I wrote this in 2018 when I was at Wise (formerly TransferWise), but never hit publish. It offers some evidence that a slow, bureaucratic hierarchy isn’t inevitable end as you scale up.

--

With 50+ autonomous teams and 1,000 employees, we’ve learned how to scale autonomous teams and avoid creeping bureaucracy.

I recently spoke to a founder of a small startup. They had 15 employees and were starting to defined clear roles and teams. He knew that the organization structure decisions he was making now would influence how the company would operate long into the future.

He understood that when companies are small — 15 people small — everyone has tons of autonomy. With that autonomy comes responsibility. Every employee can and must do whatever they think is necessary to help the company to succeed. His core concern was how to keep that going far into the future. How to keep everyone laser focused on the company’s mission and on it’s customers. How to keep moving fast, regardless of the challenges.

He was intrigued by how Wise operated and reached out to learn more. He’d heard we operate differently than most companies. And we do.

He had the six questions you see below on his mind. I hope my answers give a good overview of how we operate autonomously at scale. It should also provide some insight into how our structure enables us to move fast in pursuit of our mission.

We have around 50 autonomous product teams - teams who own a portion of our product. The teams themselves are centred around customer problems and are similar to other tech companies: conversion, help experience, payment methods, and many others. They’re different from many other companies because they’re autonomous. They self-assemble, set their own vision and KPIs, and execute mostly on their own. As a team, they have the freedom to do most anything they see will have an impact, but the responsibility to own whatever they sign up to. My colleague Harsh described in fascinating detail the principles that our Engineers live by.

Besides our globally-focused product teams, we have 8 regional tribes who focus on customers in different parts of the world. For instance, there's a LatAm tribe that supports every aspect for customers in Latin America. Tribes are composed of Bankers (working with regulators and partner banks), Product Managers, Engineers, Marketers/PR, Analysts, as well as a bunch of people to support with daily operations: Customer Support, Verification/KYC, Fraud/AML and Operations.

The main objective when we’re thinking about how we operate is how to move fast. Fast to launch new markets with a genuinely useful product. Fast to iterate on our existing product. Fast to adapt our organization as we grow. Ultimately, fast to deliver real benefit to more and more customers. And fast in spite of the fact that we’re now 1000 people spread around the world.

First, we're incredibly close to customers. If you look at our apps or our website, you might think our product is as simple as money transfer from A to B. We hope you think that. But under the hood there’s enormous complexity. Regulations, banking partners, processes, as well as data and verification requirements are different in every single country. Our small autonomous and highly responsible teams can build the regulatory and banking relationships needed to build a quality product that’s unmatched.

Second, there's almost no politics. This stems from the fact that employees have both the freedom and responsibility to figure out for themselves what to focus on. If someone disagrees with you or your team, they just tell you. Further, if the topic is important enough to them, they’ll come help you fix it. With 50+ teams and 1000 people running full tilt, this doesn’t always work. But magically, it usually does.

Third, we naturally adapt to change well. We've been put to the test numerous times over the last four years that I’ve been there. Each time we’ve been tested, the result has been no layoffs, no reorgs, and we haven’t gone broke. Not that it was easy, but when there are almost no politics you can be more pragmatic and just get crazy hard things done without much fuss.

Most importantly, it's thrilling to work here. As an employee this is the biggest benefit of all. I can join or create a team to work work on whatever I think will help Wise the most. Over the past 3 years that’s ranged from Marketing, Finance, Business Intelligence, Databases, and most recently Planning and People/HR topics. Not only does nobody get in my way, they support me. It seems logical, but I’ve never seen it happen in another organization to the degree it does in Wise.

It’s a lot more responsibility on your shoulders. Personal and team autonomy sounds great, but sometimes it's extremely hard. Employees need to make a lot more decisions on their own without a manager telling them what the strategy is. Which country should we go to next? Which team should I join? What should I work on this week? Should I give this customer a discount? We don’t have enough liquidity - which customer's payments should we delay and why? These are all incredibly hard questions that employees at every level are expected to figure out.

It’s hard to hire. Ambitious people thrive because they can see the direct impact their work is having on our customers. They get addicted to the high of delivering so much (because nothing is in their way). These kinds of people are hard to find and select for so a lot of our attention goes to hiring and onboarding new joiners.

Traditional solutions to organizational problems usually won’t work in Wise. For instance the default solution for cross-company planning when they get big entails inviting only “senior” employees to plan at a highly abstracted level. But we don’t do that as it would reduce team accountability and slow down execution at Wise.

Instead we use a “startup of startups” concept, where each product team is like a small startup within Wise. Each team chooses 3-5 dedicated coaches (like a startup’s board of advisors) to go deep into their plans each quarter. Our planning processes substitute - and in many ways transcend - the control/feedback mechanisms to a more typical hierarchical structure. This process is in no way perfect, but it’s improving every quarter.

