Four years between traders, quants and engineers.

I was a product manager on FICC electronic trading. The work was external vendor integration, real-time data pipelines, and standing between three groups who each wanted something different from the same system.

What I can describe is the shape of it, not the specifics. Most of what I worked on is proprietary, and the parts that aren’t are dull. So this page is about what the role taught me rather than what it produced.

[Theme one: requirements gathering across groups who don’t share a vocabulary. A trader saying “it’s slow” and a quant saying “it’s slow” are describing different problems.]

[Theme two: vendor integration as the job. Someone else’s system, someone else’s roadmap, your users’ deadline. The closest thing to forward-deployed work that exists in a bank — draw that parallel explicitly.]

[Theme three: working where being wrong is expensive and immediate, and what that does to how you ship.]

[The bridge: what carries into applied AI work — the domain fluency, the Series 7 and 63, and the habit of asking what a system is actually used for rather than what it was specified to do.]