🏦 The Unwritten Rulebook: Part II

The Clique Reality Nobody Advertises

The finance industry seems very cliquey, with a lot of favouritism and focus on soft skills instead of hard skills. A lot of times people are just hanging out and even gossiping at work instead of actually working.

This is not a bug. It is a feature of how banking cultures have operated for decades. The implications for BAs and POs are severe and specific:

The Favouritism Engine works like this:

Favouritism is a thing and does exist — if you're not in with your manager you're going to struggle professionally and will have to forego certain opportunities if you're not willing to rub shoulders with your manager.

This is the most direct, honest thing you'll read from someone who has actually lived it. The corollary: your manager's personal affinity for you is a career multiplier that outweighs most competence gaps. A mediocre performer who is liked gets opportunities. An excellent performer who is "difficult" gets managed out.

The Cliquey-ness Has Structure — Learn It

In every bank and financial services firm, the social graph has layers:

Your job as a BA/PO is to move from Workhorse Pool → Visibility Ring before someone else fills the Inner Circle slot ahead of you.

"Fake Agile" Is a Political Statement, Not a Process Failure

Multiple experienced practitioners across Reddit threads confirm this pattern uniformly. Fake agile. Comfy job, with people celebrating 20-year work anniversaries left and right. And more pointedly: You're competing with other internal teams at the bank for resourcing and headcount, everything has a million layers of approvals needed, it's not truly agile and might never be.

The political reality underneath "fake agile":

• Agile language has been adopted because it sounds modern and pleases shareholders
• Agile authority (the PO has final say on the backlog, the team is self-organizing) has NOT been transferred
• The actual decisions are still made by senior bankers who have no intention of giving up control
• This means your "product ownership" is a title in search of actual power

The non-naive response: Stop fighting the agile/waterfall religion war. Nobody senior cares. Instead, identify where actual micro-decisions are being made and position yourself as the person who facilitates those decisions cleanly. Own the process of resolution even when you don't own the outcome. That earns trust. Trust earns authority. Authority earns real ownership — eventually.

The Credit Economy in Banking Is Zero-Sum

In a bank, credit for work is currency. It gets traded, accumulated, and stolen — often invisibly. The practitioner consensus on Reddit is clear: You need to be political enough to watch out for others taking credit for your work or wins.

The Credit Theft Playbook (What's Done to You):

• Your ideas are shared in meetings you weren't invited to
• Your analysis shows up in a deck with someone else's name on it
• Your stakeholder relationships are "inherited" by a senior who joined the project late
• Your successful project is attributed to the programme manager who "ran" it

The Credit Defence Playbook (What You Do About It):

1. The Pre-Brief — Before every meeting where your work will be discussed, brief your manager and one senior stakeholder directly, in writing. "As I mentioned to you on Tuesday, the analysis shows..." creates an attribution anchor.
2. The Email Trail — After every significant conversation or decision, send a recap email. "Following our conversation, I'll be proceeding with X approach..." This timestamps your contribution. In disputes, emails win.
3. The Visible Artefact — Attach your name to outputs: reports, decks, design documents. In banking, the author of the slide owns the intellectual credit. Make authorship visible.
4. The Public Acknowledgment Loop — When you present results to a group, explicitly thank yourself by narrating what you did: "After my analysis of three options, we landed on..." Not boastful — factual. It makes invisibility harder.
5. The Ally Witness Network — Build relationships with 2–3 peers who attend the same forums as you. They become your informal attribution witnesses. When someone asks "whose idea was this?", you want advocates who already know.

The Internal Move — Banking's Most Dangerous Career Manoeuvre

This is one of the most under-discussed political traps in banking. It completely tips the power balance in your boss's favour, and you really really don't want to be in a position where one person can make or break your career aspirations. In my experience working in investment banking, as soon as your boss finds out you intend to leave, you immediately and automatically forfeit any opportunity at getting top-bucket (or even mid-bucket) bonus.

The internal move rules in banking:

• Never signal intent early. Interest in another role should be confidential until you have a confirmed offer or explicit permission to explore
• Build the bridge before you need it. Invest in relationships across departments before you want to move — done too late, it reads as transactional
• Protect your current manager — if they find out from someone else that you're looking, the professional relationship is damaged even if you stay
• Use HR's "internal mobility" language — framing it as "I want to broaden my experience" is softer than "I want out of this team"

The cleanest internal move: have a senior leader in the target area already advocating for you before you apply. They pull you, rather than you pushing.

