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Hello, I'm Mehran Islam, managing director
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and partner at BCG, based in New York.
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It's my pleasure to be speaking today
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with James Anderson,
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Executive Vice President
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of Commercial Products at MasterCard.
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James recently led a very compelling application
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of Agile, demonstrating the material impact
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new ways of working can bring.
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James, thank you for joining us today.
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Delighted to be here Mehran.
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James, MasterCard is on a journey
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to scale Agile ways of working.
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You recently used Agile to launch a new product.
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Please give us some context on the product first.
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So what we built and we're still working on very hard,
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but what we started on is what became
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what we call track business payment service.
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Which in simplest terms is a new two-sided market
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for MasterCard distributed to corporations
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through entities we call agents,
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with the idea of delivering a fundamentally better
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and more valuable payment experience
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for commercial payments running on multiple rails.
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So that's the essence.
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What was it about this particular business problem
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that made you choose a different working model?
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We knew where we wanted to arrive in broad terms,
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but the specifics and the nuances,
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there was significant uncertainty about exactly
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what would work, exactly what would resonate with customers.
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I've seen other people kind of embark on that journey,
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locked down early on a set
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of requirements and basically kind of barrel forward.
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One of the things I really wanted to have managed
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was the risk around it.
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And product development is intrinsically risky, right?
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You're taking corporate money,
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you're proposing something that doesn't exist
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in the world, and that's risk.
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And I absolutely don't shy away from risk
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but I do feel responsible
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and accountable for managing it prudently.
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And I felt that being able to take the risk
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in kind of bite-sized chunks felt a lot better
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for where we were in the journey.
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And so that became one of the principles,
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is active de-risking of what we're doing
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and the way
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I think about active de-risking is,
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taking direct feedback from the market
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as opposed to just sort of building
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a layer cake of assumptions and then going for it.
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Tell us about the results,
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for example in terms of speed, quality and efficiency.
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We started with an idea essentially in fall of 2018.
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We spent from fall till the end of the year
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securing kind of budget, and kind of consensus
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around the organization.
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We put the team in place on January the first
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and I gave them 90 days to the first transaction.
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We actually were ready to do it after 90 days
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and then a couple of things happened.
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And so it ended up basically being 120 days
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before we did our first live transaction
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where real money moved.
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So that was unprecedented in terms of, kind of,
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from an idea all the way through to actually
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live transactions, for a company
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of our scale and the kind of business we're in.
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And, and we had run all the traps in terms of security
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and we'd got sign-off internally
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from a right function.
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So I think that speaks
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to the speed dimension.
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What are the key differences
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between how you used Agile here,
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and how historically Agile has been used at MasterCard?
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Yeah. So we've been on, I think what's colloquially known
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as "the Agile journey" for a little while.
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It started I think like a lot of organizations,
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it started very much in the technology organization
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as a way of organizing our development activity.
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And therefore from that,
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we then sort of adjusted our product structure to line
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up against kind of an Agile model.
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And we certainly believe that for development
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it's a better approach.
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For me what we did here was apply a set
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of Agile principles
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to the whole product development life cycle.
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And I think that's probably
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maybe the first time we've done it.
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Maybe other people
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at MasterCard would say they were doing it before,
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but for my point of view, we did it most completely.
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And I think, when I think about the Agile principles,
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a couple of things jump out,
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but one of them is this whole idea of work
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on the most important problem now,
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because you're continually doing this kind
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of rapid prioritization or re-prioritization
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to address for most pressing problems
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or the biggest problem.
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And, and we really implemented that
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through product development process much more aggressively.
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And hence, as I said before,
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we were able to adjust each of our prototypes,
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each of our proof of concepts and prototype runs
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based on learnings that we'd got from the prior ones.
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And that was really in the spirit of
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what have we found out that we don't know?
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And let's go answer those questions now.
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But we took that
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at a pretty high level in terms of business problems,
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not low level in terms of technical problems.
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It was very much at the business level of
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product market fit and customer needs,
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as opposed to how do I solve this specific technical aspect
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of building the solution?
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There were product people sitting next
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to technology people,
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there were people who would get
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off calls with customers and be able to turn right
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to the people who were developing it
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and have dialogue and have that kind
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of rich high bandwidth communication
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that I think is essential to good product, to organization.
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And that really worked.
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I mean, and the team really gathered around the mission,
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they were incredibly focused on what we had to accomplish.
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And so I think in many regards,
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it is kind of a step up
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from the traditional way of building systems
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around Agile to frankly building businesses around Agile.
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How did you adapt your role as a leader in the new model?
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I decided my role was going to be basically
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setting the direction, defining the parameters
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of what success looks like,
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and then monitoring progress.
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I had a very strong leader who was the day-to-day
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executive working across products
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and with the technology teams --
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that wasn't my job,
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that person was reporting to me.
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But I made it very clear
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that I was managing external and so internal expectations.
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I also spent time with customers to make sure that I was
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in touch with what customers were hearing.
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But it was really about setting
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the key parameters for the project
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and what would success look like.
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James, thank you again for joining us today
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and for the terrific insights.
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Mehran, my pleasure.
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(upbeat music)