We will be sharing our practical experiences and giving concrete examples from our work with multisite teams that build one solution and deliver value to customers across different European markets. We imagine our talk as open to receive questions from the audience all the time, addressing it immediately and adjusting the pace during the story telling. In case of the questions that would require longer discussion and explanation, we would offer a follow-up open-space session.

 

How can organizations balance LeSS recommendations with the realities of cross-country teamwork in regulated environments?

Our talk is based on real-life stories and lessons learned from two banking products in a huge international banking corporation: lending and foreign exchange.
Tune in to hear how we created a unique, LeSS inspired, approach to building one solution with distributed teams delivering value to customers across 7 countries.

We will share actionable insights into dealing with different challenges:

- Setting up a cross-country product group and its collaboration model
- One Product Owner and country customer representative partnering towards the same goal
- Our struggle to establish one product backlog

Balancing LeSS recommendations and harsh reality brought learnings in different spheres. While always with the intention to optimize the whole system, we also had to consciously decide on what to omit from the whole-product focus and balance cognitive load of teams and continue to live with some dependencies.

Despite huge organizational constraints, such as cumbersome and highly regulated business processes, different cultures, and language barriers, we found a collaboration model that helps us continuously deliver customer value.

We are far away from being done as business goals are ambitious and our products are still in the growth phase. Here are some challenges that we still need to overcome:
- Strengthening the PO role by working further on its authority
- Further product scaling by:
o Focusing on removing organizational constraints in new countries for better E2E team setup
o Adapting architecture for easier integration
o Continuously improving the collaboration model

We are inviting you to come and get inspired by our learnings. This session will be of benefit to anyone involved in agile transformations and interested in learning how to apply LeSS inspired approach in a huge financial group, especially to those in roles of Agile Coaches, managers, team members.

Learning Outcomes:

- Learn how we manage product ideas across a spectrum of different countries.
- Find out how to build a product group that works together across countries in a big bank.
- Get excited by our simple ways to make teams work better and faster.

Presenters:

Lejla Vulovic and Ana Nad

We are senior Agile Coaches in Raiffeisen Bank International, based in Vienna, Austria. We support people, teams, leadership, and the whole organization on their Agile journey and guide them through organizational change.
We have been working together in Raiffeisen Bank International since 2018 and since then we have curated and delivered together various Agile trainings and workshops for employees across the whole RBI Group. We find it very joyful and fulfilling to work together and to share our passion about Agile with a broader audience. Our training courses and workshops were always very well accepted and rated with the highest feedback.

Together we participated in a panel discussion at the Regional Scrum Gathering Balkans in November 2023 in Belgrade.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnO2vOjsBGo

In previous years, we also had several individual public appearances and participations in
conferences, meet ups and podcasts on various Agile topics.

Lejla Vulovic
“Why don’t developers like Scrum (Masters)?, Agile Croatia Meet Up, Zagreb, Croatia, 2023
"Customer-centric Innovation in a highly regulated financial environment", Agility in the Practice, Vienna, Austria, 2022
"Customer-centric Innovation in a highly regulated financial environment", Agile Innovation Day, Zürich, Switzerland, 2022
"Creating a Culture of Continuous Improvement with Effective Retrospectives", PMI BiH Forum Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2021
"Agile Transformation in Finance Sector", Sarajevo Unlimited Innovation Forum, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2017
"Business Agility in Finance Sector", Atlassian User Group BiH, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2017

Ana Nad

"Transitioning to an Agile company – Learnings and takeaways ", Austria, 2017 , online
https://www.runtastic.com/blog/en/agile-company-culture/
Creator and moderator of the Agile User Group Linz, 2018
Guest at Mind your Tech podcast with Marieke van Vliet – van der Graaff, 2022
https://soundcloud.com/mindyourtech/bridgingthegap-with-ana-nad