate. It gives our teams latitude in planning features and program increments.
Our UX design tool is an innovative collaboration tool used for product ideation, design and prototyping. It helps us maintain a single source of truth for our product designs and enables teams to collaborate in real-time as the design-build-feedback loop progresses.
Our application lifecycle management tool has also proven to be a powerful tool to manage development work across our large product and technology organization. Leaders, teams and stakeholders alike can easily see product scope, prioritization and development progress through this tool. We’ve also used it to collect informative metrics that show us where we need to improve.
The FedNow Service has a unique approach to delivering new functionality. We must balance the continuous deployment of new code with no downtime of the instant payment service, against the more measured planning of new functionality releases to customers. To achieve this unique balance, we created our own deployer tooling that allows each of our services to be updated with no disruptions. The tooling enables automated deployments while preserving our system’s uptime. We perform frequent health checks along the way, so the process runs smoothly.
“The FedNow Service has a unique approach to delivering new functionality. We must balance the continuous deployment of new code with no downtime of the instant payment service.”
Then, from a product delivery perspective, we use a detailed manual checklist of gating criteria to plan and execute releases of new functionality. We ensure various tasks such as regression testing, user testing, customer communications, etc. are completed ahead of product releases. These in-house tools, whether automated or manual, are valuable because we customize them to meet the unique aspects of our business.
How has your toolkit allowed you to “level-up” at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston? What important tasks are you able to accomplish by automating some of the more tedious processes?
As our tooling examples indicate, we rely heavily on tools that are flexible and provide customization. The complexity and unique aspects of running a 24/7 instant payment service requires us to find the highest value and efficiency from tools we customize to meet our exact needs. In effect, these tools allow us to “level-up” because they give us the ability to react, pivot, plan and collaborate with speed — which is critical to running a new product in a nascent market.
