What It Looks Like

Chapter 22: What This Looks Like

A year in the life of a fictional European insurer that has completed the transition, composed from real cases. What remains difficult, what has genuinely improved, and what the people who made it happen look like on the other side.

The first thing the new engineer notices is the silence. Not literal silence; people are talking, keyboards are clicking, a standup is wrapping up in the corner. The silence is structural. No one is on a bridge call. No one is in a dependency meeting. No one is waiting for an approval that has been stuck in a governance queue for three weeks. The work is happening where the work lives, owned by the people who understand it.

The new engineer will learn, over the next three months, that this is what clarity sounds like. The previous chapter followed a real organisation through the discovery that it had to make itself implementable before any system could help it. The organisation described here is a different thing, a generalised picture of the steady state after the correction has taken hold.

What follows is a year in the life of an organisation that has made the transition: not a utopia but a realistic picture, with remaining tensions and trade-offs acknowledged. The account is drawn from real transitions, composited and fictionalised; not every one succeeded fully, and some stalled when political will ran out.

A European insurance company with approximately 2,000 employees, of whom around 400 work in technology. It sells motor, home, and health insurance through direct and broker channels, its core processes mediated entirely through software. It is, by any measure, a software-dependent corporate.

Eighteen months ago, it completed a restructuring. The old model, a technology division serving “the business” through project-based delivery, centralised architecture governance, annual budgets, and a product management function that mediated between stakeholders and engineering, was replaced with autonomous business units organised around core processes.

The transition was a sequence of specific, uncomfortable decisions rather than a programme, each producing a reaction the next decision had to absorb.

The programme management office was dissolved in the third month. The programme director, a woman who had held cross-unit dependencies in her head for twelve years, was told her function was being eliminated, not repositioned. Her objection was specific and legitimate: without her team, the first time two units needed to coordinate a regulatory change across a shared customer journey, nobody would know who owned the coordination. The CEO's response was equally specific: the contracts between units would track what the programme office tracked, and the cross-unit synthesis would surface the dependencies her team had been managing through meetings. She understood the logic, and she also knew that her sense of which dependencies were formal and which informal would not transfer to a contract registry. She was right, and the organisation absorbed the cost over the following two quarters, as the contract boundaries surfaced dependencies that had lived only in her head.

Two layers of middle management were removed. Three senior leaders left. Forty per cent of the product management function was eliminated or repositioned.

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See also: Full contents · Preview chapters · Illusions in the Boardroom