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ESTREEM & THIGA

Building of the Estreem Product operating model 

400 people aligned though a shared Product vision and a robust operating model structured by 3 payment Product domains (Acquiring, Issuing, Dispute)
Organizational Design
Product roadmap
Finance
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Table of content

Context

Building a new European leader of the payment processing

The payments sector is shifting to real-time processing, with rising demands for security, performance, and availability. Legacy infrastructures, built for delayed processing, require deep modernization.

Estreem is building a next-generation card payment processing platform for European banks. Its ambition: rank among Europe's top three processors by 2028, processing 17 billion transactions annually and capturing 30% of French transactions. With 400+ employees, Estreem embodies a sovereign European industrial vision.

Thiga worked with key Product and Tech leaders to:

  • Define a strategic and operational Product roadmap.
  • Restructure stakeholder relationships through transformed request management, discovery practices, and roadmap governance.
  • Organize teams around the new platform to complete development and bank integration by 2026, launch SaaS production services by 2027, while maintaining existing on-premises operations.

Challenges

Uniting employees in a shared Product organization

Establish a Product culture and practices (strategic roadmap, discovery, value-driven management) and deploy a common organizational model and a clear managerial structure to approximately 400 people with diverse cultures, challenges and levels of maturity.

Phasing the operational transition to support technical milestones with banks

The operational transformation has to be aligned with the complex technical transition program from a historical foundation to a modern platform (APIs, Microservices, Cloud) carried out without service disruption

Transposing technical services into a Product catalog with clear value for banks

Structuring the Product catalog and roadmap aligned with the expectations of banks historically accustomed to specific approaches, while favoring an "adopt rather than adapt" approach.

Our approach

A combined approach with both consulting and product craft expertizes, from defining the strategy to producing operational deliverables with the Product and Tech departments, with Thiga’s commitment to results:   

  • Clarifying the platform's strategic positioning and missions

    Facilitate a workshop to clarify and align leaders on the company's vision and mission.

    Align leaders and employees on the Product approach, its scope, and its structuring principles through awareness training, skills development, the definition of new action principles formalized in a Product Manifesto, and explicit alignment with program governance.

    Structure the platform's B2B Product catalogue through Product definition workshops based on the payments value chain, using the "jobs to be done" technique, aligned with the ongoing technical service architecture.

  • Structuring a B2B SaaS product operating model for a complex payment ecosystem

    Build the company's Product processes and activities. Structure the Product organization through Team Topology workshops aligned with Product domains. Define roles, responsibilities, and the Product x Tech collaboration model, including the impact on support functions such as risk management, human resources, and finance. Establish a Product roadmap governance model, both internally and with clients.

    Structure the Tech organization and its delivery model in close alignment with Product. Provide expertise and support to leaders in defining an operational model founded on scaled agile practices and Site Reliability Engineering. Organize teams around Product-aligned tribes and squads, complemented by cross-functional departments responsible for platform resilience, performance, security, and scalability.

    Formalize a clear summary for internal communication and adoption across all teams.

  • On-the-ground support to help activate initial Product practices

    Support the CEO and Product management teams in formalizing a three-year strategic Product vision. Complement this with Product-Tech alignment workshops to develop a twelve-month operational roadmap built from existing development plans.

    Define and implement a new governance framework for discovery and demand management with banks, covering the full cycle from opportunity qualification to value proposition formalization.

    Structure and equip discovery practices to streamline needs analysis, prioritization, and Product decision-making.

Our impact
The project enabled Estreem to develop an operational model that aligns Product and Tech, capable of absorbing its growth ambitions, guaranteeing the robustness of the platform and sustainably engaging employees.
  • Structured Product roadmap that enables smooth governance and prioritization with banks. 
  • Formalized Product x Tech collaboration model that ensures the delivery of application releases aligned with the banks's needs, technological objectives, and the Product roadmap. 
  • Strengthened coordination between Tech stakeholders, enabling the seamless integration of the platform's non-functional requirements (resilience, performance, scalability, security, operational excellence). 
  • Strengthened management structure, clarifying delivery responsibilities and establishing accessible, local management for every employee. 
  • Improved clarity and recognition of roles and responsibilities, aligned with industry best practices, to allow employees to envision a long-term commitment to the Estreem project. 
Thiga helped us develop a product approach tailored to the realities of a B2B fintech operating payment infrastructures. Their keen understanding of our challenges and constraints, and their ability to seamlessly integrate product and technology, were crucial in structuring our organization.
Antoine Leclercq photo
Antoine Leclercq CEO – Estreem

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