Building an Organization Structure that works for you

So I'm glad the lights are a little bit brighter, but it is quite bright. So it's super exciting to be here and talk in person, first time in three years for me so always a little bit nervous. But I'm really looking forward to talking to you about building an organizational structure that works for you, that delivers great experiences to your customers and also builds value to the company. I joined SumUp in late 2019. We are… like Kevin said, we are a payments provider, we sell card readers, 2 million of them so far, we are global in that we are in 36 countries, we have our main offices in Berlin, in Sofia, in Sao Paulo, and also in Denver.

We have grown to 3000 employees in the last couple of years and including 100 designers. So very, very big footprint, very big mission, a little bit more background, so you can understand the story of what I was doing or what I've been able to do at SumUp. So I've started as a company in 2012, it grew quite quickly, but also had some setbacks at different economic times that have the company downsized and come back up. It has made an acquisition of pay 11, which gave us a pretty significant footprint in Sao Paulo and Brazil. It had continued to grow to about 1000 employees in 2018 and by the time I joined at the end of the year, it had started the journey of Tribalization roughly when it hit about 500, 600 people realized that this kind of semi chaotic, delightful startup mindset doesn't really quite scale. Not only did it focus on Tribalization but also an agile transformation, not only in engineering, but in terms of how it looks at product development, and corporate strategy. And just before I joined, it had started focusing on markets and taking the same Tribalization philosophy, and creating market centric teams for Europe. And we have had, of course, our big marketing organization in Brazil.

When I joined, I was given the mission to tribalize design, even though I had quite a few reservations about it. But I was pretty much told at the beginning of my interviews that any ideas that I might have to not do that were sort of not going to fly. So really the story I'm going to tell you is what did I actually do to make this happen a way that worked? We are going through another transformation as we speak. And I will talk a little bit about what that's beginning to look like. So really, I want to keep coming back to what is our role as design leaders in organizations that are really quite dynamic and adjusting. And so how do we embrace the forces that drive organizational decisions, of course, with the goal of at the end of the day, delivering experiences that are cohesive that really work for our merchants.

So a couple of the drivers that I will talk to you about that were important in the transition at SumUp were, of course, the company culture and John talked at length about it this morning. But also the product tech and design maturity and product development maturity, which was covered in some of the conversations yesterday. I think we are in… there is always a transformation when you go from startup to growth, I think some of the learnings that I had might look very different if you're in a very mature organization, big Saas company or a company that has a lot of different products. But hopefully some of the learnings that I can share with you, you can figure out how to translate to that setting. And of course, the business climate that's changing is forcing us to make quite a few decisions today that are different from what we were thinking about at the beginning of the year.

Why do I talk about cohesive experiences? Well, we have Conway's law that says, “Organizations produce experiences or designs if you will that reflect the organization,” while this example is quite old school and referenced Saas companies, I actually would say today with Tribalization. With this kind of segmentation into autonomous teams that are focused on very specific parts of the journey, we're replicating the same problem only we use up in language today. So I will talk about have three sections, I'll talk about the first two points around organization maturity, maturity of philosophy, then how, as we grew, we were able to move from being a product focused company to being much more customer centric. And then I have what I call the cherry in the story, a particular way in which we think about brands at SumUp that became really quite an important driver of tying this narrative together and giving us a foundation that can really scale for us.

So… culture. Again, John talked at length and with lots of really valuable information. It is really important for how you understand what can be done in organization. One of the things… one of the books I read quite early in joining SumUp that it turned out, is one of our CEO’s favorite book, Brave New Work. Just out of curiosity, how many people have heard about it or read it? Cool… couple of people. Highly recommend it. It really talks about the future of organizations very much away from classic hierarchical structures with, you know, command control kind of situations, to much more flat organizations that embrace and empower autonomous teams. What's interesting about it is a little bit of how you do it.

So when I joined SumUp, we were always talking about autonomy above all else. There's quite a few of us who are also screaming up and standing, and saying, “Wait a minute, it’s not autonomous anarchy.” And my conversation with the CEO was very much around a metaphor that's in this book that we didn't really have. So the story in the book talks about the greater efficiency of roundabouts over stop signs. You know, the stop signs are really good, because the rules are really straightforward. But if you… I don't know how many of you have tried to get into a roundabout in Europe that can seem like the most chaotic, frightening moment in time. It turns out there are some really wonderful rules that govern driving in roundabouts if you know what they are that really allow roundabouts to work way more efficiently because it adapts to the traffic flow, it adapts to how many cars are in the system where stop signs don't adapt at all, they're just really quite rigid.

