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 $1.135B 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 $1.135B emergency relief platform live in three days. Same team, same operating model.
What got delivered.
our 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 — $500K to $7M each, all running concurrently.
ATB Personal mobile app rating after launch — 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.
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