The first interaction with a prospective customer often makes or breaks the sale. In today’s age of instantly obtaining products and application at the touch of a button (e.g. mobile apps), the last thing that customers expect is a long, complicated process. Truly delighting the customer requires moving towards instant gratification. How do you re-organize traditionally separate business and technology groups so that the focus is on delighting the customer?

A group within a leading financial institution identified this as a goal and looked at lean-agile principles and practices to rapidly iterate on delighting the customer and bringing business & technology processes seamlessly together. While delivery was set up using what we’ve come to as good lean-agile principles and practices, how the product backlog was managed provided the rapid feedback, innovation and pivot/pursuits required to truly delight the customers.

In building the product backlog a number of practices were introduced to make it dynamic and ever evolving.

• Kanban connected the customer to the product backlog which connected to the delivery engine
• Product metrics and cost of delay were used to create hypotheses to prioritize MVPs
• Rapid feedback through various customer and proxy customer interactions were leveraged to feed the customer backlog
• Monthly releases ensured a constant flow of new features to enhance the customer’s experience
• Story decomposition ensured the customers feedback was being directly communicated with the delivery team

The result? While the client is still on its journey the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Key metrics indicate greater customer satisfactions, increased speed to completion and simplified internal processes.

In this talk we’ll discuss how we’ve taken various product management related practices and stitched them together to connect the customer to the delivery engine. We’ll provide practical examples that we’ve seen work in our experience and engage in a discussion with the group to connect their questions to our examples.

Lean-Agile is easily & often associated with customer centric products and solution. The “customer facing” nature of the product allows for thin slicing, feedback and iteration which in turn leads to greater business agility and customer satisfaction. While there have been many exceptional case studies that demonstrate this, applying lean-agile to non-customer facing solutions has often been dismissed. Why is this? The risk is too high to thin slice? There’s no way to get customer feedback? There’s no way to deliver using iterative approaches?

Over the last 16 months a group within a leading financial services client was brought to a cross roads. Their traditionally stable market was on the verge of being disrupted due to emerging innovation and competition from smaller, more nimble competitors. They knew to operate the same way would result in significant losses in market share over the next decade. To survive, they had to lead the innovation. Change was becoming the norm, and their focus shifted from being solely focused on final solutions, to also re-thinking how they got to these solutions.

Enter lean & agile principles and practices. Initially dismissed because this client’s business model operated as the backbone of the institution. Much of the work they did was in facilitating payment origination and transaction settlement systems. Applying lean & agile required some significant tailoring.

In this talk we will discuss this client’s journey, how they changed the entire culture within the organization to focus on survival through agility. We’ll discuss how common lean-agile principles and practices can be applied and tailored to support transforming legacy eco-systems with back-end facing solutions where the concept of a real life "customer" is quite foreign. We'll visit our experiences in encouraging the transparency that is synonymous with an agile approach and how that fostered better partnerships and trust across many groups. We’ll explore how a culture of learning has established early wins for the client and set them on a path towards leading innovation, agility and empowered being first to market.