Bank Julius Bär is a progressive private bank. For over 130 years, the Swiss bank has managed its clients’ assets and served as a trusted, truly personal and holistic advisor. Combining traditional values with innovative thinking, the bank has—ahead of the curve—recognized that it must become a software-enabled company to secure future business.
The Swiss banking industry is in the same situation as many other industries. Technological progress has disrupted traditional business models by opening new opportunities to serve customers through innovative digital products and services. Digitization also has the potential to increase internal operational efficiency: do more with less.
From several, fragmented software teams, Bank Julius Bär grew to employ around 400 software engineers globally to develop and run the bank’s internal software and consumer products and services. Filipe Abrahao, global head of Software Engineering, Julius Bär was hired in 2021 to bring a fresh perspective to the bank’s engineering department. Abrahao turns pockets of great engineering efforts across the bank into a connected powerhouse of software development excellence.
Strategic investment in technical excellence
Ensuring best-in-class digital experiences and delivering new features at record speed, all while adhering to the highest security standards, are challenging responsibilities to achieve. To reach the ambitious transformation goal, Abrahao built a central Technical Excellence team, led by Jose Badeau, head of Technical Excellence, who joined the bank in 2022. The mission of the TechX team is to make the 400 engineers at Julius Bär as productive as possible by homogenizing the fragmented technology landscape and designing a Community of Practice to share knowledge and best practices.
Our path to production is quite complex. We needed to drastically simplify it. We have a group of around 400 people that code at Julius Bär, and it's important that we make these 400 people as productive as possible and as comfortable as possible.”Filipe Abrahao, Global Head of Software Engineering, Julius Bär
True Swiss craftsmanship re-imagined in 2023
To accelerate the formation of the TechX team, Abrahao chose to work with Tanzu Labs, a team of modern application specialists, known for their ability to enhance any internal software development effort.
“I didn't want to bring on one of the traditional large consultancy firms,” Abrahao says. “I wanted people that were focused on the customer, focused on building something that will redefine how we work. Tanzu Labs was a perfect fit.”
Within weeks, the joint team created a unique engineering culture, a Julius Bär way of doing things, so that regardless of the product or team, the software is developed consistently and securely, delivers value to customers, and is released quickly.
Gaining understanding and building empathy with engineers
In an immersive kick-off week at the bank’s headquarters in Zürich, the team, guided by a Tanzu Labs service designer, uncovered where it needed to invest in its engineering community to create the biggest possible impact. Tanzu Labs enabled Julius Bär through a set of repeatable tools the team can apply to gather those insights quickly. A large part of the TechX team’s identity would form around truly understanding and serving engineers. This user-centric approach became pivotal to its mission.
The TechX team identified different development teams and interviewed engineers about their responsibilities, experiences developing products, and opportunities to improve their efficiency. The TechX team looked at the other teams’ paths to production, how they plan and deliver work, and how their work impacts business at Julius Bär.
Initially, Tanzu Labs handled these interviews and workshops, but by the end of the week, Badeau and other team members were running them. This is an integral part of the Tanzu Labs hands-on enablement approach: showing clients a methodology and encouraging them to try it so they become equipped to do it independently. “I’d never done something like this. It was exciting to see a new way to work,” says Badeau.
To uncover where Julius Bär needs to invest in their engineering community, the team interviewed engineers about their experience developing products at the bank and what opportunities they might see to improve their efficiency.
Within a week of gathering useful insights and gaining context, the bank identified and prioritized five key pain points in the developer experience and committed to improving during the collaboration with Tanzu Labs.
Main obstacles for the bank’s engineers
Engineers at Julius Bär are under pressure to deliver quickly. Time to experiment or research their approach is scarce. This makes innovation difficult and leads to rushed work that has to be revisited later.
At the same time, most of the code still only gets released into production every three months. The path to production of most teams was fragmented and full of gates, at the time only leveraging cloud technologies for development, not deployment.
Engineers lacked standardized ways to fulfill common requirements which led to duplicated efforts, where a new solution was developed for a problem that had already been solved elsewhere. This not only wasted time but added complexity to an already complex environment, making code more difficult to interpret, modify and maintain.
Documentation was difficult to find and often out of date. Engineers asked their colleagues instead of spending time searching for documentation, which meant the most knowledgeable people were juggling time between working on their tasks and trying to help others.
Another interesting finding was that most of the engineers were contractors from various firms, which meant the bank could never establish a core engineering culture. Few felt like they had a personal stake in the bank or wanted to contribute to making it a better place to work outside of the immediate scope of work that they were brought in to deliver.
“There was just no community. There was no place that engineers could engage, meet each other, share, collaborate,” says Badeau. “If you want to build good software, you need a software culture that motivates people.”
Concrete steps toward improving the developer experience
With the overall mission to accelerate technical excellence and foster a development culture at Julius Bär, the team delivered five key outcomes for the bank within six months, based on the insights from the initial research:
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Enabled the TechX team in customer-centric and outcome-based ways of working
To assess engineering challenges that hinder productivity, Tanzu Labs introduced repeatable research methods like 1:1 interviews and path-to-production mapping to the TechX team. Tanzu Labs established a way to prioritize and develop ideas to solve challenges framed as experiments.
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Increased developers’ productivity from day one
The team provided application starters—standardized, compliant applications—that developers can bootstrap easily in the three most common languages. It also built reference applications, including standards and best practices, to demonstrate what good looks like. The team created a Golden Path to Production through a unified pipeline, drastically reducing the time and effort needed to support teams whenever deployment doesn’t work. Furthermore, the team created optimized how-to guides for the most common inquiries, with owners who keep them up to date. Most recently, the TechX team hired a dedicated team member responsible for improving the onboarding of new developers and creating more formal training material.
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Avoided duplicate, wasteful work
The TechX team established the use of Architecture Decision Records as well as a “Tech Radar,” a visualization of technologies, languages and frameworks the bank explores, actively uses, and deprecates, to make decisions on architecture and the adoption of tools transparent and accessible for any engineer at the bank. The team also provided a user interface component library for front-end development. This offering prevents teams from having to build basic web interface components like forms or buttons from scratch and, at the same time, increases consistency for users, which is essential in a high-trust environment like banking.
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Improved communication and knowledge-sharing among engineers
The team established a community of practice within the bank for engineers to share ideas. The community meets monthly, and engineers from inside and outside the bank bring new inspiration and fresh perspectives into the day-to-day work. Attendance is good, and in the spirit of fast feedback loops, the TechX team uses interactive polling tools to improve the quality and content of these meetups. It also created a new channel on the bank’s chat app where engineers can communicate more closely and contact the TechX team directly with any questions or suggestions.
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A fifth meta goal was establishing the TechX team itself
The team initially consisted of Badeau and a junior engineer. Tanzu Labs was brought in to create and shape the culture of the team and ways of working, including team rituals. Together, the two teams formulated a valuable service offering for engineers and crafted an inspiring mission statement. They set objectives and key results (OKRs) and defined an outcome-oriented roadmap. Lastly, but arguably most importantly, Tanzu Labs helped translate this ambitious initiative into a manageable backlog of work and started to co-deliver the first initiatives.
Tanzu Labs helped us become customer-centric, and outcome-led, not output-led. That was a big learning for some of the people internally here, which is great.”Filipe Abrahao, Global Head of Software Engineering, Julius Bär
The TechX team works in a customer-centric and outcome-based way, adopting repeatable research methods like interviews and path-to-production mappings.
Ramp-up time is so much faster, and engineers don’t have to talk to their manager about which technology to use or whether they can do a proof of concept. It's a holistic improvement of the development, affecting the daily life of developers.”Jose Badeau, Head of Technical Excellence, Julius Bär
The team established an engineering community of practice (CoP) at Julius Bär. Through regular meetups, engineers share best practices and bring inspiration and fresh perspectives.
“Tanzu Labs really helped by saying, ‘If you look at the whole initiative, it's large and feels like too much.’ They helped make it manageable. We broke it down and set achievable goals and backlog items,” says Badeau.
The Technical Excellence team’s way of working. The ambitious initiative is broken into a manageable backlog of work, which makes it easy to deliver iterative change to the organization.
Communicating the services offered within the organization
Another (often overlooked) part of the work was communicating the services offered within the organization. Tanzu Labs helped the TechX team with branding the initiative, planning for regular demo sessions and sending out weekly drumbeats, or short updates to the bank’s engineering community about the team’s progress with lessons learned and any new features available to engineers.
Tanzu Labs helped the bank with branding its technical excellence initiative, planning for regular demo sessions and sending out weekly drumbeats: short updates to the bank’s engineering community about the team’s progress, lessons learned and any new features available to engineers.
Hybrid collaboration
Adapted to today’s post-COVID-19 pandemic working patterns, the joint Bank Julius Bär and Tanzu Labs team worked mostly remotely across Europe. Regardless of the physical distance, team members spent most of the day in constant communication, working together in groups or in pairs. To build human relationships and the trust needed for a high-performing team, the team spent a week each month working together onsite in Zürich at the bank’s headquarters.
The first rule the team established was one of solidarity. Working with Tanzu Labs doesn’t feel like a usual client/contractor relationship. Team members from Julius Bär and Tanzu Labs merged into one team. This was critical for not only the team’s cohesion but also how the team was perceived in the wider organization.
Working with Tanzu Labs doesn’t feel like a usual client/contractor relationship. Team members from Julius Bär and Tanzu Labs merged to be one team.
The TechX team today: Creating a lasting impact on the business
Today, the TechX team at Julius Bär comprises only employees from the bank. Tanzu Labs stepped away, leaving Badeau and his team in control, using some of the methods they learned from Tanzu Labs and developing their working methods. The TechX team constantly engages with its users, calling regular TechX meetings to demonstrate work and ask for feedback. Most importantly, the team is creating impactful, structural improvements for engineers, incrementally.
“Thanks to our work with Tanzu Labs, the TechX team is now seen as the center point for engineering quality. We provide information and answers to technical challenges to improve engineers’ daily work, skills and workflows,” says Badeau.
The path to production is more streamlined, software standards are reducing duplicate work and simplifying code, and a community is forming across the organization of engineers that includes employees and contractors. “We are creating the Julius Bär engineering culture,” says Abrahao, “and this is massive.”
The TechX team is setting the tone for technical excellence and organically influencing other teams to think and work differently.
The long-term effects of a culture of technical excellence are invaluable. High speed to market, innovation, stability, retention of people and attraction of new talent are all results of a happy engineering community led by technical excellence. When combined with good design and product management, an organization becomes more than just agile. It becomes a place that delivers products and services customers are thrilled to use and a place where people want to work.
When I describe my team, people say ‘That sounds like a place I would like to work.’”Jose Badeau, Head of Technical Excellence, Julius Bär
Tanzu Labs: Like a personal coach, but for software
Many enterprises don’t yet have all the skills needed to transform their organization into a place of software excellence. The team at Tanzu Labs, formerly Pivotal Labs, has been honing the craft of excellent software delivery since 1989 and helped countless organizations excel at modern application development. Tanzu Labs has developed a set of best practices, all grounded in Extreme Programming, Lean and User-Centered Design.
Much like a personal coach, Tanzu Labs consultants work hands-on with a dedicated customer team to build up their individual skills. For several hours a day, 5 days a week, consultants and clients work together, so that, in the end, the consultant becomes redundant because team members have fully embraced the new skills, ways of working and culture.
Tanzu Labs helps organizations build new applications, modernize existing ones, build entire software capabilities in-house or, like with Bank Julius Bär, improve the performance of an engineering organization overall.
Want to improve the speed and quality of your software teams?
Reach out to Tanzu Labs’ modern app specialists for a chat about improving the technical excellence in your organization, and how to make a case for doing so: Elaine Barry, Director for EMEA, and Antonia Horvath, Manager, responsible for this collaboration with Bank Julius Bär.