Santander, Project Leapfrog
Senior Innovation Partner, 2019–2021
- 15
- person cross-functional team directed
- Global
- executive teams presented to
Context
Written at the level of shape and scale. The substance of the work is confidential and is not described here.
Santander UK, 2019 to 2021. I joined as Senior Innovation Partner in the group responsible for working out what the bank should build next, sitting between strategy, product and corporate development inside one of Europe's largest banks.
Problem
A bank that size has no shortage of ideas and a serious shortage of agreement. Proposals compete across markets, and each market has its own P&L, its own regulator and its own roadmap. The bottleneck was never invention. It was producing a view of the future that enough senior people would actually act on.
My role
I led Project Leapfrog, directing a cross-functional team of around 15 people to define the bank's forward vision across digital banking, customer experience and operating-model design. I was accountable for the direction of the work and for presenting it to global executive teams.
Alongside Leapfrog I worked on the bank's internal venture activity, vetting strategic initiatives and investments and helping stand up the structure for incubating and spinning out new ventures. I also contributed analysis supporting executive review of large-scale corporate-development opportunities.
Insight
The binding constraint was organisational rather than analytical. A recommendation that ignores a market's regulatory position or its existing commitments does not get implemented, however good it is. So the work had to be built to survive contact with the operating model, not merely to be correct.
Product decisions
We framed the output as a set of decisions rather than a vision document.
Vision decks get admired and shelved. We produced specific sequenced choices with the trade-offs made explicit, so an executive could disagree with one part without discarding the rest.
We built for the markets, not the centre.
Instead of a single group-level answer, we structured the work so individual markets could adopt pieces of it against their own constraints. That lowered the ambition of any one recommendation and raised the number that actually shipped.
We pressure-tested with the people who would have to deliver it.
Recommendations went through operational and technology reality before they reached the executive audience, which is why that conversation was about sequencing rather than feasibility.
Execution
Fifteen people across strategy, product, design, research and technology, on a programme with a fixed end date and an executive audience. Much of the job was structuring parallel workstreams so they produced something coherent, and managing a stakeholder set spread across several countries.
Outcome
The Leapfrog recommendations went to global executive teams and fed into prioritisation of digital rollout across multiple markets.
What I learned
In a large organisation, the quality of a recommendation is capped by how implementable it is. The best analysis in the room loses to a worse idea that fits the operating model.
I also found out I am comfortable in that environment, which was not obvious to me going in. The skill is not politics. It is working out what each stakeholder is actually accountable for, then building the work so it helps them.