What Business Consulting Looks Like Inside a Bank

The real brief is rarely the first one

A request often arrives as a solution: build this report, add this check, change this process. The useful first step is to ask what problem the request is meant to solve. Sometimes the original idea is right. Often there is a smaller or cleaner change that solves the same problem with less disruption.

Asking the question early is cheaper than discovering the answer after something has been built.

Regulation is a design constraint, not an afterthought

In banking, any change to a process has to hold up in front of risk, compliance and audit. Treating those groups as reviewers at the end leads to rework. Bringing them in while the options are still open leads to designs that pass the first time.

Write things down so they outlive you

Internal consulting work tends to get handed over. People move teams, priorities shift and the next person picks up where you left off. Clear notes on what was decided, what was rejected and why are worth more than a polished final presentation.

Measure the change, not the effort

It is easy to report how many workshops were run or documents produced. What the business cares about is whether the process works better afterwards. Agreeing at the start on how that will be judged keeps the work honest and makes the end of the project easy to recognise.

Why this matters for product work

The habits that make internal consulting work, such as questioning the brief, involving the right reviewers early and agreeing on what success looks like, are the same habits product managers rely on. That overlap is a big part of why I joined the Curious PM cohort.