Mihai Popa

My name is Mihai, and today, alongside my colleagues Mihai - yes, Mihai is a popular name in our country - and George, we are going to try to tell you a story of what we have achieved in the last three years in our company.

Basically, three years ago, our CEO came to DOES London and shared the plans about this transformation: how we wanted to move from a traditional brick-and-mortar bank to a real tech company. The story is that we did not really achieve being a tech company like Google is, but we did take very good steps in that direction.

Listen to the story and try to take away the good things and also the hiccups that we had. This is not a story in which we tell how smart we are and how many good things we did. We just want to share our experiences and knowledge from these three years so that your life will be easier from today onwards if you also want to do such a transformation. If you want to hear a great story, I do not think it will be a great story; I think it will be a good story. We just want to share some teachings with you.

A couple of things about ourselves: we are coming from Romania, a country in Eastern Europe bordering the Black Sea. It is roughly as big as the state of Idaho and has a population of 20 million people.

My name is Mihai Popa. I am the head of a department which builds software for our engineers in ING. This is pretty rare for a bank, because usually banks do not invest in software and stuff like that. Now we are just starting. Basically, my department builds software for all the engineers in the bank. For people in the audience who try to sell me something, this is not good news, because I am not going to buy the product; I am usually going to try to build it in-house. My background is in computer science, and currently I am doing an executive MBA at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

My colleague George is the chapter lead - and we will tell you a little bit later about what a chapter lead is - for the ops engineers. He works in fraud and cybersecurity, and he already graduated an MBA, so he is more advanced than me. Mihai is the chapter lead for dev engineers. He is a very passionate developer with more than eight years of experience in software development, mainly in Java. The three of us will try to share with you how we felt and what we learned from this transformation.

If I was to tell you about what I do in my day-to-day life at work, I use this metaphor: I like to say that I am the coach of a basketball team composed of orange lions. Of course, you might say, this is just a metaphor. If you want to reduce it to something simple, yes, I am a people manager. I do people management. I work on strategy, motivation, and things like that. If you ask the difference between what I do and what they do, they focus more on software engineers and developing the skills of a software engineer, whereas I focus more on strategy, planning, communication, and the people aspect.

A couple of words about our company: ING is a medium-sized bank. It is a Dutch bank. We have roughly 38 million active customers. We are around 50,000 or 60,000 employees all over the world. The company has four segments: market leaders in the Benelux area, growth markets in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, challengers, and wholesale banking. We are present all over the world except Africa. Some of you from Canada may have heard about ING. We sold our stake to Tangerine, which I think is still the orange bank in Canada. In the States, we are present only in wholesale banking.

What we try to do at ING is empower people to stay a step ahead in business and in life. We have tried to do this in recent years through different ways. This transformation itself is the living proof that we are trying to do this. In the next slides, Mihai will tell you how we moved from a brick-and-mortar bank to more of an agile organization.

Mihai Roman

As Mihai mentioned, we are a bank, so we had to deal with people's finance, and that comes with a lot of risk and compliance points that we have to cover. If we focus now on how we build software, if we look ten or more years ago, we were doing kind of the same as everybody: we were running in a waterfall way. That was okay; it was working, except that our time to market was too big. For example, there were parts of our web that had only four releases per year, and you can imagine what happened if one of them failed.

We had a lot of pressure from inside the company that we had to change something. It was not only pressure from inside; we looked outside. Let's talk about fintech unicorns. We have a lot of fintech unicorns delivering similar services to what we deliver in banking, but they are doing it faster. They had a good reason for doing it faster: they had no legacy behind them, so for them it was something freshly new. Putting these two things together, we decided that we needed to change.

As our CIO mentioned in London, it started in 2010 with the mobile app. We had to make an impact on mobile. Everybody these days is spending hours and even days on their mobile, so we started with two teams that were purely doing agile development. That was amazing for them, but soon enough we hit the first wall. We had the dev team, but we still had operations separate. We had to put these two silos inside the IT organization together, so we moved to DevOps. We put engineers together and removed the transition, the handover. Any handover that was needed was gone. That also came with other benefits.

Now we had all our IT organization split into teams where they can do everything from the first line of code to production. But we still had two silos in the company. We had the business demanding to IT, saying, "Guys, we need this new functionality and we need it now," and IT had to deliver on time. So we went one step further.

Maybe some of you have heard about Spotify. We took their model and adapted it. It is not just copying their model directly, because that does not work. Copy-paste usually goes wrong somewhere. We split our organization into tribes with a single business purpose. For example, in mortgages, we have one tribe dealing with mortgages. Inside that tribe there are several squads helping to deliver that value.

Mihai mentioned at the beginning that we are chapter leads. We are chapter leads, so we take care of people, but we are also engineers. Part of our time, we are normal members of a squad. It looks a little bit different, because the squads will not stay in the same formula with the same members for more than 12 or 18 months. We change people in order to deliver the business value that we want faster. I deal with dev engineers, so I am one of the transverse lines there. I have all the dev engineers in my tribe working with me. The same is true for George on operations.

To take it a little bit further, we had to do something for the engineers. We had to encourage them to develop more and become better. So we went to the Dreyfus model. In the past we had junior engineer, medium engineer, and senior engineer, or even expert in some companies. What we did was translate the three levels into five, and we are not looking only at technical skills; we mainly look at observable behaviors. To take a short example on novice: you can link it to a freshly graduated student. It is someone who can deliver value, but needs coaching and help.

We have done a lot of things. We moved from waterfall, switched to agile, to DevOps, and then to Dreyfus. All of this we did in order to be able tomorrow to build one ING, which has one experience and one foundation. Now George will tell us in more detail what we have done to achieve this.

George Proorocu

Before I dive into the topic, I will go back a bit to Spotify, because as we know, Spotify does not have one Spotify Mexico, one Spotify Germany, and one Spotify Japan. They have one platform which serves the whole world, and based on the region you are in, you have different options and settings.

Going back to our goals, we are moving toward rolling out one global platform. The steps we took in that direction were: first, as we saw earlier, we implemented the Dreyfus model, which means we now have one set of skills and behaviors for our ops and dev engineers. We also implemented one assessment model, which means that instead of only me having an opinion about my engineers, Mihai has an opinion, other peers have their opinions, and at the end of the day we have a quite accurate assessment for our colleague.

In order to achieve all these big transformations, we also had to lay a bit of foundation and give tools to the people. To do that, we deployed one single learning platform. This helped because during all these transitions, people needed different sets of skills, and we provided trainings and courses that helped them achieve the goal. All this goes toward our idea to have the global one platform. We started small, with Belgium and the Netherlands, and now with all the projects that are coming and that we are thinking of for the future, we are thinking globally. The mentality is going global, to one platform.

During all these transformations, we had many challenges. I will discuss the general challenges, then the continuous challenges, then explain the challenges we face as chapter leads and the challenges management faces.

The main challenge we face during such a major transformation is communication. In order to achieve good communication, you need first to be transparent with people and be clear in the message you are sending. Otherwise, if you leave space for interpretation, this will probably bounce back to you and your organization in a very toxic way.

For us, a big challenge was also changing the mentality of people. We had to explain that it is okay to fail. We are going to give you space to try things, to fail, to learn from it, and like that we advance together. Going back to people: we are a people company and we work for people. We work for our customers.

For the continuous challenges, we had business and IT. Yesterday there was a very nice presentation by the U.S. Customs and Immigration Office which explained the relationship between business and IT very well. We had many challenges here. With this mind shift that we tried to implement during the transformation, we made people understand that unless IT and business work together, we will not be able to achieve a safe and compliant bank while delivering new features and better products for our customers.

We currently have around 15,000 engineers, which means that one out of three of our employees is an engineer. They are serving, as Mihai mentioned earlier, around 38 million customers who trust us every day. The challenge is that we need to keep all these engineers entertained and able to deliver great products. For this, we are doing what most IT companies do these days: organizing hackathons, internal conferences, events where we invite people from other companies like Google and Microsoft, and smaller events focused at squad level or multiple-squad level, like a pizza day to solve different issues, drinks, and team buildings at squad and tribe level.

Now I will explain the challenges for us as chapter leads, because it is important to understand the chapter lead role. In the past, before this transformation, we had people managers and engineers. All of a sudden, some of these people became chapter leads. A chapter lead is part people manager and part engineer. Depending on their background, these people had some missing or underdeveloped skills. To address this, we did several things. We started with the learning platform, where they could address skills and register for courses and trainings. The second was management support. For example, Mihai supported his chapter leads in developing the skills they needed. If his chapter leads had issues and he did not have the answer, because of course he does not know everything, he knew whom to point them to for the right answer.

Another big challenge management faces is that we live in a VUCA world. It comes from volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. It means we live in a very fast world. In life and business, things move very fast. In order to keep up the pace and take proper decisions, we often do not see the whole puzzle. We have only a few pieces and need to take a decision. This is challenging, and for us it is interesting; we enjoy living in this world because it forces us to develop new skills and make better decisions in the future.

During all this transformation, ING was like this boat. We are all inside. We had one goal, and now our goal is to go toward one global platform. We do not really know how the boat is going to go, but we know that unless we work together, we are not going to reach there. Now I will leave Mihai to explain how it was for the managers of managers.

Mihai Popa

What about the leaders? When we started this transformation, I was promoted from chapter lead to, let's say, manager of managers. I was asking myself, "What is my role from now on?" Everybody was talking about flat organizations, not needing management, and self-organizing teams, and I was like, "What am I going to do?"

The last three years for me were about finding my way. I went to conferences and read a lot of articles on the internet, but nobody was really telling what an engineering manager should do, because I think nobody knows. For a chapter lead, it is simple: they code, and the rest of the time they do people management. But what about the level above?

During these three years I came up with a couple of things. We mentioned that it is okay to fail. I always support my chapter leads, my direct reports, to support their people to fail. I know it is very difficult because everybody in this room fights for market share, but if we do not give engineers space to try, innovate, and express themselves, we are not going to move forward.

I do mentorship. I try to help my chapter leads with the knowledge that I have to get them out of difficult situations, mainly on people management. I try to do coaching. The thing we do not do as human beings is ask questions and listen. We tend to say, "I know that you have to do this because I did it before." I think it is more meaningful if you ask questions and make that person understand which way he or she should go.

I am an ambassador of my department. I told you proudly that my people build software for the bank. I am very proud of that, and I do not think we do that often enough. Usually, we do not talk so nicely about our departments. Last but not least, we do not celebrate achievements. We generally say, "This is normal." No, it is not normal. When we do something good, we should be proud, happy, and support the engineers who did that thing.

As a manager, I thought it was good to do those things. I also try to help the chapter leads make sure the teams are coherent. For basketball fans, if the Chicago Bulls had been made only of Michael Jordan, I do not think they would have won everything they won. Sometimes we need a Dennis Rodman there, or other types of players.

How can we achieve all the things I just said? I think the most important thing is to get to know every member of your team. I have a department of 70 people, and one of them is in this room. Hello, Carlo. I do know a couple of things about him, and I know a couple of things about the others as well. I am not faking it. I know what they like and dislike, because this is how we build trust and improve communication. This is how it works: if you know your people, you will be more successful in solving their problems.

Do not take everything at face value. Whenever there is a conflict between two people, because I know them very well, I will be able to tell what the real problem is. Of course I will have different stories from both of them, but because I know them well, I can solve it, or help them solve the conflict more easily.

To finish my introspection, these are the things I think any leader should have in a software company. Some of them you have read in books, some you have heard in other talks, but after three years of doing this transformation, this is what I think we need to have as a people manager or company leader.

I will take three of them. First, I truly believe emotional intelligence is important. Many times in discussions, and even now while I am talking to you, I am able to see who is interested and who is not interested. It is very important when you go into a meeting to look around the table and see people's agendas and how they behave based on their non-linguistic behavior.

You have to lead by example. Walk the talk. Do not just say to your teams, "Do this," if you are not doing it. You had better just not say it; it is fine.

Last but not least, have courage. As a manager, you have to have the courage to do performance management. Whenever somebody in your teams, or somebody in their teams, is not behaving as management decided they should behave, we should talk about that. We should tell them. We should give feedback and help them, not just fire them. We should help them go in the direction we want. Sometimes people do not go in the direction we want because they do not understand the objectives, the vision of the company, or the transformation. George talked about communication. We have to help them, and we have to have the courage to talk to them about these things.

We talked a lot about people and how we felt this transformation, but now I will let Mihai tell us a bit about the technical part: what we achieved in these three years.

Mihai Roman

It is an achievement of our entire engineering community. We managed to end up with a clear set of tools and technologies that we use in the company. The next two may sound a little bit weird for some of you, but now we have one version control and one CI/CD pipeline. When we mention one, we mean ING Global, ING Group, so all countries can make use of it.

I am still an engineer, so the last two represent me quite well: I want to keep things simple. I do not want to do the same work in three places or more. Honestly, I hate repetitive tasks. We agreed, and all the engineers came with that: if I am doing something more than two or three times in a certain period of time, we need to get rid of it. We need to make it faster and automate it in the end.

Just a small comment: if you work in a software company, all these things are normal. We are a bank. We are highly regulated. We have to justify every single step we take. This is why we are so proud of these things, because we could not just do them without having the acceptance of the ECB, the European Central Bank, for example.

We talked about our engineering community, but let's see what we managed to achieve for our customers. It was not only about transforming a bank into a tech company. Before this transformation, we were talking about 90 designs for our cards. Going globally, we reduced that to only eight designs at this moment.

We improved our existing services. It is not only delivering new services and new functionalities; it is improving the existing ones. Why did we do that? Only in Belgium and the Netherlands, we have seven million interactions with our customers per day. That means we have seven million chances to deliver a better service, a proper service, or to fail a little bit. The chances are big, so we paid a lot of attention there.

Some things we received and are proud of from outside ING: last year we were named one of the best banks in the world. We are doing more than just banking and finance. We are investing in new technologies and supporting others to grow. For example, ING has a nice fintech village where we literally help startups grow and become bigger and better.

That was for me. I will let George conclude the talk.

George Proorocu

Before we wrap this up, we just want to give you some key takeaways that you can bring back to your companies.

First: fail fast, learn faster. This sounds quite cliche, but it is actually not. You really need to give space to your engineers. Let them try things, let them fail, let them learn from it, and like that they can evolve together with you.

The journey is not easy. Doing such a major transformation is not easy, but you need to bring everyone in the boat, as we saw earlier. You need to keep getting better and better. You need to empower your employees, and you should not wait too long, because if you do, you might not have too many chances until you become irrelevant.

Conducting such a major change, such a major transformation, is not easy to do. But unless you make everyone understand, from individual to teams to company level, that unless you do this, you will not be relevant in the future.

To finish with one slide about ING, we strongly believe that at this point we are becoming more and more a tech company with a banking license. With this presentation, we wanted to continue what our CIO presented to you three years ago at DOES London. With this, we would like to thank you, and if you have any questions, we are open for you on Slack or after the session. Thank you.

Mihai Popa

Thank you very much.