Designing the product operating model for 500 teams and a $450M portfolio
500 teams, a $450M budget, and a different way of working in every region. We co-led the design and the pilots of the product operating model due for global rollout in 2026.
- teams in scope
- 500
- operating budget
- $450M
- global rollout, fully designed and tested
- 2026
We designed, piloted, and proved the scalable operating model HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division rolls out in 2026.
- Client
- HSBC
- Duration
- 6 months
- Sector
- Financial services and payments, United Kingdom and global
- Engagement shape
- Delivery Lead co-designing, piloting and refining a product operating model.
What we walked into
HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division had no consistent product operating model across 500 teams and a $450M budget. Every region had its own processes, creating fragmented delivery, unclear ownership, and unpredictable outcomes with little leadership visibility.
The work itself
Run against The Tenhaw Way, which is published in full and free to adopt without engaging us.
Brought in as Delivery Lead, James co-led the design, piloting, and refinement of a new product operating model with select GPS teams: standardised roles, governance and reporting; agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale; and metrics and dashboards for progress, dependencies, and value. The model was tested against real-world feedback with executive alignment throughout.
What came out of it
- teams in scope
- 500
- operating budget
- $450M
- global rollout, fully designed and tested
- 2026
Pilots validated the model, with improved predictability, clear ownership, and faster decisions. Blockers and dependencies surfaced earlier, and the framework is fully designed, tested, and ready for global rollout across all GPS teams in 2026.
Why a buyer usually lands on this one
Written for the person arriving mid-programme with a question.
An operating model is where an AI programme either lands or does not
Standardised roles, governance and reporting sound like the least interesting deliverable on this site. They decide whether a capability spreads past the team that built it.
When an executive asks how to scale AI agents from one workflow to fifty, the constraint is almost never model capability. It is that fifty teams hold fifty definitions of done, fifty ways of deciding what to build and no shared metric, so every rollout is a fresh negotiation. A product operating model is what makes the fifty-first one cheap.
Payments carries its own regime
Global payments sits in the most resilience-sensitive part of a bank. The FCA and PRA operational resilience rules require firms to identify important business services, set impact tolerances and evidence they can remain within them through severe but plausible disruption. For entities inside the EU, DORA adds tested resilience, incident classification and reporting, and contractual control over critical third parties, which in practice now includes cloud and model providers.
An operating model with no view of which services are important, who owns them and how change flows through them cannot produce that evidence. Ours was a product operating model rather than a resilience programme, and we did not work on operational resilience or DORA. The overlap is real: both regimes ask who owns this, how do you know it works, and what do you do when it does not, which are the same three questions the operating model has to answer for delivery.
What this engagement does not claim
The same caveats the case studies hub carries, narrowed to this engagement so nothing here is a surprise to your analyst.
- 01
The HSBC operating model has not been rolled out.
It was designed, piloted with selected teams and validated against real feedback. Global rollout across the 500 teams is due in 2026.
- 02
The $450M is scope, not budget we controlled.
Read these at the scope we held. The budgets were in scope of the roles held rather than governed by us.
- 03
Some of this was James, personally.
Where an engagement was held as an individual role rather than delivered by a Tenhaw team, the narrative says James, not we.
What transfers is the operating model work: defining roles, governance, reporting and value metrics once, so the fifty-first team to adopt a capability is cheap rather than a fresh negotiation. What does not transfer is proof at scale. The model was designed, piloted and validated against real feedback, global rollout is due in 2026, and nothing here has been through a rollout yet.
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A pair who design the agentic systems, and the infrastructure to run them at scale. £35k–£55k / month · 2–4 months.
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Want the same thing, in your organisation?
A 30-minute call with James Rooney. We will tell you which parts of this we have done before and which we would be doing for the first time, and you will leave with a rough scope either way.
Most organisations start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks