Many folks claim that financial math, market knowledge, and engineering are the triumvirate quant skills. I argue that unless you have direct PNL to your name, those skills merely help past the post. In a highly politicized environment such as a bank, successful quants are those who have vision and are able to sell their vision. I liken this process to running a mini-startup on the company dime.

Non-alpha idea generation is cheap – similar to the real world, there’s a surfeit of ideas in a large organization. The ideas come in a bewildering torrent of flavors, strengths, and verticals. Your job is to choose a winner amongst all these ideas and convince others to invest in your winner. Similar to a start-up investing in a low information environment, these ideas lack direct numeric comparables. For these situations, you need a risk assessment framework to evaluate the ideas. Decompose the ideas into first-principles components and overlay them in the shared operational environment. Two seemingly unrelated ideas might have similar subcomponents that can be measured along the same risk paradigm. The aggregate value of the subcomponents might have a different risk profile than the initial idea. This lens is useful to find more granular value hidden by just top line numbers.

After shortlisting a set of winners, you need to establish a consensus among stakeholders to back your vision. This process is often likened to securing funding for a mini-startup within a larger organization. Managing multiple stakeholders, all of whom have orthogonal opinions, is a delicate art most similar to herding cats. Here, the soft aspects of your toolbox come into play: tapping your network, selling your heart out, and delicately compromising the vision in exchange for buy-in. Even after consensus is established and funding secured, stewardship of the vision is a dynamic and perennially active process.

I emphasize that the technical quant toolbox only comes into play during execution. As a bank quant becomes more senior and experienced in her career, she inevitably focuses more on the business building, team leading, and ship pointing aspects of her role. With this lens, her primary value proposition is that of a facilitator: connecting the most important problems with the most important people, just as scouts connect startups with investors.