Building the Team: How to Do it Right Agile teams must possess all the required skills for assessing customer needs and developing new products and product features. As such team members must include representatives from all functions that impact the customer experience— i.e., marketing, sales, finance, HR, IT, research, operations, and other groups. Four other principles are crucial to the success of these agile teams: 1. Organizing teams by features. Any team should focus on customer journeys, mapping, and improving a consumer’s experience at every step of his or her interaction with the bank. For example, a team could work to make the loan origination process more ecient. Team members would examine every step in the workflow, from routing documents to how consumers upload them online to ensure requirements (consumer credit histories, loan eligibility, bank account validation, employment, and property value check) are met as seamlessly and effortlessly as possible. We have seen agile teams cut days from this process by eliminating activities that don’t add value. For example, in the mortgage lending process, customers can provide electronic signatures for documents instead of coming into the bank, a move that saves time, and reduces mistakes. Electronic systems to check an applicant’s credit history and other changes have trimmed six or seven days from the loan approval process, meeting customers’ desires for a faster, easier-to-use process. 2. Develop team skills for analyzing and improving customer value streams. Team members must be able to dissect what information and expertise are necessary to improve key customer processes. That requires cross-functional teams that can ask questions such as: € What are the key elements and business processes central to the bank’s operations? € How many handoffs are happening between systems and functions? € What tasks add value—and don’t (and thus could be eliminated)?