The Reorg — Banking's Political Reset Button

Reorgs in financial institutions are not random. They are almost always politically motivated at the top — even when presented as cost-efficiency exercises. For BAs and POs, a reorg is a threat and opportunity simultaneously.

What Actually Happens in a Bank Reorg:

• Senior leaders negotiate fiefdoms behind closed doors
• Headcount is traded: "I'll give up three BAs if I can keep the analytics team"
• People who are "attached" to a leader who loses power become politically orphaned
• People who are attached to a leader who gains power get elevated

Survival Protocol During a Reorg:

1. Map the winners early — Within the first week of a reorg announcement, identify which senior leaders came out with more scope. Quietly position yourself as useful to them.
2. Don't be visibly loyal to the losers — This sounds brutal but it is the reality. If your sponsor loses power, maintain the relationship privately but don't publicly defend their agenda.
3. Make yourself cross-functional — BAs and POs who are embedded in multiple workstreams are harder to cut. Single-workstream specialists are the first to be "consolidated."
4. Document your value in transferable terms — Before any reorg lands, prepare a one-pager on what you deliver in business outcome terms. Not features shipped. Revenue protected, risk reduced, time saved.
5. Build relationships with the next layer above your manager — Your manager may leave. Their manager is your insurance policy. The insider advice from WSO: people at the C-suite level have many capable people but few they truly trust — earning that trust is rocket fuel for your career.

The Honest Truth About Finance and Personality

Most published advice tells quiet professionals that introversion is a "superpower." That's partially true, but let's be precise about where it helps and where it hurts in banking specifically.

Where introversion/quietness is an asset in banking:

• Deep analytical work (credit analysis, modelling, requirements writing)
• Listening in stakeholder sessions — introverts often gather better information
• One-on-one relationship building (often preferred over large-room networking)
• Written communication — reports, decks, email trails

Where it creates political risk:

• Visibility in senior forums — quiet people are overlooked for promotion consideration
• Spontaneous credit-taking — extroverts naturally narrate their contributions out loud
• Relationship breadth — introvert networks tend to be deep but narrow (dangerous in reorgs)
• Perceived "executive presence" — banking still equates volume with confidence at many firms

The evidence-based correction: You don't need to be loud, bubbly and talkative, just need to be polite, well-spoken, communicate well and do good work. The guy who used to run the entire specialty banking group at my bank was the most soft-spoken and reserved guy I'd ever met.

But the structural problem is real: It's very difficult to not promote a highly valuable professional lest they leave to another company — truth. The caveat: they first have to know you're highly valuable.

The Introvert Visibility Strategy (That Actually Works)

The goal is not to become extroverted. The goal is structured, deliberate visibility that doesn't require performing a personality you don't have.

Tactics that work for quiet professionals:

• The Weekly Written Update — A short, well-written progress summary sent to your manager and one senior stakeholder weekly. Writing is where introverts often excel. Use it.
• The Prepared Meeting Contribution — Before every significant meeting, prepare one specific insight or question to contribute. One contribution per meeting is enough to be "present" in people's memory. Silence across 10 meetings erases you.
• Coffee Chats as the Primary Network Vehicle — I am an introvert and networking was never something I liked doing, so I found one-on-one coffee catch-ups more comfortable. One-on-one is the introvert's natural networking format. Use it intentionally. One coffee chat per week with someone across the organisation compounds massively over 12 months.
• The Written Debrief After Every Meeting — Send a concise recap after every meeting you led or participated in significantly. This serves dual purpose: attribution trail AND demonstrates you're the "organised one" — a valuable brand in chaotic banking environments.
• Ask to Present — Even if it's terrifying, presenting once per quarter in a senior forum is worth more than months of invisible excellent work. Prepare obsessively. Deliver calmly. One good presentation changes perceptions that took months to build negatively.

Reframe Before You Resist

The most common mistake BAs and POs make with difficult stakeholders is treating their stated position as the problem. The actual problem is almost always underneath it.

From r/ProductManagement practitioner wisdom: A lot of times the "unreasonable" or "aggressive" labels occur when we're working with someone and we don't understand their role or goals, why they are doing what they are doing. It's like the saying: "One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." Perspectives really matter.

The reframe playbook:

• Before the meeting: Ask yourself: "What does this person need to feel safe/successful in this decision?" Rarely do people actively want bad outcomes. They want their concerns heard and their risks addressed.
• In the meeting: Lead with acknowledgment, not argument. "I understand why that's a concern from your perspective..." disarms more reliably than data.
• After the meeting: Reframe things — rather than pointing out why things won't work/need to be different, point out how the recommended change will help them get the outcome they want. If they see you as someone who helps navigate and unlock finance/capital, they will bring you in always.

This last insight is gold: you want to be the person who unlocks things, not the person who blocks things. In banking culture, the person who says "here's how we do this safely" wins. The person who says "that's not possible" gets bypassed.

The "Silence = Fear" Principle

Stakeholder silence = fear. Treat it like a fire alarm, not indifference. Keep receipts. Summarise decisions. Frame everything as risk management, not sales.

When a stakeholder goes quiet on a deliverable, stops responding to emails, or starts sending their delegate instead — that is almost never indifference. It means they feel exposed, threatened, or uncertain, and they're withdrawing until the situation clarifies. Your response:

• Don't escalate immediately
• Pull them aside for an informal conversation: "I noticed we haven't aligned on X yet — is there something I can help clarify or address?"
• Find out what they're afraid of and solve that problem, not the surface one

The High-Power Rival Stakeholder: The Nuclear Option

When two powerful stakeholders are deadlocked and blocking your progress, the practitioner move is counterintuitive: Tell each stakeholder that the other stakeholder is blocking you from going forward with their requirement and let them both "discuss" it.

Use with extreme care. But when it works — and it often does — it removes you from the middle of a political fight and lets people at the same power level resolve it directly. Your job then is to facilitate the outcome, not own the battle.

The Citigroup Number That Scares People

Citigroup published a research report that predicted artificial intelligence will displace 54% of jobs in the banking industry, more than in any other sector.

That number is real. But context matters enormously for BAs and POs specifically.

What AI Actually Threatens (And What It Doesn't)

Experts tell Fortune that an AI-fuelled finance job takeover is largely "smoke and mirrors" — at least for now.

More specifically, from r/FinancialCareers practitioners: AI might have the raw skill advantage but it doesn't have the human side of the equation, which is still very necessary in finance roles. Humans will be necessary to sanity check AI for the foreseeable future. No finance exec is going to risk a massive f*** up because they wanted to save a few million a year in salaries.

The Future-Proofing Strategy for BAs and POs

The signal: Give a product owner an app that asks them the right questions and you can get a long way in requirements elicitation. The mechanical, structured, repeatable parts of your role are being automated. The political, relational, judgment-intensive parts are not.

The practitioners who are least threatened are those who have moved from information gatherer to decision facilitator — from someone who writes what others tell them to someone who shapes what gets decided.

The specific moves to future-proof:

1. Develop domain depth — BAs with genuine banking domain expertise (payments, credit, regulatory capital, AML) are significantly harder to replace than generalist BAs who only know Jira
2. Own the relationship layer — Stakeholder management, facilitation, and political navigation are explicitly what AI cannot do
3. Become the AI translation layer — The "AI whisperer" role is emerging: people who can translate AI output into business decisions that executives will trust
4. Build compliance/risk fluency — Every AI deployment in banking requires a human who understands the regulatory guardrails. This is a growth career embedded within your existing role

What Actually Compounds Over Time

Most career advice focuses on getting the next role. The more important question in banking is: what compounds over a 5–10 year horizon?

From Wall Street Oasis and eFinancialCareers practitioners, the assets that compound in banking:

Assets that compound:

• Institutional knowledge — Understanding how your specific bank actually works (its politics, its systems, its tribal knowledge) becomes irreplaceable after 3+ years
• A senior sponsor relationship — One executive who knows your work and advocates for you internally is worth more than any certification
• Cross-functional relationships — People move around banks. Someone who was a peer BA becomes a director who can champion you
• A track record of delivery — In banking, people remember who delivered and who didn't across multiple cycles

Assets that depreciate:

• Technical skills without domain depth — Jira, Confluence, Scrum certifications are commodity skills
• Single-manager dependency — If your career is entirely managed by one person's goodwill, you're one reorg away from reset
• Silo expertise — Being the only person who understands one legacy system is a trap, not a moat

The Coffee Chat as Career Infrastructure

This is the single most underrated tactical move in banking, consistently recommended by practitioners across every community surveyed:

Aim to set up one coffee chat a week — applied internally this is transformational. Over a year: 52 relationships seeded or deepened. Over three years: you know more people inside the bank than most directors. In a reorg, you have allies everywhere. In a promotion cycle, you have advocates in multiple rooms.

