Three Teams, Three Answers: Why Product Launches Stall at the Top

In an established bank, no product launch is a clean sheet. Daniele Tonella, CTO and Member of the Management Board at ING, frames every one as an optimisation case, because everything deployed has to cope with what already exists.

Longevity changes what is possible. Joe Wilson, Chief Evangelist at bunq, notes the bank has been building with AI for over a decade, well before the current models made it fashionable, and now runs the business on it — customer support, engineering, marketing and HR alike. The hard parts, he suggests, are behind them rather than ahead.

The failure mode Cornel Dixon, Head of Growth at Plumery, sees is a communication problem with a technical root. Product knows what the customer wants, engineering knows what it takes to build, and the vendor knows where the limits sit, so leadership receives three versions of the same story and still has to make a call. The requests that follow are familiar: better vendor management, more engineering resource, more time. Underneath all of them is a dependency nobody has named. Cornel recounts a conversation with a large bank that named it exactly, in words that are hard to forget.