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