Abstract:

This talk is a story from a startup bank where two distinct product development groups within the bank discovered significant benefits in removing the barriers between the two and discovering a completely new, more whole perspective to the system they were building.
When your organisation is structured around one way of delivering loans (in our case channeling through partners), your people will see that channel. Not the system underneath it.

At Bank Jago, a development group called Loan Platform built the Loan Platform System around a specific reality: loan channeling to P2P and multifinance partners. When the bank launched its first direct-to-consumer product, the team made a pragmatic call — treat it as another partner on top of the existing platform rather than refactor a system around a newly established business. That call was right at the time. 

But as the direct-to-consumer business grew aggressive and pressure mounted from two fronts, the organisation responded by splitting into two distinct product development groups — Digital Lending (DL) Group and Loan Platform (LP) Group — each with its own engineering leadership, its own culture, and its own version of what "the system" was. The real system that is waiting to emerge, something we later called the Loan Management System, had been hiding in plain sight all along, obscured by the very structure we created to deliver value.

This talk is about what happened when a new engineering leader arrived to oversee both groups (DL and LP) and saw something nobody inside the system could see, which led to a two-day Big Picture workshop using Event Storming in February 2026 that cracked open a shared reality the people hadn't been able to see before, revealing an end-to-end view that none of our teams had been organized around. 

And then, the harder part: what happened next, when 55+ people across 12 teams had to move from seeing themselves — and the way they were organized — as serving a partner channel (the DL group), or as building lending infrastructure (the LP group), to seeing the whole loan management system end-to-end.

This is not a success story — it's still developing in real time.
What we found is that the structural constraints of the old org didn't just shape behavior — they actively prevented people from perceiving the real system they were building. The structure was a cognitive trap, and removing it required more than a reorganisation: it required deliberate, sustained work to make the invisible visible.

The conversation about reorganizing all teams around a single shared product backlog has been on the table for months. We are moving carefully, because the structural constraints are still present, and because people are still operating from the mental models the old structure created.

You will leave this session with an understanding of the forces that kept development groups isolated and prevented them from seeing the whole loan system, and concrete examples of what we did to counteract them: merging product backlogs, consolidating production support, and creating shared visibility across 55+ people, as we work toward shifting from two separate groups with competing views and duplicated architecture to a more adaptive system capable of rapidly launching and iterating on a diversifying portfolio of loan products.

Description: