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