From IT-Driven to Product-Led: How Steven Roest Is Rewiring ING’s Operating System

A teenage death-metal fan who swore he’d never work at a bank walks on stage and opens with a promise: “This talk is guaranteed AI-free.” Steven smiles, then gets serious. The real superpower in complex organizations isn’t another framework or a shinier dashboard. It’s empathy. And once you start treating platforms, tooling, and alignment as products built for real users, you can move an institution the size of ING. Without breaking it.

The Opening Riff

Steven’s origin story is disarming and deliberate. Long hair, unreadable band logos, and a vow to avoid boring jobs became the hook for a deeper point: most of us underestimate how much creativity and empathy are required to make big companies work. Years later, seated across from the art school he once dismissed, Steven realized what had changed wasn’t the students in purple skirts. It was him. After seeing too much mediocrity and too little curiosity, he’d learned to begin with empathy. It’s the mindset that turns designers, engineers, and product managers from rival tribes into a single problem-solving unit.

Discovering Empathy

Empathy, in Steven’s telling, isn’t a soft skill; it’s an operating cost. Every minute spent without it turns into miscommunication, misalignment, frustration, and, inevitably, real money lost. He’s been a designer, an engineer-adjacent builder, and a product manager, which is why he argues designers are uniquely placed to bridge the gap. They speak customer, understand systems, and can translate between detail and narrative. In an organization with 60,000 people and just as many opinions, that translation layer is the difference between motion and progress.

From Silos to a Scalable Platform

A decade ago, ING was a federation of countries, each with its own vertical stack: hardware, middleware, and business apps, all bespoke. In 2015, the bank made a hard pivot. Instead of rebuilding the same foundations ten times, it would create a global tech platform. Back-end services could be shared across markets. Front-ends would keep room for local nuance, but even there, more could be standardized than anyone expected. Countries could publish reusable products onto the platform, becoming both providers and consumers. Scale stopped being an aspiration and started becoming a design constraint.

Defining “Product” Across a Bank

Saying “product” became easy; agreeing on what it meant took ages. Was a fully fledged mortgage journey a product? What about a single approval API inside that journey? Steven’s team stopped debating apples versus pears and hunted for the shared DNA of good products, regardless of size. They identified 33 characteristics and clustered them into six convictions. Onboarding asked how fast new users could start. Engineering experience explored integration, documentation, and human-free paths. The service model covered reliability and incident handling. Optimized charging tackled fair, predictable pricing at a global scale. Especially for first adopters. Roadmap prioritization demanded transparent criteria and influence for consumers. And open contribution ensured the team never became a bottleneck, welcoming code, people, or budget from outside. For the first time, product experience became something you could measure and therefore improve.

Making Product-Led Real

Shared language isn’t enough; structures have to change with it. Steven outlined six tracks that helped ING internalize the product operating model. Leadership Trinity gave design a seat at the table. Yes, a four-person “trinity,” because influence matters more than symmetry. Strategy alignment created a clear line from ING’s top-level intent to team-level product strategy, with OKRs and quarterly business reviews ensuring the compass stayed true. Product manager maturity cleaned up years of title chaos and raised expectations to industry standards. The productization framework codified those thirty-three criteria so providers and consumers could see where their views of quality diverged and talk about it. Compelling roadmaps pushed teams to tell the right story to the right audience, not drown them in Gantt spaghetti. And the Obeya room gave leaders a place to connect strategy to execution, side by side, with one shared source of truth.

The Art and Agony of Roadmaps

Steven’s roadmap taxonomy is painfully recognizable. The engineer’s version is microscopic and present-biased. The product manager’s is an elegant Excel of dreams. The designer’s first question. “Who is this for?”.Proves the most important. Today, ING can craft audience-appropriate roadmaps, but the real challenge is orchestration at scale: ten countries, thirty initiatives each, hundreds of shared products, all interdependent. Without alignment, teams either ship tactical workarounds that become tomorrow’s tech debt or sit idle waiting for dependencies. Steven doesn’t pretend to have a magic fix; he argues for relentless improvement, shared visibility, and a bias toward candor over comfort

Obeya: The Room Where It Happens

Obeya literally means “big room,” and Steven loves it enough to joke about pointing at walls like a certain dictator. The point isn’t ceremony; it’s speed to shared understanding. One wall shows delivery portfolios. Another shows operational health. A third tracks OKRs. The room trades email threads and slide decks for visual communication that compresses complexity into something humans can parse at a glance. Red means attention; green means move on. The kicker is trust: everyone sees the same truth. That transparency turns dilemmas into decisions. And because ING is distributed across Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, and India, there’s a hybrid spin too. Physical when possible, digital when necessary, always designed to drill down from “we have a problem” to “here’s the epic behind it.”

OKRs in a Product-Led World

Steven is bullish on OKRs, but only when they are built for reality. Perfect cascades down a corporate org chart look tidy and rarely survive contact with work. ING aims for directional alignment rather than one-hundred-percent inheritance. Objectives and key results must be measurable, or they’re just wishes with punctuation. And the connective tissue matters most: explicitly naming the initiatives that will move the key results. Without that, roadmaps drift from goals, and dashboards become performance art.

Designers as Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Asked how he drove change in such a big company, Steven said designers underestimate their leverage. When he entered the IT department as one of the first UX people, he started by reminding teams there were human beings on the other side of the software. That provocation: gentle, persistent, grounded in empathy, changes how engineers solve, how product prioritizes, and how leaders trade off. If designers confine themselves to pixel-perfect UIs, he warns, they’ll be automated. If they reframe themselves as facilitators of better thinking, they become indispensable.

The Legal Fire Drill

Every enterprise has its “this must ship now” moment, often wrapped in regulatory panic. Steven’s approach is counterintuitive: challenge and delay. Not to be reckless, but to avoid letting unproven urgency bulldoze hard-won focus. Show the proof, weigh the trade-offs, and buy just enough time to keep momentum on the work that actually compounds value. It’s a small act of product courage that pays dividends in sanity.

Takeaways That Travel

Steven’s closing principles are stark and portable. To get what you want, start by understanding what others want: empathy first, always. In large companies, problems are dilemmas; there is no perfect choice, so the most compelling storyteller often wins. Make sure yours is rooted in the audience’s reality. And whatever language your organization chooses: products, journeys, jobs to be done, fight for a shared mental model, then commit to it completely. That’s how you convert meetings into movement.

The Last Word

If there’s a single line that captures Steven’s talk, it’s this: empathy is key. Practice it consciously across design, product, and IT, and your company will work better. Practice it beyond the company, and the world might, too. The death-metal kid didn’t sell out by joining a bank; he grew up and decided the most rebellious act in a complex system is to care enough to see it through someone else’s eyes.

Want to watch the full talk?

You can find it here on UXDX: https://uxdx.com/session/from-it-driven-to-product-led-bridging-design-product-and-it-at-scale/ 

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