Product and engineering teams must constantly strike a balance between stability and experimentation.
Just ask Hampus Falck, a product owner at ABN AMRO Clearing USA LLC, a global clearing firm that provides financial services to professional trading participants. According to Falck, the key to innovation is having firm boundaries.
“We balance experimentation and reliability by maintaining a clear separation between testing and production environments, allowing us to evaluate new technologies and ideas without impacting business operations,” Falck said.
At Caxy, a software development agency, COO Hannah Deason has a similar philosophy about how to scale quickly and safely.
“Experimentation is necessary on an agile team — process, tooling, tech, team structure, none of it’s off limits,” Deason said. “We don’t try new things for their own sake; every experiment comes from our metrics, our clients or planning and retro conversations.”
Brian Weis, chief innovation and AI officer at fintech company NinjaTrader Group, shared that earlier this year, his team launched the NinjaTrader Innovation Lab to experiment boldly — without breaking anything.
“Our team takes highly ambiguous ideas to a working proof concept, quickly testing them inside our regulated brokerage sandbox,” Weis said. “We can quickly see if the concept has potential or not and can move to the next stage of development.”
Looking for your next product or engineering role? The three tech leaders shared a behind-the-scenes look at how their teams’ agile cultures turn big ideas into real impact.
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ABN AMRO Clearing USA LLC is a global clearing firm that provides an integrated suite of financial services to professional trading participants in the global financial market.
What new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?
As financial markets move toward a 24/7 trading model, it is essential that our technology platforms can operate with the same level of availability and resilience. To support this, we are currently undertaking a major cloud transformation initiative, migrating critical applications to a modern cloud infrastructure that can provide the scalability, reliability and uptime required in the financial industry.
At the same time, we are redesigning our application landscape by decoupling systems and reducing interdependencies. By leveraging modern containerization technologies and cloud-native architectures, we can accelerate development, deploy changes more efficiently and reduce operational risk while improving overall system resilience.
How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?
Innovation always involves a degree of risk, particularly in a highly regulated industry where trust and stability are paramount. We balance experimentation and reliability by maintaining a clear separation between testing and production environments, allowing us to evaluate new technologies and ideas without impacting business operations.
At the same time, we follow a disciplined approach to delivery through extensive testing, phased implementations and continuous validation. By introducing improvements incrementally, we can innovate while maintaining the reliability and stability our clients and regulators expect. This approach aligns closely with our agile way of working.
What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products?
Collaboration is critical to transforming innovative ideas into successful products. As a global organization, ABN AMRO Clearing has historically developed solutions in different regions, often reflecting local requirements and ways of working. While this enabled regional optimization, it also created opportunities to better leverage expertise across the organization.
As market participants move toward extended and continuous trading hours, we identified the need for a more resilient and globally supported trade capture platform. In response, teams from multiple regions came together to design and build a new global trade capture application, combining the best practices, expertise and operational experience from each location.
The result is a faster, more resilient and more flexible platform that supports 24/7 trade capture operations and can be supported globally. Beyond the technical benefits, this collaboration has significantly improved our time to market and strengthened our ability to deliver consistent solutions across the organization.
NinjaTrader Group is a fintech company that provides software and brokerage services to help traders work smarter.
What new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?
NinjaTrader is constantly exploring new technologies and ways to build and innovate for our trader community. Earlier this year, we launched the NinjaTrader Innovation Lab to explore new product ideas more quickly and efficiently. It is a dedicated team focused on trader innovation, like building AI features natively into our trading platform.
We’ve also established an operating model where the Innovation Lab works in close collaboration with our product, design and engineering teams to facilitate clean and efficient handoffs of ideas that are tested with users and exhibit positive signals to graduate into core offerings. Our team takes highly ambiguous ideas to a working proof concept, quickly testing them inside our regulated brokerage sandbox. We can quickly see if the concept has potential or not and can move to the next stage of development.
Lastly, We also actively encourage all employees to use AI in their work and provide tools like Claude within our workflows. We have designated AI experts who hold office hours and demo new ways to embed AI skills and coding into one’s work.
How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?
We have created two ways to keep our process honest. First, we set the go/no-go criteria before we look at the data, so an experiment can’t quietly turn into advocacy for something we’ve already built. Second, we have established hard limits that live in our platform, like trade risk controls, rather than through anyone’s judgment, so the experimental surface is safe to play on by construction as we test ideas.
The Innovation Lab’s job is to produce graded decisions rather than a number of shipped product features. We also believe that pulling the plug early on an idea counts as a successful outcome. When something proves out, the reliability bar changes and ideas graduate to the product teams who own production.
What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products?
As a company, NinjaTrader embeds collaboration into our culture and it is the foundation of our company values. We believe ideas can come from anywhere and we want to provide an open environment that embraces that. In the past, we would hold yearly hackathons where employees took ideas to rough proof of concepts, but it was difficult to bring all these ideas to life.
Through our new Innovation Lab, we are building a framework for a “continuous hackathon” where employees create point of concept ideas that meet our coding, compliance and design standards. These concepts go through a review process with a dedicated team to become inputs into product or feature ideas that we want to bring to life quickly and as potential key offerings over the coming quarters.
Caxy is a Chicago-based software consulting and custom software development agency.
What new technologies or frameworks are helping your teams move faster and build smarter?
The biggest gains for us over the last few years have come from several different technologies. With Copilot in GitHub and in the integrated development environment across the team — the lift on test generation and refactor turnaround is meaningful and agentic coding sessions have made an impact in the speed of bringing prototypes and full features to production. A monorepo for projects gives us GitHub Actions pipelines handling CI/CD end-to-end and Zephyr paired with Playwright speeds up test writing and maintains our test repository; both connect back to Jira for consistency across teams.
Serverless Lambdas have helped reduce the overhead for more costly workloads — which lets us stretch what we can accomplish. Where we need higher throughput, Kafka manages our event streams and akka clusters distribute actor systems that process them.
Underneath this newer tech sits our more standardized stack — React/Next.js on the front end, GraphQL as the API, Node or Scala with the Play framework on the back. The right balance of all this lets a smaller team hit monthly release cadences that before would have required more muscle to make happen.
How do you balance experimentation with reliability in your development process?
Reliability is critical to our teams and so is experimentation. Balancing the two is what makes us successful, especially in regulated spaces like gaming and trading.
Experimentation is necessary on an agile team — process, tooling, tech, team structure, none of it’s off limits. We don’t try new things for their own sake; every experiment comes from our metrics, our clients or planning and retro conversations. Trying things on live projects gets better outcomes because we improve as we go, but it requires guardrails: defined success indicators, clear owners, code review, automated test coverage, reversible releases and transparency for buy-in and pivot control.
If an experiment isn’t causing harm but isn’t showing benefit, we tweak. If it’s not working or creates meaningful risk, we suspend it until we have better data. Failure is a risk, but so is rejecting experimentation and delivering the way we did five years ago — practically ancient in tech terms. The systems we build keep pace with our clients’ businesses and being willing to experiment intentionally has been the recipe for success.
What role does collaboration play in turning innovative ideas into products?
Collaboration takes a good idea in a meeting and turns it into something live and actionable in production. For us, ideas can come from anyone on a project, but they only become a feature or product when the key voices have gotten together and confirmed all the reasons we’re wanting to build, the reasons we shouldn’t build, what we lose if we don’t and everything in between.
A strength at Caxy is respecting the core truth that the person who understands why something matters and the person who knows the viable path to building are rarely the same person; you need both in the conversation. In practice that means clients and stakeholders join working sessions with our product and technical teams, with clarity on who has final say and when to move on.
A tribal gaming and hospitality client we’ve had for years is one example. An overhaul to their player loyalty platform couldn’t be specified upfront; it took marketing and operations folks who knew player behavior, data teams to share the historical context and engineers who knew what the architecture could support. Collaboration keeps the product, team and client evolving together.
