How ATB Escaped the Build Trap
Digital Transformations are plentiful across the enterprise world, but it’s not often that we hear of their success stories. That’s why I was excited to sit down with Siamak Khorrami, Product Operations and Governance Lead at ATB Financial, as he reflected on their digital transformation. ATB Financial is a regional bank in Canada, owned by the government, so they understand the importance and complexity of moving into a digital environment in a world of constraints.
In 2019 we had the pleasure of working with ATB Financial to conduct a product management assessment across the bank. ATB had been on a fascinating digital transformation journey for the last three and a half years, and they were looking to bring great product practices into the company as the lynchpin in this work.
While standing up the product management organization, they tackled many of the same questions other large organizations face in this type of transformation:
How do we define “products” in a company that traditionally runs on services and financial instruments?
How do we bridge the divide between the business and tech, and how does product management play that role?
How do we give people the space to learn new things as we transition a large number of people into a new role and job function?
How do we enable our strategy across the organization to connect the outcomes we want to see with what the teams are doing?
How do we increase collaboration across silos?
One thing I admire about ATB is their overwhelming willingness to learn, and their openness to sharing those lessons learned both across the organization, and now with us. Let’s hear from Siamak how they got there.
You started this digital transformation journey about three and a half years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to this transformation, how you got started, and where you are now?
According to our CEO and the board, ATB’s wanted to be more than a bank and embrace being customer-centric and customer-obsessed. But, if we really wanted to do that, we couldn’t follow the path that we had started eight decades ago when we were founded. The banking industry has not changed much over the years, and we were still following that traditional path. Leadership saw that if we couldn’t transform our banking, we couldn’t serve our customers to the best of our ability. Serving our customers is the key to surviving as a bank. So it was a really bold decision to transform banking. It was not just about investing in tools and digital infrastructure, it was also about changing how we work. We introduced an initiative called “Work Reimagined” to increase collaboration, break the silos across the organization, and transform digitally.
So you created this three-year plan to transform. What did software and digital products look like at ATB before that, and then what happened through that three-year transformation?
Many things were different, but the first we should talk about was our capabilities. Many jobs were created during the transformation that didn't exist before: data scientists, UX designers, and Digital Product Managers. Also, in the past we were heavily relying on the vendors to build solutions and IT infrastructure for us. As part of digital transformation, we wanted to build that capability in-house. The partnership with vendors continues today, but we wanted to bring the strategic pieces in house to leverage them better.
Also, in the past, our end-to-end customer journeys were really disjointed. Fixing this was a key part of our digital transformation journey and we're still continuing to do that. We really want to create a seamless customer experience across digital through and human connection.
For your Digital Transformation, you decided to take all the software pieces that lived in the business lines and put them under a Chief Transformation Officer. Why did you decide to do that and how did it work?
We have learned a lot since then, and we are changing the structure now, but the initial purpose was very intentional. It’s hard to continue doing what you're doing today while you are also enabling the future. So we can't just stop the bank. The branches still need to continue working, people are coming to us, and they need to be served. We can't disrupt that. But, at the same time we want to build for the future. Digital transformation for a bank at our size takes several years. To do that we needed to have a hyper-focused team to do the transformation without disrupting the day-to-day of the banking. We also needed to build the capabilities and give ourselves the opportunity to try, learn, fail, and grow.
That was the intention for the Chief Transformation Office - to create a space for people to learn new. When we started the transformation, I think we were around a couple hundred people. Now, it’s more than 1000 people. You can't hire that many people from outside, so we needed to move people from other parts of the bank into the transformation team. They had the passion to learn, but they needed the time and space to try. That’s what a separate transformation organization gave us the opportunity to do.
What we have learned over the past few years is that if you want to be really aligned with the rest of the enterprise, that separate transformation office is not sustainable. That's why we are evolving the structure of the company and now the capabilities are embedded in every part of the organization, aligned to the business lines.
When did you realize that you needed to align digital capabilities to the business lines? What was the goal? Why not stay separate?
Now that we built the capability, we asked “how can we scale the capability?” and “how can we be one thing for our customer?”. If we wanted to really solve a problem for our customers, we needed to work together. We needed to collaborate. So, our operating model needed to evolve so we could do that. That was why we made that decision.
“Regardless of the cost of training our 100 product managers, without clarifying what their role is to the rest of the company and creating that space for them to do their job, training doesn’t work.”
We worked together a little over a year ago now. When you reached out, you said that you were trying to introduce great product management to ATB and build out that capability? What made you realize that was a missing piece?
I took my role as a Product Management Practice Lead almost a year ago, and being a product person, I tried to really understand what the problem was. There were two major themes: role clarity and alignment. Our product teams were saying, “hey, who am I, what is my identity?” Not only for themselves but also for their stakeholders. Also, we had invested in all these initiatives, and I realized that there wasn’t much alignment in terms of why we were doing them.
So it was obvious that we had to invest in our product management capability. Our first thought was, “Hey, we should train our Product Managers. That will solve all our problems!” But, we quickly realized it wouldn’t. Regardless of the cost of training our 100 product managers, without clarifying what their role is to the rest of the company and creating that space for them to do their job, training doesn’t work.
Luckily I realized this early. We had invested in training a few product managers but when I interviewed them they said, "I did the training, it was really cool, I learned a lot. But, the next week, I was back doing the same things I was doing before the training." So nothing had changed in their work. That was one of our key lessons - not to invest in training until the company had clarity about what a Product Manager does, and how we can support them.
So after the training route didn’t work as planned, we did the discovery work and realized we needed an assessment to get the data and evidence to create alignment about what product is across the organization. And that's where our engagement was really helpful. We used the evidence from the product management assessment to create a baseline of our current state and understand our desired future state, and we saw there was definitely a gap.
After going through that, we could see it would be a multiple year journey to get to the place that we wanted to be at with product management. We also knew we needed meetings with the leaders to get them aligned. So we did that, and we came up with our prioritized longer term roadmap and we started to take action. Some of the actions that we took in early days, I know now were not the right ones, but because we did them, we learned, and it helped us to get where we are now.
And, with amazing progress, so far! So one challenge for you, as it is for most banks, is that ATB traditionally saw their “products” as banking products. You had credits, deposits, loans, etc. and you had Product Managers that managed those products, who were a little confused by this other type of product manager coming. How did you change the culture and introduce this Digital Product Manager concept?
It was a collective effort to get to the place that we now. Multiple things happened at different levels of the organization, where people started to ask, “What is a product?”
I actually had a unique perspective when I first joined ATB. One of my first product management jobs was in a dairy company. I was managing cheese products. Yes, cheese. Then I joined a telecom company, and then I joined a software company. So I had already seen different types of products but none of them were like a bank. Here you have the services of the people, you have analog products like a loan, and now the software products. I struggled for a while to understand what the product was and how we should deal with it.
Traditionally we thought of mobile banking apps or web banking apps as “channels”. We called them that. We realized these are not channels. Channels are a way to distribute products; you don’t provide added value to your customer through them. A channel for us is a branch. You can solve problems for your customer through digital products that you couldn’t do through a branch. We can use customer data from different parts of the bank to inform an insight that a human may not be able to do in the moment. For example, if someone wants a lending product and already has a bank account, we can use their spending and income data automatically to help recommend a product that fits their situation.
So then, we started to understand this concept of a product. If it can solve a problem for a customer and help them to get a job done, it’s a product. I think that lens helped us change the mindset across the company.
Also, as an organization we wanted to be customer-focused. Rather than just doing the standard banking work for our customers, we wanted to truly understand our customers and what we could do better for them. So we started to ask the organization, “what is the value we can provide for our customers beyond banking?” Now that focus is reflected in our new 10 year strategy, and it's really helped us understand the value of different types of products and that a product is not just a traditional banking product.
Now, we have a new organization. We have the people service, we have the banking products, and we have the digital products. Next, is figuring out how they can all work together. We’ll do that by focusing on our customer, their problems, and how different types of products can work together to solve that problem for them seamlessly.
“The third piece is socializing how much it takes for a product to be successful. It’s not just building a feature: it’s marketing, the experience, the design, the technology. All this stuff should work together to achieve the objectives that we have defined at the middle layer.”
So you just came out of the three year transformation a few months ago. Tell us about what you started to implement right after the assessment? How did you stand up product management around the organization and what types of things are you doing to make sure that it scales?
The first thing was implementing role clarity. We needed to all understand the role of Product Managers so we could support them. At the end of the day the Product Manager wants to create the outcome for both the business and the customer - solve a problem for our customer to reach the business goal. So in order to support that from the top, leadership needed to understand how the organization’s strategy connects to the day-to-day work of the teams. What we didn't have in the past was this higher level strategy to connect that. Implementing that was the second piece.
We only had projects happening in the teams. We didn't have that middle layer connecting the top of the strategy to the projects. So that’s what we’re in the process of defining. It’s interesting to see how much effort goes into showing the necessity of that middle piece, but it was one of the key enablers that moved us forward to becoming better at product management.
The third piece is socializing how much it takes for a product to be successful. It’s not just building a feature: it’s marketing, the experience, the design, the technology. All this stuff should work together to achieve the objectives that we have defined at the middle layer.
In the past we had all these individual roadmaps, all over the place, that were not working together. The only way we aligned them was having lots of meetings. We’d go over to each other, say “hey, can I meet with you to see what you are building?” That was not working well. We are in the process of building that capability of interconnected roadmaps now. I don't anticipate that we will get to a place where we have a multi-layer roadmap sooner than a year from now, but the organization has realized that it is needed and the leadership has supported it. And as I mentioned, it is not just because it’s “product management stuff”. The organization realized that we need to collaborate, and this is one of the artifacts we need to use.
“At the end of the day the Product Manager wants to create the outcome for both the business and the customer - solve a problem for our customer to reach the business goal. So in order to support that from the top, leadership needed to understand how the organization’s strategy connects to the day-to-day work of the teams. ”
Another piece you are setting up is Product Operations. Can you tell us a little bit about what Product Operations is at ATB?
Product Operations was something that we learned about from the assessment. Our efforts previously had been from a governance point of view. We have about 100 Product Managers, different product teams, and we're doing things differently in terms of practices, processes, tools. So we wanted to make sure there was consistency. Our main objective was to build in product management excellence. So the goal for Product Operations and Governance is to enable that in our organization.
Sometimes when you talk about processes or governance people think there's a police that wants to make sure they are doing their jobs. That’s not the goal. The goal is to build a product management capability. That’s why we not only thought about processes, tools and practices, but also product analytics. Adding analytics into Product Operations and Governance is a key enabler to define the outcome and to build that product management excellence.
We use this analogy internally that by implementing Product Operations and Governance we are creating a “playing field” for our Product Managers to play their game well. That’s based on the quote from Adam Nash, "At the end of the day the Product Managers should know the game that they're playing and how they should keep a score." So if they want to focus on their game, they shouldn't be worried about the playing field, their equipment, all of this other stuff. Product Operations and Governance is enabling them to focus on their job.
I love that, Product Operations as an enabler. So now that you’ve been laying this groundwork for the product management capability, what has changed?
While we were doing a bottoms up project to build our product management capability, our leadership was working on the new corporate strategy. Leadership promoted the concept of us being one team, and that collaboration through that strategy session was a key enabler for everything that we are doing now, including product management. So that’s a big change that I'm really feeling - every day as an organization we are being more collaborative.
The other piece is that we realized building a capability is not a short term thing. It's an ongoing effort. It takes several years, and we also need to align it to this new company strategy over those years. That’s why the new corporate strategy is an enabler for what we are doing to build our product management capability. Sometimes I see organizations start to build a product management capability, but they are not tying it to the strategy. It’s only a bottoms up effort. Not that the bottoms up effort is not valuable, but if the bottoms up approach doesn’t meet a top down approach, we are not going to have a successful Product Management capability as the product managers need to produce the outcomes for the strategy. So these two items - aligning to the strategy and the approach of one team - is bringing these two together.
Now that we’re all collaborating, Product Management can solidify our identity. In the past we were mostly Project Managers, asked to deliver. Now the business asks us why we are building certain things. They know that we need to clarify the next layers, and we need someone to define the outcomes and tie that “why” from the strategy into our product development teams. That's where the Product Managers add value.
