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CircleK, a global fuel retailer with over 17,000 stores worldwide, embarked on a transformative journey to establish its eMobility business, particularly in Scandinavia. This case study, presented by Eduardo da Silva and Guro Fladvad Størdal at the recent Agile meets Architecture conference, reveals how organizational design and strategic frameworks can guide a startup-phase business unit through rapid scaling within an enterprise environment.
The Evolution: From Exploration to Organized Chaos
Beginning in 2018, CircleK established a small, focused team — essentially five or six people from sales and marketing — to validate market opportunities in EV charging. This initial stream-aligned team leveraged white-label platforms and external services, requiring minimal internal engineering resources. Using Team Topologies language retrospectively, this phase exemplified startup-focused value creation with clear ownership and mission alignment.
However, rapid market expansion into B2B services and geographic growth across Scandinavian countries revealed critical organizational challenges by 2021. As teams multiplied and engineering capabilities grew, the architecture evolved organically—creating what the presenters candidly described as a “big ball of mud.” Multiple teams touched interdependent systems without a shared vision, resulting in unclear boundaries, deployment pressures, and decision-making paralysis.
The Turning Point: Systematic Modernization
Recognizing unsustainable scaling constraints, CircleK initiated a comprehensive modernization program (2022-2024) combining three complementary frameworks: domain-driven design, team topologies, and Wardley mapping. The methodology was rigorous: fifteen listening sessions captured pain points from engineering, operations, product, and sales teams, followed by intensive workshops identifying twelve core business capabilities.
Independent service heuristics — a Team Topologies technique — evaluated which capabilities could function as independently owned domains. This technical assessment combined with business mapping provided the North Star vision previously lacking: a clear architecture roadmap articulating what CircleK should build, partner on, or outsource.
The Enabling Team Model
A pivotal innovation was establishing an Architecture Modernization Enabling Team (AMET) combining internal leaders and external consultants. This cross-functional group facilitated knowledge transfer, prioritized transformation work, and ensured adequate organizational capacity — addressing why most transformations fail despite good intentions. By explicitly managing what gets deprioritized to create space for modernization, AMET tackled the structural dependency keeping organizations locked in legacy patterns.
Key Insights
The journey underscores that organizational architecture cannot be imposed — it must be discovered collaboratively. The six-month preparation cycle, multiple workshops, and iterative refinement weren’t inefficiencies but essential processes for building organizational consensus and capability. Similarly, geographic distribution (product in Norway, engineering in Warsaw) required deliberate integration efforts, not merely technical solutions.
The presenters notably rejected the notion that AI would fundamentally alter this trajectory. Effective AI adoption, they argue, requires the organizational clarity and team ownership that emerges from precisely this kind of transformational work.
Conclusion
CircleK’s eMobility transformation demonstrates that scaling sustainable organizations demands balancing experimentation with architectural clarity, bottom-up team autonomy with top-down vision, and technical refactoring with social and organizational change. By applying proven frameworks systematically and maintaining focus on incremental improvements, organizations can navigate the transition from startup agility to enterprise scale—a balance increasingly critical in competitive markets.