Now, with IoT that might change over time but the fundamental is, one gives you really clear rules are really easy to execute. But it doesn't give you the flexibility to scale to the changing situation. So I would say to Danielle , it’s like okay, look, we need these rules, we need these guard rails so that teams that are… we really want to encourage to be autonomous, have some level of framing that gives them parameters in which to make decisions. So one of my missions was really to figure out how do we articulate those? What are those lower guardrails? Certainly from an experience perspective and from a technology perspective, so we would not be in the sense of anarchy, where teams would go off and pick any technology they want that we then use later, would have to figure out how to reintegrate or rebuilt. But they will have the right boundaries to make their independent decisions and…

This was roughly the… what the organization look like, we had Tribalization, which again meant that we had teams really focused on some of our domains, some of our products, some of our parts of the journey. We had our market focused marketing organizations. And then we had a global design team that was about 35 people. We were roughly 1700 people total in the organization. And if you look at the number of tribes, and it was a couple more than this, it was clearly clear to me that we weren't even enough designers to really handle the work that was required. And so what had been happening up to this point is that the designers were working much more on a project basis as opposed to product. I think we talked about that a little bit yesterday in terms of the drawbacks of that. So I embraced the fact that I had to travel as the organization, despite my reservations, but I was going to do it my way.

Then we talk about the maturity… Design maturity. This is a model from Design Management Institute but there's a much more elaborate one from the McKinsey report that was published a couple years ago. I find this useful, because it's quite simple, but just always taking a look at where is the understanding of the organization around design. Most of the companies that I've worked in and joined in the last 10, 12 years are always roughly between 2 and 3, at least by the time they decide to bring me in to help them grow the organization. I would say we are now at between 3 and 4, and some parts of the organization, even 4. And I attribute that a bit to the philosophy that I established quite early in looking at how do I do this Tribalization that addresses some of the issues that I saw.

And… I really focused on setting up design as a peer to product and engineering. Again, some of the conversations yesterday we're already covering this a little bit. I really see challenges whenever design reports into either product or tech that tends to be the relationship that's a bit stronger, and then the other relationship tends to be a bit more neglected. So I really wanted to establish this triad that I firmly believe in where magic can happen, and real innovation can happen, which is when you have product design engineering, as peers collaborating, working together, trusting each other and really making amazing decisions.

So part of my journey, as we're looking to hire more designers was to work with all the different tribe leaders around this fundamental framing of how I wanted to set up design in their unique organizations. And really set it up almost like a mini organization inside of the tribes, where there was strong design leadership, and also strong design mentorship, and coaching in many cultures and communities could be built around the product development cycles that this particular tribes were using. So we proceeded, and it took about I would say, 2 years, we grew quite a bit, I would say, we probably hired about 35/40 more people in that timeframe. I was deeply involved in most of those hires, especially for the design leaders, and I'll talk about that in a minute. Because to me, it was really important to set up a slightly different criteria for the kinds of designers who were able to grow and scale with us going forward.

So as I hired a design leader, I would put them in the tribe and move the designers that were working on the different products into the tribe, and very slowly, tribalize the design organization. The final push was when a new tribe payment to existence called the platform tribe whose mission was to really look horizontally across the organization and address issues, projects, teams, and topics that really wasn’t addressed by the individual tribes. And I became a co-lead of that tribe, along with a partner of mine who was focusing more on product, but also he has a technical background, and head of technology that came in and really, the three of us modeled a bit the leadership of a very diverse tribe, because not only did we have DesignOps, but we had data strategy, we had CRM infrastructure, and we had Devops . So it was a bit of a challenging journey for 2 years. But the three of us really felt that all of us in this tribe had a similar mission. how do we really work with all the different tribes that wanted to go do their own thing, but we really wanted to build these parameters, these guardrails, this rule for the roundabout together, so it would allow the organization to scale.

