How we form teams and build processes for creating digital banking products

About work in the IT departments of banks decided to respond negatively. It is believed that a normal person there is unbearably boring, that the subordination leaves no freedom, and the skills acquired in the banks, no one needs. It is also widely believed that IT in banks is guys over 40, with long hair and longing for the times of Nirvana. In general, they say different.

We talked with Alena Bocharova, Director of Retail Products at Alfa-Bank, about how things are going on in this regard in the digital products division of Alfa-Bank, as well as plans for the future.

On the essence of projects and customer focus

- We do not “invent” projects and products. We do not do services for the sake of services. We are now in the paradigm of the client-oriented approach. Speaking like human beings, we go from the needs of people. “How was it before?” You ask. We will not prevaricate that, one way or another, earlier products and services in Russia were created, for the most part, on the basis of business interests.

A few years ago, starting with Sense, we began another way: not to convey value to a client, but to create it based on its values. It would seem an obvious story, but it became a kind of revolution in the creation of digital products. Soon we will present one of such products “for people” and “from people”.
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How did this approach affect the mobile bank we are creating? Today we are going to personalize the mobile by the power of the entire bank. A mobile bank should become a much larger entity than just “an application where you can look at the balance and pay for Internet and mobile communications”.

We implement the concept “to do”, in common “tudushka”. The ability to create a to-do-list, in which the user can plan important things for him, his regular activities, such as payments for utility services, kindergarten, compulsory motor TPL insurance, rent, mortgage repayment and others. A kind of finance calendar. There are a number of solutions that will help our clients with recommendations based on their financial behavior.

We recently realized that we are against the patterns inside. Templates, in principle, come from a certain wretchedness of the existing infrastructure (and in this case we are talking not only about banks, but also about the surrounding system in general). Patterns appeared as an attempt to make life easier for the client. For example, on average, a man of 35-40 years old, with a family, has up to 40 payments per month. He lives in the paradigm of what endlessly pays for something, fills in, and nothing can be forgotten. Patterns were some solution to this problem.

The concept of to do makes the whole process smarter, more flexible, and, of course, effective, in terms of saving time (and time today, as we know, is the most expensive thing there is) and in terms of efficiency (this is about “not forgetting "And" on time ").

An important task in this concept is to make the person say “This is what I want to do myself, I did not think about it, but this is also cool, thank you, and here let the operator make the payment”.

The future of banking is an adaptation for each client directly. We do not go to the marketplace, we go to the creation of a personalized client Universe, in which we take into account all aspects of his life, important things for him.

An extremely important goal on this path is to learn so that being a client is always the way and always on time. Do not climb to it when not needed. Every day it is more difficult for people to exist in the world of “caring for them” from all kinds of businesses. Our idea here is simple - any of our actions / advice to the client should be helpful. And this KPI is quite easy to calculate and verify. If all the hints were used, then everything is fine. If not, it means that some tips, tips and recommendations are superfluous, which means that we have not worked.

About competitors

- One of our competitive advantages is often considered a rather informal style of team building. I do not think that the very fact of building a team in the way it is done here is a full-fledged reason for pride, each player has his own goals.

The process is built under the goal, and not vice versa.

If, however, to single out something that actually is an important difference is culture (based on people, including those who come to us from competitors). We are more patient, we give employees the opportunity to organize themselves into teams — independently, without starting a message from above and making lists of who should work with whom.

We managed to build processes in such a way that people can choose their own people and build productive relationships.

The second element is that we have very strong leaders. These people know how to make cool analysts out of analysts, how to take a junior developer to a new level. They also know how to see talents and abilities. For example, to see that a person in a communications or testing team can become a very effective product on the player, help a person walk this path and, in fact, retrain.

The third point is the value of the employee and his work time is rather high. Now we employ around 260-300 people. The main goal is stability.

The fourth is about freedom and respect for the individual. There are clear requirements for goals and their achievement. But we are in favor of people dreaming and having the opportunity to realize dreams. Sometimes some fantastic things are born in the minds of the guys. Setting a goal, it is not particularly important for us how a person will come to it. Yes, we will support if a person lacks his own strength, some knowledge or skills, but we will never snatch a spoon from a person so that he “eats more correctly”.

There is still a very important point. Personally, it is important to me that those who work in my teams are happy not only inside the office, but also beyond its borders. Therefore, we respect the time that a person should spend with his family. We do not rob families, again, we return to the idea that today the most expensive is time. If the family of my guys is happy, then they begin to love what a person does inside the office. To love and support. It is very important.

Perfect bank

- Here we must immediately note one main thing.

Everyone lacks one understanding: to describe the ideal state is nonsense. How many people - so many opinions. A person can be in different situations, so we cannot think of everything here and now at once, this is not the case.

Most likely, we will come to the conclusion that customers will win thanks to one of their main requests. The client, trusting his money to the bank, besides reliability, first of all requires one thing - “Bank, just be invisible, but be where I am. Work and don't make me any problems. ”

The faster everyone turns to face the customer (instead of a known place), the faster the banks will become those who do not interfere with the customer. And the competition will move from the sphere of speed of production of new features and release of new updates in the service sector.

Commands and powers

- The most difficult thing is always people. Everything else can be quickly resolved. Some process rebuild, some change. I noticed that we are all talking about the fact that we have come to a new reality - big data, machine learning, neural networks, and so on. This is all changing, but people are not. People, for the most part, are very inert.

I now have a lot of talk with the guys about the powers. People often believe that in order to do something great, they need authority. And I'm trying to tell you that authority in a new reality is a very ephemeral substance. Today they are. Tomorrow they have changed. The day after tomorrow there are none. I’m sure that you need to give not “powers”, but create opportunities.

When you are an expert in your area of ​​responsibility (and you are an expert, if you receive an SMS about salary receipts twice a month), then you can do almost everything you can to achieve the goal for which you were hired. This is unlikely to be an “excess of authority,” no matter what you do, in any case, I don’t remember that. I do not remember situations when a person passionately and professionally went to his goal, sometimes not fitting into the familiar banking world, and it would turn out that he “exceeded his authority”. If the actions fit into the culture and in the framework of the overall human adequacy.

The framework in the heads, not in the powers.

The leader’s job is to give, help, explain, show examples, expand the framework. Again, create opportunities. Opportunities for users, for the development of their people, for the growth of their service or product.

What can be considered an achievement is viable self-developing teams. Sometimes teams come to us (that is, product, tester, scrum master, designers, developers, analysts) and take on teams in general one common KPI.

I am really proud of it. People trust each other so much in terms of professionalism and teamwork that they are ready to subscribe not to a personal KPI, which depends only on them and their own skills, but on command.

New features and new people

Our guys are very well focused on self-development and enhance their skills. Over the past six months, I quite often raised the staff and gave them a new job - they were ready for this.

Of course, there are always people who use the capabilities of our unit as a career springboard. After all, this is a good line in the resume, and new contacts, and a great opportunity to improve skills. But there are fewer such units, one might say. For me the main thing is not why people come to work for you, but why they stay then.

What would you like when changing roles - is that the staff at the same time experienced less stress. The very practice of changing places or roles is effective. Of course, it is quite energy-intensive and complex, but effective.

I have a belief that when a person takes a position for a long time, he gradually begins to acquire a certain “No” list. That is, he knows so well the inner kitchen and some (even hypothetical) problems that sometimes he will not undertake to solve any problems in advance, because he has this “No” in his head. And the new man on the spot in this plan is the tabula rasa. He has a task, he goes and tries to do it in all available ways, he does not know all these “No.” If he has an awl in one place, he craves for new accomplishments, he is undermined and does. As a rule, all new and those in the new roles have an awl. And the desire to accomplishment, too.

Some companies sometimes recruit new people just for the sake of new people. We have it not, as I said, culture is a very important guarantee for the existence of teams. And a large mass of newcomers without this culture can start to blur it very much, which will bring imbalance to already existing teams. It is very important to make the process environmentally friendly.

This does not mean that we do not recruit people, on the contrary, there are a lot of vacancies now. But we can normally recruit such a number precisely because the backbone of very cool guys is already formed. We like the culture we created. I like the way teams work and develop. New talented people enrich us. But this is a process that is very conscious with us.

We try to continue to work in the same rhythm and on the same principles. If such views on teamwork and values ​​are close to you, come to us to talk, see for yourself how it all works, all of a sudden this is exactly what you have always dreamed of, and you are the one we have been looking for.