BEC Financial Technologies · Advisor platform
One platform for 19 banks. Six Product Owners to lead.
On BEC’s shared Salesforce platform, my job was to hold the direction across the banks — and to lead the Product Owners who each ran their own development team.
The problem
Many banks. One roadmap.
19 Danish banks, together serving 2.1 million active bank customers, shared one platform — and their wishes often pulled in opposite directions. Without a shared prioritisation, we would spread the teams too thin.
The larger banks carried more formal weight than the smaller ones. But the platform had to work for all of them.
My responsibility
I was overall responsible for the platform’s roadmap and product vision across the banks, and line and professional manager for six Product Owners, each representing their own development team.
We built the roadmaps and ran sprint planning together within SAFe, with weekly backlog grooming across the group.
The decision that mattered
Judge the requirements, not who asked.
In a prioritisation round with six banks and conflicting wishes, I ran the whole process — gathering requirements, running the workshops and defining a ladder for success. I designed the workshop to anonymise the requirements: no one knew which bank had submitted what. That took the politics out of the room, and the list was decided on merit.
What happened
We delivered on the list, and all six banks got something from their wish list.
On the leadership side: one of my Product Owners had deeper insight into the backend than I did. I let him drive the prioritisation for his team while I kept the overview across the platform, and on my own initiative brought him into the steering committee, where he did very well. Today he is one of the leading Product Owners where he works now.
What I learned
- “Decisions belong close to the problem” is only a principle until you let go of one yourself — where someone else knows more.
- Leading product people is mostly context and trust: explain the why, then give them the room and the visibility to own the how.
- Power dynamics fade fast when nobody knows whose wish is on the wall.