Context

By 2015, ING Netherlands faced increasing pressure from fintech competitors. New digital features typically required 18 to 24 months to reach customers. Separate product, channel, operations and IT organizations created long coordination cycles, fragmented ownership and inconsistent customer experiences.

Instead of starting with a technology program, ING redesigned the organization around customer journeys. The objective was to shorten the path from customer need to delivered capability. This required changes across the value stream, from strategy to engineering and delivery.

Value Thinking

ING replaced traditional functional departments with approximately 350 multidisciplinary squads, grouped into 13 tribes. Each tribe represented a major business domain. DefDefine Each squad was responsible for a specific customer journey or business capability. AlnAlign The new structure aligned teams with customer outcomes rather than internal functions. Every squad contained the skills required to deliver customer value, including product management, software engineering, design and data analysis. PrioPrioritize Decision making moved closer to the teams doing the work, reducing coordination overhead and shortening feedback loops.

Architect for Flow

The organizational redesign led to architectural change. StrStructure Large monolithic applications were gradually replaced by services owned by individual squads. Each squad became responsible for designing, implementing, deploying and operating its own services.

StrStructure Clear service boundaries reduced dependencies between teams and made faster releases possible.EvoEvolve Where cross-team consistency remained necessary, ING introduced chapters to share engineering practices without taking delivery responsibility away from squads.

Outcome

The organizational changes produced measurable improvements.

CmtCommit Time-to-market for new features decreased from 18-24 months to 2-4 weeks. MonMonitor Net Promoter Score increased from 23 to 46. Deployment frequency increased from monthly releases to multiple deployments per day. Recovery from production failures dropped from hours to minutes. Employee engagement also improved.

ING did not achieve these results by introducing Agile practices alone. The bank changed how work was organized, how decisions were made and who owned the flow of value from customer need to production.