[1/3] Business lines, service lines and platforms @ T-Bank (Category Management)
I haven’t written about management for a long time and decided to correct myself by writing about the structure of T-Bank:) Our company is organized federally: different subdivisions work independently enough to achieve the common goals of the company. Most of the divisions belong to one of three types: business lines, service lines, platforms, which are very different from each other. It is important for the manager to understand what type of department he works in.
1) Business lines A characteristic feature of such a unit is a product that is provided to external customers. (product can be of different types: b2c, b2b, b2g, b2b2c, ...). A product usually has a development plan and product metrics as well as a PnL. (profit and losses). Such a unit is like a mini-company inside a large company. Examples of business lines can be: a bank of individuals and individual products inside (debit, credit, ...)Bank for legal entities and individual products inside (RKO, accounting,)Investments, insurance and so on. In our scheme, these business lines have their own business leaders. (CPO) and their guys in the form of products and business analysts, as well as their own technical managers (CTO) And the whole structure of the IT teams underneath. Ideally, business and IT are aligned with goals and use some framework to cascade goal-setting across all levels.
2) Service line Such units provide some service that business lines need to operate efficiently. Such a service is often easier to build centrally and get the effect of economies of scale. It is also very important that service lines often concentrate some important resource, which you need to be able to use together and not allow the effect. tragedies of shared resources (tragedy of the commons). Therefore, on the outside, a service line for business lines looks like an interface where they come for a service that is provided with a certain level of quality. Inside, the service line often consists of some set of specialists who provide service within the framework of operational activities. The activities of these specialists are automated by the development team of this service line and a large number of tools are obtained at the output, which allows to provide the service more efficiently. For the service line, it is important to be able to count the bones that are located on the business line that this service turns out to be. But the profit part here is considered more difficult, but usually there are models that show how it can be valued:) For example, for online attraction, the costs are spending on PHOT of employees, advertising, and profit is considered from the models of the NPV product, which attracts users or LTV of the attracted customer. (This approach is more complex than NPV.).
- Platforms These units create products for internal users. A characteristic feature of such products is the ability to use them in the format of self-service. The most prominent representative of such platforms is IDP. (internal developer platform)It is aimed at engineers within the company who create digital products. On the subject of IDP can be read whitepaper by CNCF and my analysis in three parts: 1, 2 and 3. The platform can be presented as a collection of features that are defined and presented in accordance with the needs of users of the platform. What’s important here is that all of these features are integrated together and provide the ability to execute typical user scenarios on the platform. In addition to IDP, there are higher-level platforms that allow you to use the platform as a Service or deploy some of the platform services for yourself if the utility version is not suitable for some reason.
Interestingly, most of my activity at T-Bank is related to the automation of service lines, and sometimes the transition from a service line to a platform. Next, I’ll share my experience and show how the type of unit dictates some development strategy and goals for teams:)
#Management #Leadership #Software #Processes