Founded in Bern in 1826, La Mobilière is the oldest private insurance company in Switzerland. They offer insurance products for professional and private customers in the fields of life insurance and property insurance. In order to scale their business and fulfill customer needs, La Mobilière uses the highest technical standard to innovate through the digitization of products and services.
50% more efficient in meetings
50% more efficient in the planning process
3+ days saved in prep time for each planning session
Story highlights
- With a 1,500-person distributed agile team and dependencies across multiple applications and departments, the PI Planning process at La Mobilière was highly complex.
- La Mobilière adopted Miro’s Planner and Dependencies apps to make PI Planning faster and easier. This led to better visibility into cross-functional work and potential roadblocks. After seeing success with Miro for PI Planning and remote work, they also started using it for in-person meetings.
- Planning meeting facilitators saved up to four hours of work by prepping in Miro. And since Miro automatically syncs with Jira, they reduced manual work and risk of errors. Overall, using Miro made planning sessions much easier and faster — and more engaging and inclusive.
Explore Miro for product planning
The problem: La Mobilière’s PI Planning process is complex and reliant on distributed teams
Digitalization of insurance products and services is key for maintaining La Mobilière’s competitive advantage. La Mobilière’s agile organization is composed of several cross-functional teams (or “agile release trains”) aligned to specific solutions, for SAP, life insurance, or non-life insurance. Each of these teams follow agile methodologies in their sprints. One of the main responsibilities of agile teams is to create an online version of the entire insurance contract management process. This includes everything from the first offer to the final contract and address changes. Internally, teams work across a range of applications owned by multiple departments like sales, accounting, legal, and contract management. This creates a challenge because they have to align cross-functionally and take other departments’ needs and goals into account too.
Externally, the team is responsible for providing high-quality services and new online functionalities for customers. Any missteps or slow downs in the development of digital solutions could negatively impact internal processes and the customer experience.
Collaboration and communication across hundreds of distributed workers is critical to La Mobilière’s agile PI Planning process. About 1,500 specialists on the agile organization are working in release trains with eight development teams and one testing team. The sheer number of people involved leads to a complex development workflow, and the communications between team members is already more complex due to hybrid and distributed teams. It’s a huge effort to make sure all workflows and modes of documentation are up to date and that information and relevant context isn’t lost. Frequent team changes are additional hurdles to creating complete and well-organized documentation.
The entire agile team must identify all impacts of changes in the IT ecosystem and dependencies. Errors or missteps due to misalignment in the process could risk missing go-live dates and hurt the customer experience, La Mobilière’s reputation, and employee satisfaction.
“Before, preparing physical PI Planning with printouts took a lot of time, and we did nothing with them afterwards. Now, with Miro, we save easily up to 3 days when setting up the Planner and we actually work with it after the planning, too.”
Olivier Fischer, Release Train Engineer at La Mobilière
The solution: End-to-end hybrid PI Planning with Miro’s Planner and Dependencies app gets teams aligned
La Mobilière piloted Miro’s Planner app for a 4-month product increment, using the platform for every step of creating a digital insurance contract management process. They used the Planner for preparing the PI Planning, running the PI Planning live sessions, as well as planning sprints, organizing work and team capacity. The Planner app is also used to define and visualize dependencies, tasks, and responsibilities. The Miro board became the central source of truth for communication and documentation.
The integration of Jira with Miro reduced effort and saved time across the board. Through a robust 2-way Jira integration, you can create and edit Jira Cards directly in Miro. These show up in Jira in real time. Automatically… All information displays on a single Miro board for all teams, without having to create Jira filters and configurations or worrying about out-of-date information.
The single-source-of-truth Miro board enabled all teams to have a view of the big picture at all times. With Miro, all dependencies are easily visualized, so they don’t have to draw manual connections between different Jira maps and Confluence. This makes all information easy to record, access, and store. Details, data, or notes can be imported and exported easily via drag and drop. This means that all details are available to all teams at all times — and all changes are visible without using other communication channels. With the capability to zoom out and see the big picture while also being able to zoom in on details, it’s easy to share information with stakeholders at different levels, such as executives or other departments.
Planning sessions are more engaging and inclusive with Miro’s templates and features designed to support agile rituals. The setup of planning sessions was much easier and faster with the Planner. So easy in fact, that La Mobilière teams also used it for in-person meetings. It helped to increase collaboration, input, and engagement from everyone. Even people who normally kept to themselves got involved through Miro templates for retros or the voting app. In the end, teams felt safer expressing their opinions and more connected than ever before.
La Mobilière’s favorite Miro PI Planning tools and functionalities:
- Roadmap Development to build understanding, capture dependencies, and drive alignment — leading to faster delivery.
- User Story Mapping to make working with user stories a lot easier. They used this better version of the backlog to explain the product, prioritize, and plan releases.
- Dependencies app to reduce effort and mitigate product development risks.
- Template gallery with Miro’s pre-made templates to build on instead of starting from scratch.
- Private Mode to reduce group bias, create a safe space to be authentic during feedback, and give participants privacy when formulating their thoughts.
- Estimation app to align team members on scope of work, identify gaps in analysis or understanding, and set clear expectations for delivery.
“What we really liked was that it was so easy to update the card, epic, or story, rather than to go back and refresh, all done from a single board, drag and drop.“
Scrum Master at La Mobilière
The result: PI Planning in Miro was a game changer in efficiency, convenience, quality, and interactivity
The pilot improved collaboration and created a smoother process for the entire IT team — with less errors, more structure, and more comfort in all project stages. And it required less work.
Miro made the whole process more efficient, convenient, reliable, and fast. They always had a complete overview and a big picture of dependencies, features, and the actual status. A real advantage for La Mobilière’s agile release train with 10 different teams.
The team increased productivity by saving effort and time. The agile team saved up to 30 hours of manual preparation, printing, and follow-up work thanks to the auto-populating program boards synced with Jira. After the initial setup of the Planner, preparing PI Planning sessions took just 20 minutes.
Quality of work improved. The whole process is much more accurate with fewer mistakes. It is much less likely for information to get lost, or features and dependencies to be missed. Go-live dates are more attainable and La Mobilière’s customers can more quickly experience a new feature or improvement in their online insurance contract management.
La Mobilière’s agile team collaboration improved in all aspects.
- Boards are always available and up to date. Every team has its space, and it’s easy to share information. Miro’s templates and apps for rituals make the planning sessions engaging and inclusive.
- Team engagement is improved — real-time participation through voting, timed exercises, and comments achieved more interactivity and engagement in sessions.
- La Mobilière appreciated the help of the estimation app, with fun templates for retros that make this repetitive task less mundane.
- The private mode enables the team to share ideas without being biased and fosters a feeling of inclusion.
Hybrid and remote work is supported and made easy. The whole process is now digital and interactive, no matter where the people are. Teams feel less isolated, it’s much easier to practice agile together.
“It’s a convenient real-time collaboration — efficient and interactive. It makes my work so much easier. It gives me peace of mind. I know that mistakes like forgetting something, putting a sprint on the wrong team, or losing a story don’t happen anymore.”
Scrum Master at La Mobilière
Learn how you can manage all your product development workflows in one visual, collaborative space — with Miro.
