Inside JPMorgan Chase's Compliance Technology organization, something was missing — not a system, not a process, but something more fundamental. No one had a clear picture of how the organization itself existed.
Decades of growth had produced an ecosystem of extraordinary complexity: eight distinct technology towers, more than twenty interconnected systems, multiple user types distributed across teams, third-party connections, and data flows that few people could trace end to end. It all lived in documents, institutional memory, and people's heads.
Working alongside my lead design director, I set out to build something that had never existed — a single, interactive visual that captured the entire compliance technology ecosystem in one navigable view.
The map was interactive — not static. Each element was clickable, revealing teams, systems, personas, architectural documents, and callouts for upcoming strategic changes. The intent was to make the organization navigable the way a map makes a city navigable.
Every element in the map was intentional. If something appeared, it was because someone needed to understand it. If something was linked, it was because the connection mattered to how decisions got made.
When we presented to the Managing Director of Compliance Technology and his executive counterparts, the reaction was immediate. Awe. These were leaders who had spent years — some decades — operating inside this organization. They had never seen it like this.
The most powerful design artifacts aren't always the most technically complex. Sometimes the most impactful thing you can build is the thing that helps an organization understand itself. Clarity is a design deliverable.
Before you can fix a system, you have to be able to see it. Most organizations skip that step. We didn't.