Finally, on challenges, it’s hard to aggregate our strategy up. Each of our 50 teams prepare or update detailed plans (10-20 written pages) each quarter. But you need to be superhuman to even skim all of the plans and retros each quarter, much less give meaningful feedback. So almost nobody has a complete overview of Wise. That sounds problematic, but in practice it isn’t. Nobody in any business has a complete overview. In more hierarchical organizations you have to abstract away (all of) the important details. So the main challenge with this is that it feels scary, especially for new joiners.

I.e. customer support and fixing bugs across the app when they're not part of a KPI

Every team and tribe define their mission and a scope. On top of that, every team choose KPIs and targets to guide them on their journey. In practice this is hard. Some teams are great at this. Some - like brand new teams - have a steep learning curve.

None of our teams have a crazy backlog of bugs. Our reviews on Android, iOS, and TrustPilot speak to that. Product bugs are covered in the scope for the team, but not usually as explicit targets.

We’ve done this with extremely fast feedback loops. As fast as a glance across the desk. PM's and Engineers interact daily with Customer Support and Operations teamm-members. In fact, they often sit at the same table. As a result, product teams are absolutely hammered if they don't fix important bugs right away. Not only does this mean a higher quality product, it also means our Customer Support team members can clearly see the product getting better and aren’t dealing with the same problem over and over again. For PM's, Customer Support and other operational teams are an invaluable partner to gather customer insight. PM's lead planning and prioritisation (that’s their job after all) but they have a holistic understanding on which to balance product quality and development speed.

I.e. VP of engineering or Head of HR.

We do have most of the VP roles you’d expect. But it's turned out to be crazy hard to find senior level hires who both know the discipline and can thrive in our culture. The VP roles we’ve filled in the last 2 years have all taken 1+ year intensive searches. All other VPs have grown up in Wise.

Our Leadership team needs to work differently than executives in other organizations. They need to do less. This is harder than you’d think.

Our autonomous teams are responsible for making many more decisions than in other similar sized organizations. But there are a fixed number of decisions to make to run an organization. So a consequence of increased autonomy is that our leadership team must make fewer decisions. As such, they almost never take the final decisions, set targets or budgets, or decide strategies.

So what do they do all day? They lead, in the best sense of the word. As they don’t generally take final decisions, they help their teams to make the right decisions. They ask a lot of provocative questions. Our Leadership team supports the teams to set ambitious visions, clear KPIs, and to deliver what they promise. Mature and successful teams need help finding the next challenge. New teams need help figuring out their vision and their capability.

Our Leadership team also works with our board and rounds out their day fighting the fires that inevitably come up in a fast growing company. And interviewing and hiring: lots of that.

Is it always a PM or someone else?

Generally yes, Product Managers lead our 50+ product teams. We maintain a quarterly planning cadence and most teams aim to have a 12-18 month product vision they’re working towards. Each quarter, each product team updates their plans and KPI targets and shares this with the rest of the company.

Almost nobody formally reports to PM's though (only other PM's and some analysts). Our Engineers report up through to VP Engineering. Customer Support report up to the head of CS. Teams are autonomous, but we encourage personal "autonomy" as much as possible. Engineers have to decide whether they work on X or Y. One phrase we live by which our founder Kristo said is, "if you fail to inspire an Engineer, you'll fail to inspire your customer." As a result, Engineers (and others) can and do move on to other teams if they’re not having an impact.

Finally, functional teams like Engineering, Analysts, Finance, Legal, People/HR all create plans as well. This is in addition to the plans for the product teams they're embedded in. For example, there are Engineering problems that cut across most teams. Engineers need to carve out time from their product teams to work on those.

So, for my startup friend with 15 people: bureaucracy as you grow is not inevitable. Wise is at least one proof point that an organization can exist and function well past the point that you all fit in one room.

The way we operate is fundamental to our success until now and surely well into the future. It enables us to stay close to customers, get the details right in each country, and move extremely fast. Not that it’s perfect: we have different challenges than other organizations of a similar maturity.

In the end, our focus on autonomy/responsibility, and customer impact is that employees put their hearts into their work. Ambitious people thrive because they can set their own objectives and see their impact everyday. My colleagues agree: read what they have to say on glassdoor. Imagine the energy when 1000 people are working together with all their passion. That’s Wise.

--

But if this kind of a culture interests you, consider joining us at Salv. We’ve taken the best from Wise and made it even better. We’re starting to grow really fast now, so it’s an exciting point to hop on board.

Go back to the main page.

Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash

I wrote this in 2018 when I was at Wise (formerly TransferWise), but never hit publish. It offers some evidence that a slow, bureaucratic hierarchy isn’t inevitable end as you scale up.

--

With 50+ autonomous teams and 1,000 employees, we’ve learned how to scale autonomous teams and avoid creeping bureaucracy.

I recently spoke to a founder of a small startup. They had 15 employees and were starting to defined clear roles and teams. He knew that the organization structure decisions he was making now would influence how the company would operate long into the future.

He understood that when companies are small — 15 people small — everyone has tons of autonomy. With that autonomy comes responsibility. Every employee can and must do whatever they think is necessary to help the company to succeed. His core concern was how to keep that going far into the future. How to keep everyone laser focused on the company’s mission and on it’s customers. How to keep moving fast, regardless of the challenges.

He was intrigued by how Wise operated and reached out to learn more. He’d heard we operate differently than most companies. And we do.

He had the six questions you see below on his mind. I hope my answers give a good overview of how we operate autonomously at scale. It should also provide some insight into how our structure enables us to move fast in pursuit of our mission.

We have around 50 autonomous product teams - teams who own a portion of our product. The teams themselves are centred around customer problems and are similar to other tech companies: conversion, help experience, payment methods, and many others. They’re different from many other companies because they’re autonomous. They self-assemble, set their own vision and KPIs, and execute mostly on their own. As a team, they have the freedom to do most anything they see will have an impact, but the responsibility to own whatever they sign up to. My colleague Harsh described in fascinating detail the principles that our Engineers live by.

Besides our globally-focused product teams, we have 8 regional tribes who focus on customers in different parts of the world. For instance, there's a LatAm tribe that supports every aspect for customers in Latin America. Tribes are composed of Bankers (working with regulators and partner banks), Product Managers, Engineers, Marketers/PR, Analysts, as well as a bunch of people to support with daily operations: Customer Support, Verification/KYC, Fraud/AML and Operations.

The main objective when we’re thinking about how we operate is how to move fast. Fast to launch new markets with a genuinely useful product. Fast to iterate on our existing product. Fast to adapt our organization as we grow. Ultimately, fast to deliver real benefit to more and more customers. And fast in spite of the fact that we’re now 1000 people spread around the world.

First, we're incredibly close to customers. If you look at our apps or our website, you might think our product is as simple as money transfer from A to B. We hope you think that. But under the hood there’s enormous complexity. Regulations, banking partners, processes, as well as data and verification requirements are different in every single country. Our small autonomous and highly responsible teams can build the regulatory and banking relationships needed to build a quality product that’s unmatched.

Second, there's almost no politics. This stems from the fact that employees have both the freedom and responsibility to figure out for themselves what to focus on. If someone disagrees with you or your team, they just tell you. Further, if the topic is important enough to them, they’ll come help you fix it. With 50+ teams and 1000 people running full tilt, this doesn’t always work. But magically, it usually does.

Third, we naturally adapt to change well. We've been put to the test numerous times over the last four years that I’ve been there. Each time we’ve been tested, the result has been no layoffs, no reorgs, and we haven’t gone broke. Not that it was easy, but when there are almost no politics you can be more pragmatic and just get crazy hard things done without much fuss.

Most importantly, it's thrilling to work here. As an employee this is the biggest benefit of all. I can join or create a team to work work on whatever I think will help Wise the most. Over the past 3 years that’s ranged from Marketing, Finance, Business Intelligence, Databases, and most recently Planning and People/HR topics. Not only does nobody get in my way, they support me. It seems logical, but I’ve never seen it happen in another organization to the degree it does in Wise.

It’s a lot more responsibility on your shoulders. Personal and team autonomy sounds great, but sometimes it's extremely hard. Employees need to make a lot more decisions on their own without a manager telling them what the strategy is. Which country should we go to next? Which team should I join? What should I work on this week? Should I give this customer a discount? We don’t have enough liquidity - which customer's payments should we delay and why? These are all incredibly hard questions that employees at every level are expected to figure out.

It’s hard to hire. Ambitious people thrive because they can see the direct impact their work is having on our customers. They get addicted to the high of delivering so much (because nothing is in their way). These kinds of people are hard to find and select for so a lot of our attention goes to hiring and onboarding new joiners.

Traditional solutions to organizational problems usually won’t work in Wise. For instance the default solution for cross-company planning when they get big entails inviting only “senior” employees to plan at a highly abstracted level. But we don’t do that as it would reduce team accountability and slow down execution at Wise.

Instead we use a “startup of startups” concept, where each product team is like a small startup within Wise. Each team chooses 3-5 dedicated coaches (like a startup’s board of advisors) to go deep into their plans each quarter. Our planning processes substitute - and in many ways transcend - the control/feedback mechanisms to a more typical hierarchical structure. This process is in no way perfect, but it’s improving every quarter.

