Mambu Engineering shifts to a Streamlined Development Workflow

Last year, 2018, was another great year for Mambu, capped off with the announcement of an additional €30 million in funding ensuring we will have the right people, processes and architecture to consolidate our position as a global leader. This will accelerate our momentum by stepping up investment in both the commercial teams as well as in the product, platform and services, resulting in a planned three-fold increase in headcount and a six-fold increase in revenues in the forthcoming years across all regions.

The enterprise architecture of the modern financial institution is shifting as part of the global wave of digital transformation. As such, the responsibilities of systems like Mambu are shifting too. Evolution and Longevity are two of our core values and it’s an integral part of our culture to continuously improve, therefore we start 2019 with a focus on our engineering teams.

We’re shifting towards modern, composable architecture and moving away from a traditional monolith, providing a better and faster way of working for the engineering teams. Taking this step towards being the best SaaS core banking engine in the market, we’ll be able to address the needs of bigger and innovative clients.

In order to achieve this goal we are taking the next step towards enabling team autonomy and ownership by shifting our testing strategy.

We are structured in Tribes, Groups, Product Lines and Feature Teams, each one with a different focus that in the end serves the same delivery-oriented business strategy. Every skilled individual in the team (e.g. agile coach, engineer, product owner) is a member of a Group. Every Group defines a consistent way of working, streamlined activities, processes and good practices oriented towards automation with positive impact for each individual Feature Team. Every Feature Team manages their own goals and priorities, applying the way of working defined by the corresponding Group and aligned with the strategy and objectives of the company. As engineers, we make use of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach to try things out for feasibility and to share the new capabilities with our partners.

In this way we ensure every team can Build, Release and Run capabilities autonomously.

The transition to this more streamlined workflow is the result of constant monitoring and observability of team efficiency and dynamics. Analysing collected data and following market good practices are key factors in the evolution of our bold young company, therefore we have decided to include the testing phases as a whole in the implementation phase. As a result, our engineers will master the development of new capabilities along with ensuring the quality and reliability aspects of the services. All of this will happen with an automation-driven mindset; eliminating handovers and reducing on-hold states will result in lower lead and cycle time.

"We started this approach with a pilot team and confirmed the results to be as successful as expected, managing to cover testing, implementation and delivery of a completely new business with new microservices architecture. As such, end to end ownership is enabled and comes with a high degree of autonomy. Therefore, the new workflow will be adopted by all our development teams.

We know there will be a slow down initially, but we are confident we will reach relevant results in the medium term and exceptional results in the long run. We highly trust our teams of engineers to act on this matter as of a second nature. We have the right mindset and the skills of judo programmers: able to solve everything with some nice code." says Alin Burlacu, Developers Group Lead at Mambu.

Mambu offers full support in career path shifts for our colleagues affected by this change and we have a highly customized approach. QA Engineers will transition to new roles, including Software Engineers and Integration Engineers.

For the colleagues from our testing group who will be making a career shift, we will work together to identify the best career path possible, based on their set of skills and knowledge and on their personal development plans. After identifying the path, they will be part of our dedicated intensive learning scheme. Bootcamps and training programs will be set up and transitioning employees will work one-on-one with trainers and mentors throughout the process.

We are highly committed to an autonomous and aligned way of working, within a continuous delivery flow for relevant architectures. All of this is enabled by a robust self-service infrastructure to facilitate uninterrupted feature delivery and stable team growth in Mambu as we scale.