Sbergile’s 5th anniversary: summarizing the world’s biggest agile transformation

Sber has summed up the five years of its agile transformation that began on September 14, 2016. During this time, product introductions increased more than fourfold, while the average time to market (from idea to implementation) decreased more than sevenfold.

Over 35,000 people work in Sber's agile perimeter and the companies in its ecosystem. Over 3,000 product teams develop, improve, and support over 600 products and services. Making up the largest and most mature agile coach community in Russia, around 100 coaches help the teams to carry out their work successfully.

Sber is currently developing its product management and improving the expertise of its product managers. The bank has developed a unique research tool - the Discovery space - which assists agile teams in the formation of hypotheses and research. The focus is on the continuous improvement of the efficiency of all products and processes.

Over the years of its agile transformation, the bank has amassed a wealth of experience in this area. Sber's educational center offers agile learning and certification programs and courses, original courses from leading agile experts at Sber, as well as training in the most popular Scrum and Kanban strategies. Sber is one of three organizations in Russia accredited by Kanban University (the only international university that teaches the Kanban methodology).

Sber's successful experience has drawn attention from a number of Russian companies that wish to improve the speed and efficiency of their production processes. That is why Sber launched Sbergile as a Service in 2020, through which the bank's experts advise interested companies on a variety of agile practice-related issues, from teaching the basics to implementing a full-fledged readymade transformation. Agile methodology is being implemented with Sber's support at over 40 companies from fields such as logistics, retail, FMCG, construction, etc. Sber has facilitated the implementation of flexible approaches at the management level at individual agencies and regions of the country, helping them make decisions more quickly and implement reforms.

We have undergone a radical agile transformation in the last five years, and our level of maturity has grown immensely over these years. We currently have 3,000 teams designing apps simultaneously within the bank and over 30,000 people agile working on the whole. Our agile transformation has helped us reduce time to market tremendously and, of course, save on production. I would like to congratulate all Sber employees following the agile way of working. I hope for brilliant new insights and successful achievements for the benefit of our customers!

Herman Gref

CEO, Chairman of the Executive Board, Sberbank