Coming Together Around Agile To overcome the impediments to becoming agile, financial services companies must take three paths: 1. Organizational assessment and planning. They need to define their vision, identify the internal impediments to agility, and create an enterprise transformation roadmap to overcome them. This is about having a change management strategy, adequately supported with resources. Any systemic change requires a feedback mechanism to collect and analyze stakeholder reactions. Addressing the feedback is what drives progress. 2. Implementation preparations. The goal of agile transformation is to create customer value quickly. Therefore, companies should establish teams organized around discrete pieces of the customer experience. Those teams will work best when managers demonstrate ‘servant leadership’—i.e., acting frequently to remove impediments that can slow the work of digital product teams, rather than operating in a traditional command-and-control mode. 3. Technology platform and engineering culture. To support the agile deployment of new products, financial services firms need to employ modern IT architectures and designs, like micro-services and application programming interfaces (APIs) that take advantage of the latest technology infrastructure designs, and cloud-based systems. What’s more, product engineers must adopt a culture of automated systems— converting manual technology work into automated work wherever possible.