So I'm pretty much a firm believer that any organizational structure can work. You know, I've worked in every kind of matrix. And really what I've learned, and what I've observed is that the success of any of the organization is the strength of the people. And the culture that supports collaboration and encourages it. So what I'm looking for, what I always try to bring to a conversation is how in whatever the organization is, where's the weakest link? Where do we need to really put our emphasis? And at SumUp with a Tribalization into these different journey moments or different, very different parts of the product organization, of products offering, the cohesiveness of the experience was really the weakest point.

So I really focused design on addressing that collaboration and driving it through building a very cohesive design community that in some ways, I really was asking to make a commitment to that single journey. And like I mentioned, I was involved in most of the hiring of the first or the next 30 people when I had joined. And I would always be like the final interview for with people it doesn't matter if it was a really senior leader, or if it was a more mid-level designer, I always shared with them the story of what we're here to do, which is to build this cohesiveness across the organization. I've always said they had to commit to the design system. They just had to leave their ego and their freestyle at the door. And also really contribute to the community to really engage in partake it so we could be forming a structured organization that can rely on each other when we would share so we could actually build that efficiency and build that cohesiveness across the journey.

We wrote the commitment… the focus on our commitment to community action, our career ladder, again, to really reinforce how important it was that it wasn't only about your own project or your own product, it was really about what contribution are you making to the community and how are you contributing to them? The way I like to think about my approach, you know, because there's many times where I said, I really didn't want to do it this way. I think about always as blending, it took a business course for several years. And we always talked about Tai Chi and learn some **Tai Chi **moves and this idea of not resisting but moving, you know, with it, moving with the flow, moving with the energy and then turning it into something else. I think it's something that I think about often, and I try to use really consciously, especially when I feel like I would really like to resist the move like I felt about Tribalization.

So it's something I encourage you all to think about as you reach to see and learn and try to work inside of parts of organizations that you may or may not agree with. But where's the opening, to turn it into something that actually makes sense. So we did tribalize when we were ready. We are now over 100 designers and I think by far in the company we’re one of the strongest communities. And we have also set up some key practices like design operations and building a design system to help facilitate this kind of shared cross organizational collaboration.

As a small anecdote, you know, I never have resisted and never said no to Tribalization and all the meetings that a colleague who was a bit more resistant, and managed a lot more issues. It was last August at an offside from the extended cord , Daniel surprised me by acknowledging that he'd been watching me. And he said that he noticed that I was doing Tribalization, not the way he actually wanted me to do it, which was immediate, and in a moment. But he was very observant, and was really aware that I was doing it my way. A tribute to him, he thanked me for showing that transformations could be done in different ways and gave me quite a bit of credit for it. So I was pleasantly surprised because I didn't know that he was observing what I was doing, because he never commented on it. So that was on organization maturity and philosophy. I want to move a little bit more on how to… what were the drivers for become moving from being product centric to being customer centric.

I know there was already some conversations yesterday about agile. Agile is super fascinating. For me, it's, I think it's a pretty useful set of tools and practices. But I've seen it really go sideways in a lot of companies. And I think Rory was talking about it yesterday, a little bit of like, almost like agile wrapped in a waterfall process. That's something I've observed quite a bit. But, you know, there are some great things about it. The notion of agile and agile teams, fundamentally speaks to the core values of SumUp, you know, this notion of self-organizing interdisciplinary teams is really a great concept. And it speaks to engineers, designers and product peers, you know, to being peers together, when it actually works. I could talk at length about product designers, which I consider new unicorns, but then we’d be talking for another 30 minutes.

So I'm leaving that for a side conversation if you're interested about that, because what I think what I want to focus on here is much more what I've observed in teams, not only at SumUp, but also a couple of the companies I've worked in before is that teams solve problems within this space or the domain that they're responsible for. And they don't have to practice to step back and say, okay, fixing a problem or registration or drop off in our onboarding may not be the problem, where they detected, where they see the numbers, it might actually be in the marketing side where we don't tell our people enough about what is going to happen. And so, again, this is not something that makes agile bad. It's just something you need to know what is the problem and how does it manifest in your organization.

So coming to the second part, how then do you… how do we build a structure or a narrative that allows teams to come together despite autonomy to create these cohesive experiences? Going back to SumUp, Tribalization worked actually quite well, we were a really quite straightforward company when I joined. We sold card readers. We had about 3 or 4 different models. Only one model did you really need to use the app for because you had to input the amount that you wanted to charge and then with an AR card reader, that's where you could then take the payments. However, we had acquired a few companies and they were really on this mission to become a multi-product company so we wanted to really start to add a lot more services into this one app that was really completely built and focused around just taking payments entering a credit card value. On top of that, we're also building our own hardware for the first time, because we knew we had reached some limitations with doing third party hardware automation. And so we really wanted to invest in building our own hardware so we could really start to create a much better experience.

When I joined, and I looked at this… And I looked at all the products we wanted to incorporate as I was looking at the app, and I was looking at our web dashboard, and I said, “Okay, our architecture has reached what I call the end of life.” It's not going to scale to really create a cohesive, meaningful experience.” But it wasn't clear to me either exactly how does one re-architect something when we are really focused on velocity and growth and getting things out of the market quickly. And as a matter of fact, we looked for brand emphasis on breaking things than necessarily making things cohesive. So it was a little bit philosophically at odds with how we were talking about it.

So I think this is within the first six weeks of joining, I had an opportunity to speak to one of the tribes, introduce myself, and the tribe that had a lot of the acquisitions and was really going to be part of the core of our multi-product offering. And I had a two designers work with me for literally two days and to say, “Okay, let's provoke the organization a little bit,” what if, you know, we could really visualize money because money is becoming so ephemeral, and for some of the merchants in our region, we know that kind of ephemeral kind of quality is actually hard for them to grasp and understand so how could we make money or the value of what they possess a little bit more tangible? How can we create business insights for them that would allow them to actually scale and grow? Because ultimately that was our mission, our purpose. And how can we really start to think about a much more integrated experience where these products that didn't share any back-ends didn't really share any databases barely even shared the same customer base, that they would start to come together and really start to think differently about the product. And I would say, the success of this presentation was that the team really started to come together and plan for 2020, how to start to connect some of the back ends so we could, at some point, get to this kind of cohesive front end.

Part of my story, which I'd still use until today was we, even though the invoicing team was talking about the merchants, they wanted to target with the invoicing first product. And the online shop people wanted to target different merchants with their online shop, product, and of course, the card reader business knew who they were targeting. I really want to emphasize continuously that at the end of the day, we're talking to the same merchant, and we can't keep treating the merchandise if they don't have one experience with us. So I always reinforced from that moment on, we have to think about one merchant one experience. That is not only how we market our products, but then how do we deliver them and how to we service them through customer care.

In 2022, when COVID hit and affected us like a lot of companies, our business really suffered quite a bit and we scrambled on two fronts. One is to say we have all these products, we just haven't really published them and integrated them. How do we get them on the marketing pages? So I ended up driving a marketing page evolution where I looked at my marketing friend. At one point, my colleague said, “Why am I doing this? Isn't this your job, such a great job, just keep on going?” And then at the same time, we're also really starting to look at how do we make these products available, because now they were going into real time we're really actually launching them.

So 2020, we'll focus on marketing and getting some of these out and actually developing some products in 3 months and pushing them live again to support merchants in the ability to make… do business online. But we also said, okay, we are now as a company really committing to the story that I was saying, telling even a year earlier about this really integrated experience. And we call it a super app. So in 2020, we did a lot of discussions. Is it all one app? Is it separate apps? And really, we made the decision that no, it's going to be one integrated experience. We called it the Super App. So last year was our year of launching the Super App. Now that's a little bit of a misnomer, because quite frankly all we did… all of our products were hidden under this more button but of course nobody could find this magical green dot that showed up supposedly there was something new and voila, now it's on something called the home screen.

It's a lot more vision and what we want this to become in order to become really meaningful and valuable. But this is what we actually ended up getting out the door. And what I said to my design organization, “You can't hide anymore.” Because all the things that don't work, that don't look the same, that behave differently now that when you're on one screen, and you start clicking around all the different products, it's so apparent and so obvious. So we've been really working on unifying a lot of the different bits and pieces in the organization to try to get a little bit more similarity and little bit more cohesiveness. And it's… we're on the journey, we're not where I want us to be, I hope to be by the end of this year. But it is by far better than where it was when I first joined. One of the key drivers for us, of course, was the underlying design system, which we started building at the beginning of 2020 because there was no mobile design, even figma file. Yet we had mobile… we had people developing with bits and components that have been developed over the last previous 4 years, probably by 5 different designers. And as my colleague Lucas always used to say, “You can tell which designer was working on by which conversion of blue they were using. So we really focused on unifying it.

Now I’ll talk about it in a minute as well. For us, one of the most important pieces was accessibility. Because our merchants are out, they’re not always in stores, they’re not always in nice environments with perfect lighting. In Brazil, there are frequently very small merchants out, in and open. Some of them can read, some of them can't, some of them have bad phones, have really simple devices so accessibility has been a really core driver, and all the adjustments we made on the color palette and simplification of the elements.

Now we're in another transformation. And this is our business climate part. We're in a more market downturn. And so one of the things that started to happen in the last year, including a couple of colleagues joining who really wanted to start to look at, wait a minute, what are we really doing with our customer care? You know, is this costing us a lot of money? What's happening in the products? Let’s actually fix the products before we get to customer care. And in a marketing organization, we’re starting to really talk about customer journeys so where even a year ago I would have said journey mapping, we're starting very slowly, every time we try to do journey mapping, the company is so complex we just didn't get very far. So now's the time when we really want to start to look at journeys, and we're starting to map them and looking at what are the pain points. On one hand actually driving product improvements, on the other hand, now also really starting to say how do we bring a journey narrative into how we think about our product development and even our design practices? And the goal is also Business goal, at the end, we really want to understand how we can know where we're investing our marketing spend, and what business value we're driving? So we get also a lot more strategic about how we're going as a company as we're moving away from a pure growth at all cost to a much more thoughtful efficiency organization, as well as looking at you know, what is the investment that we need to be making strategically so we can grow.

I have an anecdote, I would love to share a little bit more in depth. But let me just say when I joined, there was a bit of a misconception that research was not supported in the company, even though we have a really strong mission around being customer and merchant focused. It turned out after multiple conversations, specifically, also with Daniel CEO, we came to realize that he actually is a really big believer in research, but what he doesn't like is his academic research. He has his biggest fear was that people would do a lot of this work, and then it would sit somewhere right and collect dust] and wouldn't really drive impact.

So we have actually built a nice sized research organization, but we've really kept it in one size now for about a year, it's distributed. We have also a research operations team. But we’re really, really focusing on this connection between what are we learning? And how do we actually drive impact? And how do we show that so we don't do just research for research sake. Nor do we confused research practices and interviews with what I call empathy building, which everybody should be doing. So the session just now beforehand was actually really valuable to talk about that.

We started to look a lot more at customer focused storytelling, it’s not only coming into our product it’s also driving our marketing narrative. And to be expected that we are starting to say okay, maybe we need to actually be organized a little bit differently. We're starting to look at where do we need to come together to build these efficiencies? Where do we need to focus on growth and start to work much more closely across tribes? So as the emphasis on autonomy has really shifted towards how do we build a bit more cohesiveness? So our focus is a lot more on knowledge building, journey mapping, and business impact. I'm almost out of time because I want to leave some time for questions. So I'm going to speed up a little bit in this last section, which is my, what I call the cherry. Brand is usually associated with marketing, it's usually associated with logos that’s been bothering me for a long time, because I see brand as being much more holistic.

The other thing is interesting is Design, I've really tried to re own the word design at SumUp. But design isn't just one practice. It's around brand design, marketing design, UX UI experiences and also user research. And in that context, when I came to somehow discover the brand was actually not part of marketing, brand design was part of my organization. So I use that opportunity to really reframe design, reframe branding, into something that when you step back, it really gives us this light font and I had to use this German term, because it’s perfect, “Leitfaden” that really threads all these experiences together. So from looking at this diagram, again, you see the brand characteristics, those are the classic and then a lot of organizations brand characteristics are used for marketing, and then the rest of the organization ignore them. We really wanted to actually use the same characteristics to derive experience principles that could be used by the product organization and service principles that could be used by the service organization.

So these are the new ones that we are working with true, pioneering and inclusive, and they’re so new that I still need my cheatsheet. So true, we really mean, we want to evoke the sense of like, I know what is happening, when from our merchants, we really want to be reliable, which is something we have had problems with. We want to be supportive, we want to be really clear, we don't want to have any asterisks or anything like that. And how do we actually, in that context, help our merchants solve problems? How can we be true and be honest with them pioneering? How can we be smart? How can we be forward looking, make people feel like this is really easy, and also solve problems for them with that same kind of mindset? What can we do that's extra different, that allows us to solve our merchants’ problems and go that extra mile, and then inclusive? I mentioned it already earlier is super important to us because of the diversity of our merchants. So how can we really be everything… everything to everybody and make it accessible in that part. So accessibility is really the core of who we want to be to our organization and to our merchants.

So simplification of color palette, using semantic colors that are actually semantic colors not brand colors, staying the typeface as we had it but really creating a bit more typographic richness. And then redesigning the iconography so it's a lot bolder, a lot more understandable and doesn't have any extra sort of frills on it. And then coming back to storytelling, from the previous side, we really took us further we said, okay, this is who we want to be, then how do we start to realize that in what we call the lighthouse, you know, a bit of a storyline of what could it actually mean on our marketing side? We made a commitment because of our solar devices, black and white, to black and white? Which still is a little bit challenging for our designers. But I think it's something that can really work and could be distinguishing. And, of course, in the marketing side and some of our coms you might really want to use some other colors because it's appropriate for the form of communication. But how do we really start to tie this together into an experience and I want to share with you this story.

So we have ways to go but people are really excited about starting to make it happen. And this year is really about building on the marketing side, and building out our CRM campaigns and really starting to make it happen. So brand has been really fast in… the theme an unusual theme because brand was designed for us to really start to tie together into something that creates cohesive experience really end to end. And it is by now the definition that’s kind of framing from an experience level, bout what are the rules of the roundabout. And so it's something that really has helped us bring the designers together, and also really help the product organization around decision making and really coming together to make it real.

So just to summarize our organization maturity and philosophy, I really thought about blending has been in my DNA and how do I work with the organization to accomplish what I see as important. Storytelling is a foundation from really becoming moving from being product focused to being design… customer centric and then brand as an opportunity to create something unifying that I have not seen in other organizations that I've worked in. But maybe the last message, it's super important, building organization structure that works for you, can’t just work for you and your team, it really has to work for the organization. The company is coming back to John's point this morning about culture. And I think that's really quite important. So I want to thank you. I know I ran a bit over, but I hope this was valuable to you. So thank you. I think the intent was to have questions, but there's only probably time for one or two.

Audience
Yes. So we will do… who has a question in the audience? I have one if that's alright. So my biggest thoughts around you and all experiences that you have is what has been the most surprising, positive or not, like there's a lot of challenges that you might encounter when building organizational structures and challenges. What are the most surprising things that you thought would be difficult, but was actually easy?

Pamela
In general, or in Sumup?

Audience
In general, let's not put names.

Pamela
I think, in general, what is harder is… is really figuring out what can work in an organization in my life I’ve worked in a big telco, you know, which is completely the opposite of **SumUp **and then figuring out how do you actually build something that can scale in the organization and then distributed and have impact in the larger organization. Those are some of the things that I think can be harder. But I found what I really learned at Telefonica, and I’ve seen now at SumUp is this real difference in when you inherit a team that might have like John was talking about some behaviors, in cultural sort of challenges that are really human design itself, negative and defeating… self-defeating, versus when you're an organization where you can bring people in with a really clear mission.

And if you bring just enough of the right people, there is such an incredible empowerment in teams that trust each other, that believe in each other, that support each other. And I’ve always, this is now my second time where I can really say, I can see how when you have an organization that has all these characteristics, you can move on. And that's pretty amazing and incredible when it works, but you have to know the organization that allows you to actually build that kind instruction but not every organization is ready for it. So I think John's talk this morning was really quite powerful because it really talked about this. You have to know your company, you have to know what's possible within.

Audience
I think you and John have a lot in common with regards to your career but also giving your feedback and your kind of perspectives on… on everything with that. That's fantastic. Thank you very much. Pamela, that was fantastic. Well done.