Head of Product Engineering: In my team, you can be part of Bigbank's daily banking journey
The strategic decision made years ago for Bigbank, to develop its banking platform in-house instead of outsourcing it, continues to offer interesting and challenging work and development opportunities for technology specialists today, as we prepare to offer daily payment services to our clients.
How does our self-developed banking platform Nest work?
At Bigbank, we use an internally developed banking platform called Nest, based on microservices architecture. We chose this architectural style because it allows our product teams to solve business problems comprehensively with minimal dependence on other teams for business needs. This approach also ensures better service scalability and reduces the workload for both software developers and testers, making new developments faster and higher quality. Additionally, microservices architecture has given us greater freedom in making technology choices within product teams. However, implementing microservices architecture has brought challenges, such as monitoring and observability of distributed systems, for which we have adopted the world-class observability platform Elastic Stack.
How did you reach your current role as team leader?
I joined Bigbank nearly 12 years ago as an analyst in product development, where my task was to translate business needs into technical requirements for software development teams. The journey to becoming the Head of Product Engineering has been very enriching and varied. Despite the conservative external image of banking, the actual work at Bigbank is full of opportunities – you constantly learn and discover new things and can contribute significantly.
As an analyst, my interest and knowledge in banking software development grew, and soon I had the opportunity to lead a small banking software development team. We mainly worked on configuring and developing the outsourced banking platform. In this role, I actively participated in software development and gained a deep understanding of the nature of the banking platform.
When Bigbank started developing its in-house banking platform, I joined the new product team as a software developer to launch Nest in Finland as the first country. I had a fantastic and dedicated team with whom we built the foundation for today's loan application and processing systems. From there, I moved on to lead a couple of product teams to achieve similar goals in other countries, which was an exciting challenge for a few years.
After launching the banking platform in all countries, I took on the role of chief architect in the technology field for five years to take our newly created banking platform to the next level. During this time, we introduced non-functional requirements to the organisation, ensuring the security, availability, scalability, and observability of the systems being created. We also implemented several architectural changes and adjusted team responsibilities to ensure faster and higher quality delivery of business needs.
Today, I am responsible for managing all teams related to software development in addition to software architecture. We work daily with product management and business stakeholders to achieve our business goals through software solutions.
What can you do in your team? What is the work culture like?
In our team, you can be part of Bigbank's daily banking journey by contributing with well-thought-out and high-quality technical solutions. Our team culture is built on dedication, high technical competence, open discussions, and a customer focus. Each team member brings a high level of technical skill, enabling us to solve complex problems and create innovative solutions. We value open and constructive discussions where everyone's opinion is important, and we encourage the free exchange of ideas. Customer orientation is at the heart of our activities – our goal is to provide solutions that meet our clients' needs and exceed their expectations.
What are you like as a leader?
As a leader, I believe the most important thing for success is involving people in a common goal and creating a supportive environment. Such an organisation can adapt to changes and consistently achieve excellent results. To understand what is worth achieving in the future, I consciously take time as a leader to reflect on the future and have intellectual discussions with each other on this topic. I value open discussion and individual freedom, along with the associated responsibility. In implementation, I focus on a smaller number of goals but ensure that these have the greatest impact and receive the deserved attention.