The mechanics: If asking them to be your mentor is a bit off-putting, just ask if you can buy them a coffee and chat about how they got to where they are. Nobody in banking declines this. Everyone likes talking about their career. It costs them nothing and builds you a relationship. Done at scale, it is the most asymmetric investment available to you.

The Sponsor vs. Mentor Distinction — Critical

Most people invest in mentors. The ones who advance invest in sponsors.

From r/AskReddit career advice aggregated from finance practitioners: Few people make it to C-level without a sponsor of some kind. It doesn't have to be in your own company either — networking with execs in your field counts.

For BAs and POs specifically: your sponsor should ideally sit in the business (not in tech), because business sponsors can influence product decisions and headcount conversations that tech sponsors cannot.

Managing Up — The Three Currencies

In banking, managing up is not about impressing your boss. It's about making three specific deposits:

Currency 1: No Surprises
Your manager should never learn about a problem, a conflict, a stakeholder concern, or a delivery risk from someone else first. Brief them proactively. Even a 2-line message: "Heads up — [stakeholder] raised a concern about X. I'm handling it by doing Y. Will update you after the conversation." This is the single most trust-building behaviour available to you.

Currency 2: Translated Outcomes
Every significant piece of work you complete should be translated into business terms before going upward. Not "we completed 12 user stories this sprint." Rather: "We delivered the capability that reduces manual reconciliation time by approximately 3 hours per week across 40 staff — annual saving of ~£250k." Your manager uses this language upward. When they look good, you get credit.

Currency 3: Reduced Cognitive Load
Senior people in banking are drowning in demands. The BA/PO who becomes the person who removes problems — who comes with solutions, not just problems — becomes someone a senior manager actively protects. Listen to pain points of leaders and managers and literally try to work to solve the problem. Not just finance — cross-functional visibility, stakeholder management, delivery confidence.

These are the career-ending moves that nobody puts in the induction handbook.

Trap 1: Publicly Embarrassing a Senior Person

In banking culture, face matters enormously. Correcting a senior person in front of peers — even when you're right — is rarely forgiven. The right move: raise the correction privately, after the meeting, framed as "I wanted to flag something I may have misunderstood..."

Trap 2: Going Over Your Manager's Head Without Warning

Unless there is an ethical or compliance violation, going around your manager to their manager is a declaration of war. Even if it works in the short term, you've created an enemy. If you must escalate: signal it first. "I want to be transparent that I'm planning to raise this with [senior person] because it affects delivery — I wanted you to know first."

Trap 3: Being "Too Honest" in the Wrong Room

Banking culture heavily values diplomatic honesty over unfiltered honesty. Saying "this approach won't work" in a room full of the people who designed it will make you an obstacle. Saying "here's what we'd need to address to make this work" is the same message, received differently.

Trap 4: Letting Your Manager Be Surprised

Already covered — but worth repeating. In the r/FPandA community: VPs go straight to the COO for big expense approvals that they know finance would reject. So we lose control over a lot of expenses. When people bypass you, it means they don't trust the normal process — often because a past surprise damaged the relationship. Being the no-surprises person is the antidote to being bypassed.

Trap 5: Single-Manager Career Dependency

Verbal promises about future moves can't really be relied on. In banking, managers move, leave, get restructured, or get replaced. Building your entire career advancement on one person's goodwill is a fragile structure. Every 6 months: ask yourself — if my manager left tomorrow, who else in this organisation knows my work and would advocate for my development?

Trap 6: Being the Person Who Always Says No

In banking, people remember who blocked things. The compliance person who says no to everything gets routed around. The BA who says "that's out of scope" instead of "here's how we could scope that in" gets excluded from planning conversations. The no-sayer's career plateaus. The yes-and-here's-how person's career accelerates.