Q&A With Monika Ocieczek

Monika Ocieczek at UXDX Community: Nordics. Video: https://youtu.be/mIpRnpjzyHI

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Primer's scale and Fast

[00:00:00] Host: Welcome, Monika, and hopefully everybody out there has gotten to see her talk about implementing universal checkout at Primer. Monika, I might just jump into the questions and some of the thoughts that came up for me about your talk. But do feel free, if you're out there, to use the chat box on the side and throw in your questions as well if you have anything. First, I just want to dig into this: can you give a little bit of context about Primer? What's the scale, and what are we talking about in terms of the teams and how they work together?

[00:00:39] Monika: Primer is an infrastructure or automation platform for payments and commerce, really. We're slightly more than two years old. When I joined in May 2020 there were eight people on the team, and today we're, I think, 120 or 130 people in I don't know how many countries. We're fully remote, so I've lost track of how many countries we have.

[00:01:11] Host: Excellent. And is that primarily tech-focused people, or is there also a lot on the sales and marketing side?

[00:01:22] Monika: We obviously have a massive engineering team, but we also have a big design team and sales team, in Southeast Asia, the US and Europe, and of course marketing.

[00:01:39] Host: Brilliant. I'm going to jump to a bit of the elephant in the room now, because we're talking about universal checkout, and the news has been quite big about a high-profile company called Fast that went out of business probably two or three weeks ago now. It sounds like Primer and Fast are in the same product space, would that be fair? And why is Primer going to succeed where Fast didn't?

[00:02:10] Monika: Primer also has a checkout, obviously, and we've spoken about the checkout, but Primer is a lot more than just a checkout. The checkout is part of our payment service, so in Primer you have the automation engine and the payment service, and the checkout is a part of that. Obviously we have massive ambitions for our checkout, and a one-click checkout experience such as the one that Fast was promoting is one of them. It's very interesting what happened to Fast, and it obviously happened very, very fast, overnight. It went from this massive valuation, and investors were very keen on the company.

[00:02:55] I think what they did that was interesting was that they were targeting consumers. They were trying to build a consumer brand and positioning it as solving the consumer problem of the hassle of paying online. It seemed like they did a fairly good job. At least I was seeing Fast everywhere as a consumer. Well, maybe I was researching payments, so maybe that's not fair.

[00:03:24] Host: But I was seeing it everywhere as well.

[00:03:30] Monika: Yeah, exactly. But I don't think that they had many customers. If I had to guess, I would guess that it was because Fast got an investment from Stripe and they were locked in to only process payments with Stripe. That is a problem for merchants. Merchants don't want a checkout that only works with Stripe, so I think this was holding back their expansion.

A founder's customer request

[00:03:58] Host: Okay, that's great. We'll move on from the competitor space. One thing I found really interesting about your talk was that you mentioned the founder reaching out to you. Jasper's talk was all about how you balance the priorities of everybody. How did you manage it when the founder came to you with an idea? Do you run with it, or do you try to make sure that it's more than just the founder telling you what to do?

[00:04:31] Monika: Oh, it wasn't the case. The founder was asking me to jump on a call with a customer, and this was one of our first customers. This was my first week, actually the week before my first week. Before I even started at Primer I was already onboarding and starting to talk with the team, but I wasn't even officially on the team. We had, I think, probably two or three bigger clients that we were really interested in working with as we were building out the MVP of the product, and one of them was asking for a checkout.

[00:05:09] So it was 100% driven by a customer request. At that point, when you're three months old and you actually have a big customer who's asking for something, you just have to jump on it and figure it out. It turned out to be a really good move. The checkout is obviously a key success driver and a really important product for Primer.

Scaling design through fast growth

[00:05:36] Host: Excellent. You mentioned you were starting before you even started, but that growth trajectory that you've seen, how has that impacted design at Primer? If you're going from that small, eight-person, very manageable single team to this explosive growth, how have you managed that scaling of design?

[00:06:02] Monika: I think it's a really good idea to involve design from the very beginning. One of the reasons I decided to join Primer in the first place was that the founders were actually speaking to me. They reached out to me and said design and product are really, really important to us. It's still very, very early, and we want design and product to be involved from this early stage. I think if you do that, you're already in a very good position to be a design-driven company. That doesn't mean that you're not a tech company or you're not customer-focused. It's one of the areas that you want represented.

[00:06:50] I think a lot of companies bring on design and UX way too late in the growth journey, and treat design as making things pretty at the last stage, when everything else has been defined and decided. When you have that design thinking and you value design, and design is at the heart from the very beginning, then it never becomes a problem. It's just part of your process, and you're always involved in decisions. So I don't feel like we've struggled or had to think about it actively.

[00:07:35] I've been lucky to have a lot to say at Primer, and I feel like I've had a massive impact because I was there so early and because design and user experience are very valued at Primer. In the very beginning I was doing everything myself, then over time I could hire two designers, and now I have many designers in my team.

[00:08:03] One thing that you need to be ready for when you're working with a company with this trajectory is adaptability. You have to thrive in an atmosphere of constant change. And it's fine, some people don't do that. But I get very easily bored, so I think it's awesome that my role has changed tremendously from my first week, or the week before I officially started, to leading product design and having a team of, I think, 11 people right now.

[00:08:43] What I've had to do is just learn, grow, improve, listen to feedback and adapt. We're constantly changing structure and processes and teams to adapt to the strategy, the market and the product areas that we want to build out. If you also have that adaptability and you're comfortable with it, it doesn't become a problem where you constantly have to think about how to reorganize or restructure the organization.