- Plaid’s engineering staff has grown from less than 20 in 2017 to more than 300 today.
- The growth led Plaid to reorganize its engineering division into separate, cross-functional teams.
- Plaid’s CTO said the move helped the startup reach its goals four months ahead of time.
When Jean-Denis Greze joined Plaid in 2017, the startup had roughly 45 employees and less than 20 engineers.
Plaid’s business — which was founded in 2013 and runs the pipes carrying consumers’ financial data from banks to other companies — had already enjoyed some success. The startup had raised roughly $70 million from a roster of backers that included Goldman Sachs, Citi, and American Express.
But there was still plenty of growing to do as the fintech entered “scaling mode,” Greze, Plaid’s CTO, told Insider.
“From 30 to 40 to start until about 150 engineers at Plaid, it was literally all hands on deck to just get the thing working,” he said
Now valued at more than $13 billion and having inked partnerships with the biggest names in finance, including JPMorgan Chase, Plaid plays a key role in the continued digitization of consumer finance.
Roughly a third of all the startup’s employees, which now numbers around 1,000, sit under Greze. But the growth hasn’t always been easy, especially given the surge Plaid saw amid a pandemic that drove financial activity online.
“What happens when you scale is that your team feels less and less like a small company that’s like shoulder to shoulder, excited to tackle a common problem,” Greze said.
It’s the principal reason why Greze and a team of Plaid’s senior engineers and managers pursued a reorganization of the fintech’s engineering organization over the past 12 months.
Gone are horizontal layers of engineers working across three distinct areas: bank integration, data storage and security, and APIs used by fintechs and
neobanks
.
In their place are individual business units — or what Greze termed “smaller companies” — operating within Plaid. They each carry responsibility over key components of the startup’s tech, delivering to internal and external customers alike.
The new team structure has already resulted in quicker customer uptake in new products Plaid is now testing and launching, according to Greze.
“We want each of these units to move very fast, have very high velocity and feel like they have a lot of autonomy in terms of the problems that they’re solving and why those are important for the business,” Greze said.
From Amazon and Netflix to Plaid
Plaid has 11 of these cross-functional teams: seven that are customer focused and four platform groups that work on the startup’s common tech infrastructure.
They range in size from a dozen employees to 100. Each business unit rolls up to different executives depending on the product and market involved. Greze, for example, oversees the platform and engineering-heavy teams.
Plaid isn’t the first company to break its engineering division into individual teams. Some of the biggest names in tech, particularly Amazon and
Netflix
, have embraced the practice, as well as some of the
largest banks
in the country like Wells Fargo.
Plaid hired from Big Tech companies like Amazon and Google as it grew, which meant that new employees were well-versed in how larger firms are organized. But in Greze’s view, Plaid’s decision to divide its engineering team came “earlier than a lot of other companies would.”
The startup’s decision to give separate engineering teams more autonomy hasn’t been without challenges. A fundamental question early on in the reorganization revolved around how much independence each group should actually have.
“We decided that our culture really prizes autonomy and ownership,” Greze said. “That has issues too, because coordination becomes more difficult when they’re more independent,” he added.
But having smaller, cross-functional tech teams does mean Plaid has been better able to focus on new projects at the same time, each with different time-frames or product standards, Greze said.
A lending product with fewer customers at the outset, for example, can be spun up quickly. But Plaid’s data storage tech is more “mature” and requires a heavier hand in terms of security and privacy.
“You can only do that if you really embrace the fact that you’re gonna have multiple cultures within one org,” said Greze. “These people are startup people. They should be able to make decisions like a startup.”
Facing customers
Plaid’s engineering reorganization has brought another benefit: a flatter corporate hierarchy where tech workers sit closer to business decisions.
“One of my favorite things that can happen at Plaid is when one of my engineers tells me, ‘I don’t think we should work on this because it’s not the most important for the business,'” Greze said.
As one example, Plaid is currently beta-testing a tool through which individuals can verify their income and employment data with other companies.
In December, Plaid’s own customers that had signed up for the beta test came back to the fintech with suggestions for the product. Updates for Plaid Income were planned for January, after the company returned from a holiday break. But engineers sitting in on the conversations with customers pressed for more changes sooner, and were able to think more creatively about product updates with the direct input.
“We made so much progress between December and mid-January that a bunch of the customers decided to up the percentage of traffic that they were sending to the product really quickly,” Greze said. “We’ve beat our Q1 and our Q2 goals in two months. We’re four months ahead of the roadmap because of it.”
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