Scaling a delivery team 400% without losing the plot.
A $50B bank needed its technology team to shift from project-mode to product-mode and support a ten-year strategy across consumer banking, advisory, core platforms, and (eventually) the pandemic response. Four years later, the same team launched a 1.3-to-4.4-star mobile app and ran more than $1 billion of CEBA relief in three days.
The strategy was set. The delivery model wasn't going to make it.
ATB had a ten-year plan that demanded continuous software delivery across four very different portfolios: direct-to-consumer (ATB Personal, Business Banking, Onboarding & Origination), advisory (data lake and enterprise CRM), the core banking platform, and whatever came next (which turned out to be COVID relief). The project-led delivery model that got the bank this far wouldn't scale to what was coming. It was already showing its seams: long feedback loops, static plans, work that wasn't visible until it slipped, and a hiring approach that couldn't keep up with demand.
The job was to build a delivery operating system the strategy could run on, one that could absorb fast team growth, keep quality high, and hold together when unscheduled emergencies hit. Because they always do.
Build the operating system first; ship through it.
Make the operating model explicit.
Stood up a Transformation Operating Model covering governance and decision rights, capabilities and skills, delivery and architecture, DevOps, organization and talent, culture, and metrics. Squads as the unit of delivery; Shared Services and Specialist Pools as the patterns around them. Everyone knew which lane they were in.
Run my team as a shared-services practice.
Organized the team as an internal shared-services group with talent-pipeline visibility, consistent role profiles, and empirical forecasting, so when portfolios needed Scrum Masters, Product Owners, or specialists, they came from a known pool with known cycle times, not a hiring scramble. The same practice turned budget forecasting from guesswork into data-driven planning.
Treat culture as a delivery feature, not an HR program.
Introduced rituals the team actually looked forward to: Hack Days, Freedom Fridays, Scrum Master Day, Agile Bootcamp. The goal was retention, craft mastery, and a shared definition of "how we work here" that held together as we scaled past 400% growth.
Prove the model under live load, repeatedly.
Shipped the ATB Personal mobile app and watched it climb from a 1.3 to a 4.4-star rating with 180,000 users in its first month. When CEBA landed, the same squads put a $1B+ emergency relief platform live in three days. Same team, same operating model.
What got delivered.
my delivery team scaled to 27 people while continuing to ship across four portfolios. Talent-pipeline visibility and empirical forecasting kept hiring ahead of demand.
delivering across D2C, advisory, core banking, and pandemic-response programs at $500K to $7M each, all running concurrently.
ATB Personal mobile app rating after launch, with 180,000 unique users in 2.8 million sessions and 350,000+ transactions in month one.
from federal go-decision to a live CEBA application path. The same operating model, running an emergency at speed.
The CEBA delivery is the moment most people remember; what made it possible was the four years of operating-model work that came before.
Other engagements.
Tell me what's stuck.
Send me the initiative that isn't moving. Within a week I'll tell you whether I can help, what an engagement looks like, and what it costs.