I think that you should be more specific. Steepest ascent/descent belongs to mathematical optimization techniques, e.g. see this wiki Gradient descent .
Depending on the problem in your hands, you may not need to implement the method by yourself, because JMP may already have capabilities for your problem. If you don't know whether such capabilities exist in JMP, you can try to elaborate your problem description. If indeed, there is no existing capabilities out-of-the-box, JMP have powerful tools to solve your customized problem if you are able to specify the problem and tell JMP. One of such tools is the Nonlinear platform, using which you don't need to implement your own method. In the end, JMP has a programming language, JSL, using which, you might be able to write a program which does the mathematical optimization. The thing that you need is the ability to translate a mathematical optimization method to a program.