Finally, on challenges, it’s hard to aggregate our strategy up. Each of our 50 teams prepare or update detailed plans (10-20 written pages) each quarter. But you need to be superhuman to even skim all of the plans and retros each quarter, much less give meaningful feedback. So almost nobody has a complete overview of Wise. That sounds problematic, but in practice it isn’t. Nobody in any business has a complete overview. In more hierarchical organizations you have to abstract away (all of) the important details. So the main challenge with this is that it feels scary, especially for new joiners.

I.e. customer support and fixing bugs across the app when they're not part of a KPI

Every team and tribe define their mission and a scope. On top of that, every team choose KPIs and targets to guide them on their journey. In practice this is hard. Some teams are great at this. Some - like brand new teams - have a steep learning curve.

None of our teams have a crazy backlog of bugs. Our reviews on Android, iOS, and TrustPilot speak to that. Product bugs are covered in the scope for the team, but not usually as explicit targets.

We’ve done this with extremely fast feedback loops. As fast as a glance across the desk. PM's and Engineers interact daily with Customer Support and Operations teamm-members. In fact, they often sit at the same table. As a result, product teams are absolutely hammered if they don't fix important bugs right away. Not only does this mean a higher quality product, it also means our Customer Support team members can clearly see the product getting better and aren’t dealing with the same problem over and over again. For PM's, Customer Support and other operational teams are an invaluable partner to gather customer insight. PM's lead planning and prioritisation (that’s their job after all) but they have a holistic understanding on which to balance product quality and development speed.

I.e. VP of engineering or Head of HR.

We do have most of the VP roles you’d expect. But it's turned out to be crazy hard to find senior level hires who both know the discipline and can thrive in our culture. The VP roles we’ve filled in the last 2 years have all taken 1+ year intensive searches. All other VPs have grown up in Wise.

Our Leadership team needs to work differently than executives in other organizations. They need to do less. This is harder than you’d think.

Our autonomous teams are responsible for making many more decisions than in other similar sized organizations. But there are a fixed number of decisions to make to run an organization. So a consequence of increased autonomy is that our leadership team must make fewer decisions. As such, they almost never take the final decisions, set targets or budgets, or decide strategies.

So what do they do all day? They lead, in the best sense of the word. As they don’t generally take final decisions, they help their teams to make the right decisions. They ask a lot of provocative questions. Our Leadership team supports the teams to set ambitious visions, clear KPIs, and to deliver what they promise. Mature and successful teams need help finding the next challenge. New teams need help figuring out their vision and their capability.

Our Leadership team also works with our board and rounds out their day fighting the fires that inevitably come up in a fast growing company. And interviewing and hiring: lots of that.

Is it always a PM or someone else?

Generally yes, Product Managers lead our 50+ product teams. We maintain a quarterly planning cadence and most teams aim to have a 12-18 month product vision they’re working towards. Each quarter, each product team updates their plans and KPI targets and shares this with the rest of the company.

Almost nobody formally reports to PM's though (only other PM's and some analysts). Our Engineers report up through to VP Engineering. Customer Support report up to the head of CS. Teams are autonomous, but we encourage personal "autonomy" as much as possible. Engineers have to decide whether they work on X or Y. One phrase we live by which our founder Kristo said is, "if you fail to inspire an Engineer, you'll fail to inspire your customer." As a result, Engineers (and others) can and do move on to other teams if they’re not having an impact.

Finally, functional teams like Engineering, Analysts, Finance, Legal, People/HR all create plans as well. This is in addition to the plans for the product teams they're embedded in. For example, there are Engineering problems that cut across most teams. Engineers need to carve out time from their product teams to work on those.

So, for my startup friend with 15 people: bureaucracy as you grow is not inevitable. Wise is at least one proof point that an organization can exist and function well past the point that you all fit in one room.

The way we operate is fundamental to our success until now and surely well into the future. It enables us to stay close to customers, get the details right in each country, and move extremely fast. Not that it’s perfect: we have different challenges than other organizations of a similar maturity.

In the end, our focus on autonomy/responsibility, and customer impact is that employees put their hearts into their work. Ambitious people thrive because they can set their own objectives and see their impact everyday. My colleagues agree: read what they have to say on glassdoor. Imagine the energy when 1000 people are working together with all their passion. That’s Wise.

--

But if this kind of a culture interests you, consider joining us at Salv. We’ve taken the best from Wise and made it even better. We’re starting to grow really fast now, so it’s an exciting point to hop on board.

Go back to the main page.

Photo by Marc Sendra Martorell on Unsplash