Written by Luke Sleeman.
A case study in digital transformation, and creating a large, high performing mobile team
In early 2019 ANZ set out to radically transform the way they did mobile banking. This involved building a world class app - built on world class tech - backed by a world class team - that will have world class longevity. This was to be an ambitious and wide ranging digital transformation project.
But how do you go from a blank sheet of paper, to an app with 690,000 customers and $14 billion in deposits? Â
In this case study we will explore how ANZ built and scaled a high performing mobile team and explore the pillars that underlie the team's success.
The ANZ Plus story is one quite close to my heart, as I’ve spent 4 and a half years on the project as one of the mobile leads. I was there from the beginning, for the whole journey as we scaled to become one of Australia’s fastest growing new banks.
It starts with a vision
A strong vision was developed:Â
The app should be a simple, elegant app, that “just works”
A feature set grounded in the idea of improving customers financial wellbeing.
There would be no migration of existing customer accounts. This would be something separate and new that people would sign up for.
The mobile app would be the only access point - no website! Â This would be a native app and lean into all the great functionality that running directly on the hardware allows.
This was to be long lived and form the foundation of what ANZ was doing digitally far into the future - not something we would throw away in 5 years time.
ANZ partnered with Mantel group early on, to help build out the core of their new mobile team. We already had a strong existing relationship formed from years working on other ANZ products such as ANZ Grow and ANZ App. This deepened as we brought on the initial team members. I joined the team as their 2nd Android developer. Initially we focused on laying technical foundations, along with building a strong engineering culture. Our people worked closely with ANZs employees, embedded as part of their squads. It was a hugely important project, both for us and ANZ.
Results
5 years later ANZ now has over 1400 people working in the ANZx program. You can check out the app at anz.com.au/plus - Signing up for an account typically takes under 3 minutes and can be done from your phone.
By any measure the program has been a great success:
The app has proven very popular - it's currently 4.8 stars in the app store.
From a financial perspective ANZ Plus is performing very well. Plus is rapidly acquiring customers - so quickly in fact, that its the fastest growing new digital bank in Australia. And those customers have a dramatically lower cost to acquire and cost to serve. Â
There has been a stream of new features released, such as joint accounts, add ins, home loans and round ups.
On the engineering side, the mobile team has grown from 5 developers in a room to the largest mobile team in the southern hemisphere!
This graph overlays the monthly commits into the codebase. For the most part, contributions have scaled with team size. The more people we add, the faster we go
How we did it - 10 pillars for high performing teams
So how did we do it?
ANZx started with nothing but a vision - it was a completely greenfield project. How did we execute on that vision?
Right from the start the mobile team had strong opinions on the type of team they wanted to create.  As we built out the team and product, those “strong opinions” evolved into 10 pillars. Each pillar reinforces the others. Together they form the blueprint for our success:
Strong product vision
A vision for a simple, elegant, high quality app that “just works”, which leans into all the great functionality you can get from building natively for mobile. The product was constantly evolving based on customer feedback and data.
A values driven team
The mobile team is driven by a set of shared values, developed by the engineers. These values guide the team, and allow people to self manage, rather than relying on processes, procedures or hierarchy. As part of the leadership team, the values allowed us to empower individuals and delegate decision making. This is part of what enabled the rapid scaling of the team.
Teams not projects
The ANZ Plus mobile team is persistently funded and will own the app forever. Squads are combined “build and run” squads, and are not beholden to project based budgets. Each squad is oriented around a single valuable customer focus - for example transactions, payments or cards. They are empowered to build and deliver value as quickly, safely and independently as possible, without requiring hand offs to ship the work.
This creates long term accountability for the technical health of the codebase, and reduces silos.
Communication and Transparency
There is a heavy focus on direct engineer to engineer communication, rather than indirectly through hierarchical communication. The team values communication and transparency to share context. There is an investment in creating the time and space to contribute ideas and solve problems. On the leadership team we worked hard to connect the right people for the right conversations and create spaces where the whole team could talk openly
Empowered engineers
Engineers are empowered, curious problem solvers operating in a strong engineering culture. They are responsible for their own time, understand opportunity cost, and take ownership over outcomes. Mobile is a centre for engineering craft, not a production line run off Jira.
A rich client application
ANZ Plus is a rich client application, built on native mobile technology. Rather than being a “JSON pretty printer” from a technical point of view we conceive of it as an “remote read replicate, in a distributed database”, containing all the data it needs to run. Screens load instantly with no loading spinners. Business logic runs on the device, allowing the team to easily produce engaging experiences.
Enablement & Platform teams
Mobile invests in building technology that is shared throughout the team. This platform serves as the foundation of our application and allows us to deliver functionality rapidly, with aligned autonomy. The platform and enablement teams build tech wealth, not remediate tech debt.
Continuous Delivery
The app is shipped twice a week. On average it's 5 days from a PR being raised until the code is in customers hands. This rapid pace is enabled by: Automating everything, feature flagging, short lived branches, and “shifting left”.
Zero Tech Debt
By choosing simple easy to change technology, boldly executing large cross cutting changes and balancing feature delivery with technical work, the team drives towards zero tech debt. This is underpinned by custom dashboards that give team wide visibility into code quality. Each week the team would walk through the dashboards together to gain insights and discuss where to focus their effort.
Always evolving
Our values remain constant, but the way they are expressed by the team evolves. The team structure, size, and direction all change in response to everything. We are never perfect, always changing, always learning.
Learn more
This blueprint worked really well in a greenfield environment. It also helped that ANZ was able to invest a significant amount of money into their digital transformation project!!
It would be easy to sit there and think, “well of course these things are simple when you have all that money and no legacy” - and you might be right.  I do invite you to remember that having no legacy was a deliberate - and bold - product choice that ANZx made right at the start.
Banks also operate in a highly regulated environment, and are very risk averse. ANZ is one of Australia’s oldest organisations and has a huge amount of history and inertia.
Not everybody has either these opportunities, or these threats.
With that said, there are many important things learnt along the journey, that apply to any environment - and for the most part you don’t need a truckload of money to do them.