Financial institutions today face unprecedented pressure to become more agile and customer-centric, yet many struggle with deeply entrenched organizational patterns that resist change. Through insights from Luke McManus, Team Topologies Asia Pacific lead, we explore how design thinking and modern team organization principles can help break through these barriers.

The Customer Service Paradox

One of the striking paradoxes in financial services is how organizations often become more disconnected from customer needs as they grow. “The higher you move up in the organization, the further disconnected from the customers' needs you seem to become,” observes Luke McManus, drawing from personal experience, starting in bank call centers - where he spoke directly with customers on a daily basis - gaining an intimate understanding of their needs and pain points. This disconnect manifests in seemingly simple issues, like taking ‘five to seven working days’ to process basic payment changes in 2025–a timeframe that reflects deep-seated organizational challenges, not just technical limitations.

Breaking the Control Paradigm: A fundamental challenge in financial services transformation lies in the unexpected connection between funding mechanisms, organizational structure and control systems. Traditional management approaches, deeply rooted in Taylorism, continue to dominate, despite their increasing incompatibility with modern business needs. We hear and see the right words like”innovation”, “Agile’, “devops” and "transformation" yet we don’t always see the benefits - when management and leadership mental models and approaches are not kept in sync and modernised.

Luke illustrates this through an enlightening analogy: traffic lights versus roundabouts. Traffic lights represent traditional control systems–centralized, rigid, and trust-removing. Roundabouts, in contrast, exemplify modern organizational principles–trust-based, collaborative and optimized for flow. “The leader's role is to make sure that the road is well maintained with no hazards. You can’t badger people to do a better job. The only thing you can change as a manager is the system of work.”

Design Thinking: A Bridge to Modern Organizations

Integrating design thinking principles with team and organization design offers a powerful approach to transformation as well as the building of products. This combination addresses one of the most costly problems in financial services: the extended feedback loop between requirements, implementation and customer usage.

Key principles include:

Early Prototype Testing: Killing unviable ideas before significant investment
Visual Modeling: Using physical and digital tools to explore customer and organizational options
Continuous Iteration: Building adaptability into organizational design
Customer-Centric Focus: Maintaining connection to actual user needs at all times.

Team Interaction Modeling: Making Change Tangible

Recently Luke has fallen in love with using Team Interaction Modeling (TIM), which is one of the most effective tools emerging from this approach. It combines design thinking principles with Team Topologies concepts. This approach helps organizations visualize and experiment with different team structures before implementation.

“When you ask a team of ten people a question... you can get ten different answers, including some that you’ve never heard before,” McManus explains. This open-ended exploration helps teams and organizations discover innovative solutions to structural challenges while maintaining focus on delivering value.

The Two Teams Purposes

A crucial insight emerging from using TIM is the distinction between two fundamental team purposes: those that deliver value, and those that support value delivery. This simple mental model helps organizations rethink their structure around value streams rather than traditional departmental boundaries.

This perspective particularly helps in managing team cognitive load–a critical factor often overlooked in traditional organizational design. As McManus notes, “Having worked inside teams and managed them, I realized that the number of things that these teams had to do to productionize something is close to inhumane.”

Platform Thinking: Beyond Technology

The concept of platforms in modern organizations extends beyond mere technology stacks. In the Team Topologies context, platforms represent anything that reduces friction in value flow; even something as simple as a wiki page can act as a platform in this sense. This redefinition helps organizations focus on the right level of support structure without building unnecessary technical complexity.

Implementation Guidance

Organizations looking to transform should:

Start with customer needs and work backward
Focus on reducing handoffs and dependencies
Use visual modeling to explore team structures
Maintain connection to customer value throughout the organization
Treat cognitive load as a primary design consideration
Build platforms that reduce developer cognitive load as well as friction rather than add complexity.
Use team interactions to enable organizational sensing and continuously adjust and respond to changes as the organization, market and landscape evolve.

The transformation of financial services organizations requires more than just adopting new methodologies or technologies. It demands a fundamental rethinking of how teams are organized, and how work flows through the organization. By combining design thinking principles with modern team organization approaches, institutions can build more responsive, customer-centric teams. This helps maintain their effectiveness in an increasingly dynamic environment.

The key lies not in pursuing agility for its own sake, but in creating organizational dynamics that naturally enable flow, adaptation and customer connection. Through thoughtful application of these principles, financial institutions can build organizations that are both more effective and more comfortable places to work.

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From Call Centers to Team Topologies: Transforming Financial Services Through Design Thinking