Fidelity Developer Experience
Summer 2022 - Fall 2023 | DIRECTOR AND ENGAGEMENT Lead AT EPAM CONTINUUM
Challenge
Fidelity wants to be a digital leader, attracting the sort of talent that would normally go to Google or Meta. But despite employing some 18,000 developers—over a third of their workforce—their products were often slow to market, inconsistent, and infrequently updated.
Competition: Fidelity’s founders achieved success by pitting business units against each other, letting the best products win. But it’s resulted in duplication of work and an atmosphere unfriendly to collaboration.
Mobility: A unique program that encourages internal mobility helps associates find new challenges and see the big picture. Unfortunately, this has led to long onboarding timelines, knowledge transfer difficulties, and major productivity concerns.
Retention: These problems have created high developer churn in a time where competition for talent is especially high.
Objective
Design a holistic work experience that enables developer effectiveness and job satisfaction.
Research
VOICE OF CUSTOMER SURVEY
5k+ responses, including
3k comments
RESONANCE TESTING
30k+ hours of testing
IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS
50k+ hours of internal and external interviews
QUANTITATIVE VALIDATION
4k+ responses
Treat software development as a creative process rather than a manufacturing process on a factory floor conveyor belt.
—SURVEY RESPONDANT
Insights, Opportunities, and Roadmap
In Fidelity's overly polite and non-confrontational culture, our insights highlighted hard truths that historically were unspoken or unarticulated.
Lighthouse Vision
In the future as a tech associate, I thrive in a culture of trust, respect, and engineering excellence.
Near-Term: A Clear System
To improve the day-to-day efficiency of tech associates—and let them focus on what they love—these are the places to start.
INSIGHT 01 There is a shared goal, but the how is mismatched.
INSIGHT 02 Incentives prioritize designing for the silo, not the organization.
INSIGHT 03 Capturing and maintaining knowledge are equally important.
INSIGHT 04 Fidelity sees itself as having a federal and state model, but it functions more like the UN.
OPPORTUNITY AREA
How might we create dynamic knowledge and enforceable standards that optimize development and business value across Fidelity?
Mid-Term: Continuous Growth
Nearly everyone wants to grow in their job. But tech associates see their future prospects strongly tied to keeping up with the times.
INSIGHT 05 Interesting is new to me.
INSIGHT 06 When it’s the least interesting to me, I’m the most valuable to my team.
OPPORTUNITY AREA
How might we continually engage tech associates with interesting problems to solve so we maximize their time of mastery on a team?
INSIGHT 07 Moving up shouldn’t
mean moving away.
INSIGHT 08 Mobility gives me a sense of control over my career
OPPORTUNITY AREA
How might we create clear and desirable growth paths for tech associates that offer control over their career beyond mobility?
Long-Term: The Right Culture
Culture underpins every aspect of the tech associate experience and can multiply—or cancel out—improvements made elsewhere.
INSIGHT 09 Fidelity can’t expect change, it needs to create it.
INSIGHT10 Without space to make mistakes, I won’t innovate.
INSIGHT 11 Politeness is important, but it’s not a good alternative to openness.
OPPORTUNITY AREA
How might we inspire fresh thinking and create room for mistakes to unlock innovation?
INSIGHT 12 The culture of consensus is crushing a culture of doing.
INSIGHT 13 Designing for the worst intent tells me (and the team) you don’t trust us.
INSIGHT 14 Treat me like a creative human, not a cog in a machine.
OPPORTUNITY AREA
How might we create a culture of doing through systems that default to trust so we unleash our tech associates’ creativity?
Envisioning
We developed 4 enterprise-wide concepts focused on addressing A Clear System. All solutions were designed from the tech associate perspective. The four concepts address a variety of tech associate needs and could certainly stand on their own. But they’re stronger together — data should flow between them, increasing overall utility.
Standards Definition System
A single home for standards at Fidelity, covering not just design and code standards, but common processes, patterns, procedures, and tools. Save your oft-referenced standards to a list for easy access and to be notified of changes. Or filter standards by your role or BU to make browsing simple.
Landing Page
Detail View
Components Catalog
The one-stop shop for all shared design and code patterns at Fidelity, organized around experiences. Code and design live together; live usage metrics and links to work in production instill confidence in the various components. As Fidelity has many ways of doing things, different groups’ work will first be collected here; as tech stacks and preferences converge over time, the number of patterns will be organically reduced.
My Profile
A resource to learn more about colleagues, see their skills and past work, and gather information to propose collaborations or project staffing assignments. Unlike current employee directories, My Profile is focused on tech associates’ needs, emphasizing the skills and initiative work that really speaks to what they’re capable of.
Associate View
Searching for Skills
Initiative Hub
A consistent theme in interviews with tech associates was a general lack of awareness of other work happening around them. Associates loved hearing about others’ work — it was a great way of finding inspiration and potential collaborators — but absent physical proximity, most didn’t have an easy way of keeping up. Enter Initiative Hub. First and foremost, it’s created to help tech associates connect and follow interesting work; it also has secondary uses in reducing redundant initiatives and filling open roles internally.
Cross-Fidelity View
A new way to keep tabs on interesting work and in-demand skills across the entire organization.
Product View
Shows how individual pieces of work connect to build Fidelity’s line of products.
Initiative View
Makes it easy for tech associates to learn from each others’ efforts, and to keep track of interesting problems.
Experience Principles
Experience Principles describe and direct the core values and qualities of new and existing tech experiences. They are a tool for driving alignment and creating better, more consistent initiatives.
Discoverable
The tools (and the content within) need to be intuitive to find, search, and browse. It’s also important that they complement daily workflows, and are built to encourage sharing.
Current
As Fidelity grows in size and skills, so too should these tools. Their usefulness should increase the more they’re used; when associates can see they’re evolving, their trust in them grows.
Governed
A bottom-up approach to maintenance and freshness will give everyone a stake in the tools’ growth, but assigning top-down responsibility will make sure important decisions get made.
Transparent
There’s a direct correlation between transparency and trust. Making the tools’ use, targets, and goals clear gives associates the assurance they’re contributing their time to something important.
Inviting
The emotional aspect of the tooling. These experiences reflect the desired cultural aspects of future Fidelity — collaborative, open, fun, straightforward, inclusive.
Governance Model
At Fidelity, technology decision-making is tied to organizational structure. Many companies have siloed organizational structures. However, successful technology decision-making in these instances isn’t tied to org structure. We developed a Fidelity governance structure that creates clear roles, explicit responsibilities, and a defined process.
Socialization
Fidelity is relationship-based and hierarchical. Socialization involved constant workshops, share-outs, and executive updates to ensure ongoing buy-in and alignment.
Our extended team included 50 associates, with representation from technology and HR across the entire organization.
We conducted regular share-outs with the Fidelity CTO (who reports directly to the Fidelity CEO) and Business Unit and Domain CIOs.
And we conducted over 15 workshops with stakeholders over the course of the engagement.
Impact
A new and groundbreaking cross-enterprise initiative was implemented, impacting over 18,000 Fidelity employees, based on the strategy, consisting of a vision, roadmap, governance model, and experience principles.
A new Product area
Fidelity created a new Product Area consisting of over 15 workstreams. Fidelity has invested 27 senior tech associates resources to the program as well as a new squad, a multi-million investment.
A NEW Priority
The CTO has prioritized UDE, a key enabler for the overall Fidelity tech strategy.
A NEW Excitement
Of the over 4k responses to the validation survey, each proposed solution had at least 75% of respondents liking or loving the concepts.
A New Approach
Fidelity had never conducted this type of research with their employees. Our insights deeply resonated with developers; they’ve become widely referenced across product, dev, and even HR teams.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
At the program outset, Fidelity wanted to become a tech-first company, but this didn't resonate with employees. Instead, we pointed them towards building a successful financial services technology company.
A NEW PARTNERSHIP
Despite a general policy of not working with outside agencies, our work on this initiative has led to 2 extensions, 3 follow-on projects, 4 internal referrals, and a multiple new projects with other Fidelity teams.