Postcard from a beach - Summer 2019

I intended to give a mid-year update on progress at Nationwide to follow an earlier article on 'The year that was' for 2018 and, whilst it's a little later than planned with Summer having caught up with me, it's actually another nice reflection period whilst chilling on a beach!

In my last article, I called out a few areas of focus for 2019 - it felt only right to give a view on how we are getting on...please excuse the forced postcard tomfoolery ??

Nationwide Engineering is definitely the place to see and be seen

We set out substantial growth targets for our in-house engineering capability for 2019 - focused on scaling up our full-stack talent pools across Software, Testing and Platform to work with autonomy, mastery and purpose (thanks Daniel Pink) in long-lived co-located product teams alongside business, creative and delivery colleagues.

Do you know what pleases so much with this one is that it is a cross-functional group across Recruitment, Engineering and Digital that are absolutely smashing it ??. From broadly a standing start, these folk have brought in more than 70 new joiners in six months across a range of disciplines and backgrounds - crucially not solely new experienced hires but also in retraining current colleagues, as well as with our Technology Development Programme, our partnership with the Institute of Technology and new StartTech schemes. In parallel, we've both levelled-up our Recruitment team and partnered with some amazing agencies (you know who you all are!) to attract and onboard talent and the folks now knocking at our door are super-talented!

Alongside Engineering, we now have a highly-talented group of Tech Leads (think scale-up CTOs) - a diverse mixture of both new joiners adding their experience and external insight, alongside a number of existing colleagues who are revelling in their new-found accountable freedom and potential to accelerate their careers in technology and develop not just brilliant code but also an entire generation of engineers. I am incredibly lucky to have such a team working with me - as per Steve Jobs view on talent...we have been able to onboard some awesome individuals and they are helping us grow and learn with them.There's clearly loads still to do and the team now have the collective 'bit between their teeth' but I am in love with both the individuals involved and the attitude and approach that the group have - amazing progress!

The smorgasbord of technology on offer is both delicious and nourishing

I think this one is my favourite - I have been blown away by the work our folks are doing and how we are now sharing some of our 'firsts' and learnings more broadly. For a flavour of some of our best tech, may I offer you up the following examples from two of our amazing Tech Leads - Richard James (yeah - I know - there are two of us!) and Aubrey Stearn - as holiday reading ??:

And, actually, it's not just the tech itself - it's as much about sharing what we are learning about ourselves and how we best serve our members through a cultural transformation that celebrates agility, innovation, inclusivity and co-creation across our organisation...here's yours truly and Jen Marsden at DOES19 with 'Technology is Easy, Culture is Hard':

With increasing cloud cover, we are enjoying the refreshing environment

2018 was a breakthrough year for Public Cloud here at Nationwide and 2019 sees us really upping our game in terms of maturity and scale of our offerings across all major providers and supporting an increasing breadth of services for our members. Another area where partnerships both internally and externally are supporting are progress - we are making great strides on both Cloud adoption, as well as in introducing consistency and scale in DevOps and SRE ways-of-working to best-leverage the opportunities.

As we move through 2019, we can now start to see our Platforms increasingly offer not just modern infrastructure capabilities but also a range of shared services across data, integration, security and experience - our Open Digital Platform is the next stage of our evolution towards an API-first strategy to support both internal and externally-focused innovation and partnerships.

Wish you were here?

I guess to close out, and as per my last update, I wanted to thank all those involved across so many of our internal communities in making these changes happen. Again - you all know who you are, you all know you are valued by colleagues and aware of the value that you bring for our members of today and tomorrow.

For those interested in being part of the story and maybe to write your own postcards in future, I can wholeheartedly recommend taking a trawl through our careers site and possibly checking out our recently announced expansion into the Post Building in Holborn, Central London. For those who do apply and are successful, I look forward to meeting you as future colleagues and working together to support us with #buildingsocietynationwide