Krzysztof Dąbrowski - mBank - Remixing Management Systems and Escaping Technological Debt

Summary: After a career as IT Director, Krzysztof Dąbrowski became a COO at mBank - Poland's first digital bank that was a fintech before fintech was a thing. In this episode of Leadership Deep Dive, Krzysztof Dąbrowski talks with Hendrik Deckers about his passion for "stealing like an artist" from different management systems to approach complex operational challenges and to always be learning, even if he's exhausted the learning materials from a given domain. He shares the behind-the-scenes view of building efficient operational processes and banking systems on the foundations of obsolete technologies. He dives into a transformation program that compiled COBOL applications into .Net in real time, without stopping any systems, and another that translated a proprietary language into one they could actually find programmers for. TABLE OF CONTENTS 01:00 - Introduction: Krzysztof Dąbrowski, COO of mBank 01:50 - about mBank - the first digital bank in Poland 03:20 - The role of COO at mBank and the operations transformation he led 10:50 - Defaulting on technological debt: compiling into a new language without slowing down the systems 20:00 - mBank's cloud ambition 22:30 - Translating the corporate banking core system 25:50 - How IT is organised at mBank: balancing agility and compliance processes mBank scaled agile model navigating "agile islands" 33:04 - The changing role of a CTO/CIO 36:05 - Krzysztof's management style 39:55 - Recruiting top talent in Poland 43:20 - mBank's innovation strategy, startup incubator and ecosystem 44:00 - What your team says about you when you're not around 45:58 - People and books that inspire Krzysztof The importance of surrounding yourself with kind people You need to know good specialists when you see them, even if you don't understand their craft 52:30 - The difficulty of keeping it simple 54:45 - The values he wants to pass on to his children 56:20 - His advice for future CIOs How learning new skills used to be different Why you should do things you're not yet good at