PM as a Service
Great products start with the right questions, not the right tools. Most product teams fail not because their engineers can't build, but because nobody validated the right problem to solve — or the gap between customer insight and shipped product is too slow to matter by the time it closes.
JP Morgan Chase — Commercial Banking
The CEO of JP Morgan Chase's Commercial Banking division faced a specific problem: the commercial loan process was losing customers to fintechs. From the moment a client requested a loan to receiving it could take months. Worse, customers rarely knew whether they'd submitted everything required, leaving them in limbo while faster competitors provided decisions in hours.
- Week 1 Mon–Thu: Cross-functional team mapped the entire commercial loan process on flip charts across conference room walls
- Week 1 Friday: Invited a friendly customer to walk the walls and tell the team where their real experience diverged from what was mapped
- Weeks 2–5 Mon–Thu: Took each section of the customer journey and designed the next-state experience step by step
- Weeks 2–5 Friday: Customer returned each Friday to validate the new design before the team moved to the next section
- iPads for every banker — real-time loan status and documentation requirements available during client visits, eliminating "I'll need to check on that" delays
- Automation of manual operations steps — removing the processing bottlenecks adding days to approvals
- Automated pre-notifications at key stages — customers told exactly what to submit and when, before they had to ask, eliminating documentation limbo
- Business plan grounded in five weeks of real customer feedback — validated at every stage, not at the end
- Real customers in the room every Friday — not a focus group after the fact
- All three recommendations funded and implemented by the Commercial Banking CEO
- Led to a record quarter for the commercial loan division
Alkami Technology (Nasdaq: ALKT)
Alkami had hired product managers across 30+ product teams. Those PMs were operating as project managers — managing timelines, tracking features, reporting status. Nobody was discovering customer problems before committing to build solutions. With a 46% escape defect rate, nearly half of all bugs were reaching customers before being caught internally.
- PMs tracking timelines and features, not owning customer outcomes
- No customer discovery before committing to build
- 46% of bugs reaching customers before being caught
- No shared product vision across 30+ rapidly scaling teams
- Established 7 functional product groups with dedicated Product Leaders accountable for outcomes
- Introduced discovery-led development: customer interviews, assumption testing, problem validation
- Rebuilt product intake: no feature enters development without validated customer evidence
- Coached PMs from requirements writers to problem owners using outcome-based OKRs
- 30+ product teams with outcome-accountable product leadership
- Escape defect rate: 46% → tracking toward 25% annual goal
- Quality sign-off embedded at intake — problems caught before development begins
- PMs shifted from status reporters to problem owners
30 minutes. One senior partner.
Tell us what's stuck, what you've tried, and what good looks like. We'll tell you honestly whether PM-as-a-Service is the right fit — and if it isn't, what is.
- You'll talk to Anil or Kriti — not an SDR.
- We'll respond within one business day.
- If we're not the right fit, we'll say so.
