Background

LHV Bank were entering a new phase of growth. Having successfully launched and expanded their UK banking operations, they were now investing in new propositions—including retail. Although LHV maintained a culture characterised by trust, empowerment, and efficiency, their rapid growth increased complexity, leading to higher coordination costs.

The brief

LHV were looking to scale delivery without significantly increasing headcount. At the same time, they were feeling the effects of rising cognitive load and unclear ownership—particularly in areas where responsibilities had accumulated over time.

The goal was to rethink how teams were organised around value, without losing the culture that made the organisation effective.

How we worked

We worked closely with leadership to explore how value flowed across the organisation and how teams were structured to support it.

This included:

• Identifying key value streams across retail, banking services, and lending

• Exploring which capabilities were truly core vs better provided externally

• Using heuristics to define viable service boundaries

• Mapping how teams interacted and where ownership needed to shift

The emphasis wasn’t on applying a model, but on making deliberate, context-specific decisions about structure.

What became visible

A few critical patterns emerged.

• Capability-based teams had led to concentrated ownership and high cognitive load—particularly in backend domains

• Delivering customer value required coordination across multiple teams

• Some areas of the system were treated as core when they didn’t need to be

• Engineering effort was difficult to trace back to specific business outcomes

These issues were limiting the organisation’s ability to scale effectively.

What changed

The organisation shifted from organising around capabilities to stewarding value streams. Product and engineering were aligned more closely to business segments, creating clearer flows of value and ownership.

This enabled:

• Reduced cognitive load through more focused team responsibilities

• Clearer accountability for outcomes within each segment

• More deliberate decisions about what to build vs buy

Importantly, shared services were owned by their primary consumers, with a path to evolve into platform services as demand increased.

Outcomes

Within months, LHV began to see tangible benefits.

• Faster, more focused delivery with fewer cross-team dependencies

• Improved strategic alignment between product, engineering, and commercial teams

• Clearer financial traceability by aligning engineering costs to value streams

• A “register of services” that provided a foundation for ongoing evolution

They also began rethinking compliance—treating it as something to enable flow through automated guardrails, rather than slow it down.

Alongside this, they invested in approaches to share knowledge more effectively across teams, reducing duplication and accelerating innovation.

Feedback from participants

“A fantastic facilitator and a great person to learn from!”  LHV

“Rich didn’t just give us answers, but guided the team to think deeper and uncover the right solutions together.”   LHV

“He doesn’t push a fixed method—he listens, adjusts, and focuses on what really brings value.”  LHV

Could this help your organisation?

This kind of work is particularly relevant when you’re scaling successfully—but starting to feel the strain.

It’s a strong fit when:

• Growth is increasing coordination costs across teams

• You want to scale delivery without scaling headcount at the same rate

• Ownership is becoming unclear as responsibilities expand

• There’s a need to connect engineering effort more directly to business outcomes

The goal is to design an organisation that can continue to grow, without becoming harder to operate. If you’re facing similar challenges, I’d be happy to explore how this kind of work could support your next stage of growth.