The next piece is very tactical, but very important. We are planning for cadences that are not delivery focused. In the past people were asking, "What are the risks to deliver this? How many features have you shipped? When you are going to ship that feature?" These are all delivery related questions. Now, we are working to define new cadences that are focused on outcomes, so people ask questions like, “What is our objective for this quarter? Are we moving towards the objective or not?” That's a big, big change to bring the Product Manager into the world of the organization and not just the development teams. And to make that happen we are exposing leadership to universal product analytics. Once they see the data and insights, it enables a conversation around outcomes.
“Sometimes I see organizations start to build a product management capability, but they are not tying it to the strategy. It’s only a bottoms up effort. Not that the bottoms up effort is not valuable, but if the bottoms up approach doesn’t meet a top down approach, we are not going to have a successful Product Management capability as the product managers need to produce the outcomes for the strategy.”
I know it’s early days, but have you seen any changes in how you approach building products for your customers?
As I mentioned, ATB is a key foundation to Alberta's economy and we are here to service all citizens and businesses. With COVID-19, we were all impacted. One thing we are very proud of is that we executed a great initiative to serve our customers with a specific program that was introduced by the federal government during this time. We were able to do that very quickly and our customers were really happy. We did a retrospective on why it went well and one of the key findings was that because we all understood the priority and defined the value for the team, everyone knew how they should contribute to meeting it without being told exactly what they should do.
Everyone in the organization was rallied around that priority. We didn't have time to define every JIRA ticket or every single task, but everyone knew the value, the problem we were solving, and the priority and could operate autonomously. Now we are discussing how we can leverage this experience and bake it into our day-to-day because we understand that if we do great product management, this is what it will look like all the time.
That’s a great story. So you’ve come a long way and it's only been three and a half years since this all started, and yet you’ve said you have a lot more to go. What's next?
I’m excited to see our roadmap in action now that we have the buy in to do it, because talking about it is one thing, doing that in a large organization with multiple product teams and non-product teams is another.
The other is experimentation. Historically, we tend to define the problem and design needs very well, but even though we try to be agile, that piece is very waterfall. We are missing the capability around experimentation. We want to do quick experimentation to learn, and then define the solution. So that's one thing I'm really excited about, but I know that we are not there yet. First, we need to really build out the layers of strategy and finalize role clarity. Maybe in the next year we can start to build the experimentation capability so we are truly agile rather than just calling it agile.
So looking back on when you kicked off this digital transformation and where you are now, what do you think are the biggest lessons you've learned from a Product Management perspective?
Biggest lesson learned: not everything is a product. I know that when you’re passionate about Product, you see everything through the lens of Product, but appreciating the different capabilities in your organization and how Product fits into a traditional organization, like a bank, is really important. I think that was something I didn't understand well in the beginning of my journey with ATB, but now I’m able to articulate how Product fits into the organization and is aligned with the corporate strategy.
The other piece is communication and how words matter. When you call someone a “Product Owner”, different people have different opinions about what a Product Owner is. When you say “Roadmap” maybe 5,000 people have 5,000 opinions on what a roadmap is. A roadmap could be a release plan, a gantt chart, it could be a strategy, it could be objectives. So when you're working in a larger organization, you should be very intentional about the words you use, define them very well, and be consistent about communicating them.
I know that sometimes we say, “I don't care about the words,” but no. Words matter because it creates a shared understanding. Once you have the shared understanding you can increase the velocity for collaboration and communication. That’s one thing I do in all of our meetings on governance. I make sure we have a shared understanding about where we are in the meeting. Everyone then knows what we are talking about, and not assuming something different. I think that that has been one of the biggest takeaways for me. Shared understanding is key to the success and the pace of collaboration between the teams.
That’s a fantastic insight. Thanks for sharing with us Siamak!
It's been quite a journey. I've learned a lot, the bank is a very different world from a startup, but as our organization is always trying to learn, it has given us the opportunity to test different ways of doing things. That’s not only for building the product management capability, but also building the products themselves. Using the assessment as a baseline has been really helpful to create a shared understanding about where we were, and where we are going. So, I’m excited about the journey ahead of us!
Me too. I think you are going to do great, I'm very excited to see where you go!
Melissa Perri is the CEO of Produx Labs, a Product Management consultancy in NYC. She is a professor at Harvard Business School, the author of Escaping the Build Trap, and the creator of the online school, Product Institute.
