In today’s competitive fintech landscape, optimizing team performance is more crucial than ever. At the forefront of this evolution is Nubank’s Global Productivity team, a squad dedicated to harnessing the power of metrics to support teams’ effectiveness.

Join us as we explore some of the tools and data-centric strategies employed in Nubank, and discover how we are approaching the productivity subject in the world of financial technology. Dive in to learn how metrics are promoting excellence in the digital banking domain!

Unlocking superior productivity

At Nubank, one of the core values that have been deeply embedded since our inception is the ability to assemble strong and diverse teams, with world-class engineers, product managers, and various other roles.

However, the challenge lies not just in hiring but ensuring that teams are equipped with the tools and information needed to make the best use of their valuable time. While productivity is everyone’s business, we have our Global Productivity team equipped with Agile expertise to assist Nubank’s world-class professionals with the information and resources they require to continuously improve their ways of working.

As seen globally at the beginning of 2023, the answer for productivity will not lie in just hiring more.

Two critical areas the Global Productivity team puts their efforts in are:

  • Continuous improvement in delivery: achieving excellence is an ongoing journey. It’s about prioritization, planning, tracking performance, spotting variability and looking into it with curiosity, and understanding the capacity more intimately.
  • Maximizing focus for higher productivity: the key to achieving more is to minimize distractions, allowing team members to focus and increase their time in the flow.

We truly believe in the power of metrics, recognizing that no single metric can paint the complete picture of a team’s productivity. Instead, we employ a “preponderance of evidence” approach, refining our metrics as we go along, always prioritizing the goal behind the metric over the metric itself.

While the Global Productivity team partners with the Data Intel team to provide Business Unit level metrics and enable leaders to know what to do with them, there are great out-of-the-box solutions for the team-level workflow metrics.

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Nubank’s workflow metrics

For instance, an integral part of our enablement process involves sharing flow metrics extracted directly from their work management tools. Currently, over 200 teams at Nubank utilize these workflow metrics, some of which include:

Aging Chart

The Aging Chart shows how long an item that is currently being worked on is stuck on any given step. This chart is a leading indicator that brings instant insights for our teams that look at it in their daily meetings, helping them prioritize finishing work rather than adding more to the flow.

By looking at the items that are currently taking longer, the team can find ways to collaborate and complete them. Also, it makes workflow bottlenecks explicit: workflow stages that usually have higher aging are prime candidates for optimization.

Cycle Time Scatterplot

The Cycle Time Scatterplot shows how long items were in the workflow until completion. This lagging indicator helps our teams quickly find the outliers and actively learn from them. Looking with curiosity at the ones that took much longer, it’s possible to reflect on what could have been done differently一and apply that knowledge the next time age climbs.

Variations in the cycle time trends help teams notice how small or slow changes impact the team. In retrospectives, the trend direction helps ask good questions and even notice the results of previous retrospective actions.

Monte Carlo Forecasting

This is a more advanced indicator that, given the duration of past work items, can forecast how many items can be delivered by a specific date, with percentiles of certainty.

With the Monte Carlo method, teams in Nubank have a better grasp of how many work items can likely be completed by a certain checkpoint date. They can then replan to maximize the final value, given how much work fits into the time they have.

Also, our new Capacity Planning process includes insights coming from Monte Carlo simulations on the BU’s historical data that indicate the amount of initiatives they can fit in a semester’s work.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The Global Productivity team is in perpetual motion, seeking out the best tools and devising new metrics to boost our efficiency.

Gathering feedback

Now, you may wonder, how does the Global Productivity team gather feedback? The team has an open communication channel on Slack, alongside a dedicated channel to discuss the tool metrics.

Moreover, the metrics are updated dynamically, as work items are moved in the work management tool – and teams can have their distinctive presentation style tailored for them. A case in point is the Aging Chart, which some teams use to guide their daily meetings.

Our commitment to the continuous pursuit of excellence is perhaps best illustrated by the story of how we integrated flow metrics with our capacity planning processes. This allowed every business unit to plan their semesters using historical data, leading to a more grounded and realistic approach.

So, while our journey in enhancing productivity is ongoing, our focus remains clear – to equip our strong and diverse people with the best tools and data.

After all, at Nubank, we don’t just strive to be the best; we enable the best to be even better.

 

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