Developing tomorrow’s savings platform together with customers — Part 3: “Make agile work for you”
At Nordnet, we always develop new products and features together with our customers. The way we do this are:
1. Maintain a high speed in development
2. Really listen to our customers but also measure what they actually do
3. Make agile work for you a
Continuing on from my last article about working with feedback and analytics developing tomorrow’s savings platform together with customers, I move onto my third and final point: making agile work for you, and not the other way around.
I’m sure everyone reading this article has in one way or another started a journey towards the agile way of working in your organizations. Some of you may be done, other have become stuck and yet others have transformed the Tech department (or at least a part of Tech) and felt that was enough.
Now I’m no agile coach and I won’t be quoting the agile manifesto in this article. But what I will say is that is incredibly liberating to work in an organization where agile is not just a strategic goal or something abstract that’s “done in IT” but rather the only way to reach success.
At Nordnet, our Product & Tech organizations take their form in domains created around rough customer journeys: Foundation, Discover, Execution — all three domains have full front-to-back capabilities with their own ability to release features directly to customers. The domains are led by domain product owners and product owners. The PO has a decisive role in being the voice of the customer and works in the intersection of business, tech and UX — it truly is one of the hardest jobs in the bank.
My tip to you is this: adopt the lingo if you want (product owners, scrum masters, sprints) or the rituals (stand-ups, backlog grooming and retros) but don’t miss the essence of the way of working — it is all about a continuous delivery!
Find what works for your firm. It doesn’t really matter if you choose scrum or Kanban, if you write user epics, stories or tasks.
Make sure you focus on supporting self-organizing, stable teams created to address customer needs and customer journeys and give them the prerequisites and mandate they need to deliver quickly and with quality.
What the teams need to do just that is a clear vision with measurable results, front-to-back competences with as little cross-dependencies as possible, the freedom to move quickly and solve problems instead of delivering on fixed requirements with fixed deadlines. In such a setup, your senior management has to be humble enough to understand that the team has the best competence to deliver true value to customers.
For without a roadmap chock-full of strategic initiatives, the teams themselves have the ability to adapt to changing requirements and not get locked into a certain solution but rather can retain their flexibility all the way to delivery.
It is that way we — and you — can quickly embrace customer feedback and delivery ever greater value.
To summarize, if you are serious about building tomorrow’s platform together with your customers, here are my three principles for you again:
1. Maintain a high speed in development
2. Really listen to your customers (but also measure what they actually do!
3. Make agile work for you (and not the other way around)
I hope you enjoyed this three-part article. I wish you the best of luck!
Rasmus Järborg
Chief Product Officer at Nordnet
