The world’s most used online
payment processing vendor was
struggling with how to manage credit and risk on their broad platform. The vendor needed strong risk analysis tools and an analytics dashboard to answer risk-related questions for both merchants and consumers.
As this new initiative was funded
and kicked off, a group of high performing engineers and business analysts were pulled together to form a product platform team. This team, led by a highly experienced platform engineer, began to develop features for technical capabilities that would comprise the new intelligence automation platform. It quickly became evident that this team was on a mission to build an intelligence platform – not how to solve a customer problem. They were missing a critical part of the picture – the voice of the customer. What did a credit risk analyst need in order to make risk trade off decisions?
The customer engaged Sketch as an expert who could provide a guiding hand to the newly formed team. Together, we agreed that the primary objective for this phase of the engagement was to successfully plan the first value increment. Additionally, it was determined that this team would adopt proven Agile mindset concepts and best practices, which were new to the team. Sketch leveraged our value framework that outlined core elements for team success. First up: create alignment to a common purpose and publish a product vision. This grounded the team and drove direction and decision making. The team needed visible goals to ensure they were always working on the right things at the right time for the right reason.
Multiple facilitated working sessions yielded a high-level roadmap along with the beginnings of a leadership backlog. This leadership backlog
provided delivery and enablement teams a clear escalation path to quickly mitigate risks, dependencies and impediments. Once the vision, goals and mitigation plans were established, it was time to re-think the structure of the team. To move away from a team organized to build an intelligence platform and toward teams organized by customer value; six cross-functional, valuealigned delivery teams were formed. This structure supported the
requirement of quickly responding to changing business priorities..
One of the goals of this effort was to iteratively and incrementally build a secure, reliable and
responsive data platform. In order to do that Sketch worked with the teams to build the foundation necessary to operate in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) environment. Sketch also played a key role in providing coaching support for team members to gain clarity on virtually any topic related to continuous delivery. After two and a half months the team had set meaningful goals, built an execution plan, aligned themselves with customers and stakeholders, and were guided by a Product Roadmap. The Risk Assessment Platform Teams were now ready to deliver their first value increment.
We hope these are the kinds of outcomes you were looking for. If you want to learn more about the work that went into this project, we're happy to answer your questions.
Better yet, let's talk about whichever project you were mulling over that brought you here. We love to talk shop, and the first few conversations are always free.
