Scaling our organisation up
A few days ago Moneyfarm announced an important and exciting milestone: a new Series D funding round of £44.1 million, led by M&G plc along with participation from existing investor Poste Italiane.
This is not the first time for Moneyfarm, in 2018 Allianz led a Series B funding round and in 2019 Poste Italiane a Series C funding round. Both of them enabled us to be what we are today. But to compete in the current market and to achieve our vision, that was not enough anymore. It’s time for us to work on a different scale. To play in a different league.
As you can imagine, everyone is really excited about it. I’m not an exception. I joined Moneyfarm in September 2021. There are multiple reasons that convinced me to accept this new professional opportunity. One of them is definitely the possibility to bring my expertise to such an ambitious and fast growing reality.
The objective
As a company we want to expand our proposition, to scale up our B2C and B2B2C offer and to create the best European Wealth Management platform.
But the business vision alone is not enough, we also need an organisation that is able to support it. So how to remain fast and nimble to face an increasing complexity while becoming bigger?
In terms of numbers: we are currently working with 5 cross-functional teams and we expect to reach a setup of 9 teams soon, remaining flexible to grow more based on new business opportunities. This means that we will hire a lot of new professionals with different skills, resulting in a +60% increase in people. It’s no peanuts!
Designing our new Tech & Product organisation has been a top priority for our leadership team over the last few months. From my first day in the company I have had the opportunity to put all my passion into it.
The main goal of our design effort, but also the guiding principle, was to find a structure that allows our teams to:
None in the team has a particular interest in any notorious framework to scale Agile. So we looked for our own way, with no dogma.
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What we did and what we learned
As everyone that works in a company that is scaling and that is involved in funding rounds knows, the level of uncertainty is quite high. For a period of time things change very frequently, the situation is not always 100% clear. This is hard for different reasons: you should be able to manage the frustration that you can feel on a personal level, as the risk of getting too attached to an idea is high enough, but also the design needs to be fluid to avoid a complete org redesign before the actual change is live.
That’s why we decided to use an approach based on different scenarios. We considered and kept different alternatives open. We constantly asked ourselves questions like: are we adding or removing dependencies between teams? What’s the relationship with our current and future architecture? What are the key dynamics, as a whole? We evaluated strengths and weaknesses, the alignment with our guiding principles, but in particular we clarified the consequences to be managed for all of them. This is crucial for me: there is no perfect solution. It may sound obvious, but every decision, and this is true for the org structure also, results in different consequences to be managed and to different levels of risk. It’s about choosing the right trade-off.
As for every complex system, no matter the amount of analysis and simulation you do: reality will be different. Given all the available options, it’s important to start from the most promising one, with the awareness that something will need to be improved and changed again with actual feedback at hand. Practice makes progress. It’s about making the most reasonable hypothesis, setting the best conditions for success and then start iterating on it. We need to be clear with ourselves and with the people involved in the change about it: we did our best in the design process, but some additional improvements will be necessary. Someone will be happy, someone will be critical. What we can do is to communicate, with radical openness, what is driving the change and the rationale behind the decisions.
We are scaling up and thinking big. But we realised that what we were facing was more an evolution of our current organisation rather than a revolution. This had a significant impact on us and it was really beneficial. Why? Because we were really confident that a lot of things are already working well. But also, thanks to the level of transparency shared across Moneyfarm, we had a good perspective about the pain points and the obstacles. We looked for a solution, coherent with our guiding principles, to leverage all the positive things while removing the obstacles or reducing the impact of the weaknesses. It’s not about changing things just for the sake of it. It’s about being pragmatic, keeping the right focus on the business.
In every change, the level of involvement of the directly impacted people, is a decision to be taken. More people involved means leveraging the collective intelligence, achieving a better alignment about the goals and the constraints. Different perspectives and inputs are integrated in a more holistic view. The downside it’s about the speed of the process, the consequent required time and effort, with the risk of delaying some releases. But, more important than that, we all manage different levels of uncertainty in a very different way. As I’ve already mentioned our context was extremely uncertain. That’s why we decided to quickly iterate with our stakeholders and, to avoid any unnecessary stress but to mitigate the risk of our blind spots, to involve a reduced number of people in more private discussions. Is it my favourite approach? The one that resonates the most with what I strongly believe in? No, but while (even strongly) bringing my ideas to the table, I understood the specific situation to make a final shared decision. As professionals we need to be able to draw the line between what is acceptable to proceed, given the circumstances, and what is completely misaligned from our values, and not negotiable.
Conclusion
As a company, our next step will be a big step. To be ready everyone brought his experience and perspective: people dynamics, technology and architecture, product and business. We are all well aware about the complexity of our socio-technical system. We are conscious that the evolution of our org is not about solving a problem in a mechanical way, but, to quote Adam Kahane, can only be worked with and through.
So, we are just at the start of a new phase and at the very early stages of the new change. In the next few days we will start seeing the real dynamics at work, we will confirm the expected upsides or discover new constraints and weaknesses. For sure we will collect feedback and look for improvements, while keeping our delivery at its best.
More to come soon.
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We have a lot of open positions. Please check our list of available jobs here.
My 24 years in the IT industry and physics degree flow into my mission: simplify what appears complex.
2yInspirational! Thanks, Luca Bergero!
agisco affinchè tutti ottengano il potere di guidare e autorealizzarsi al servizio delle organizzazioni che amano
2ydistributed design doesn't necessarily mean everyone on everything, I think you are doing the right thing, if you want to get quick feedback from a lot of people on an initial design (necessarily created by a few domain experts) you have to create an MVP that sticks to describing the main interfaces without going to much into the details of what happens inside each team and than find a way to test it with them on a few big use cases, or just organise a plenary session by which you collect feedback in groups (what is not clear, what will create problems? what can be improved? what is good?). This is better than iterating with a few experts on everything until you reach a detailed initial design that satisfies the experts. In any case reality will differ from design, because when you ask people (experts or not) to reflect on something they have no way to let real tensions emerge from the design, they can only formulate cognitive tensions about it, they can only anticipate based on their "experience of the past" which doesn't necessarily apply well to "the new"
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2yRe: scaling framework. I think they have become purely commercial products. They are bought (literally and metaphorically) by those companies who don't have real scaling needs and what I mean by "don't have real scaling needs" is that they need to scale up their agile practices (for reasons that are not always clear or known...) but they don't really need to scale the company and the products themselves. If you have to scale a company in terms of size and capabilities it's better to know and use a huge amount of tools and build your own "scaling toolchain", so to speak: North Star, Flywheels and OKRs to link strategy, goal-setting and progress tracking. Flight Levels and Flow Framework to manage and keep track of the entire flow of work. Team/DevOps Topologies and Dynamic Reteaming to handle how the teams are formed, how to collaborate among them and how people flow inside the organization. I could go on and on forever, but in real life not everything is an agile problem with an agile solution – for example: how do you handle the onboarding of so many people in a short period of time – there's no agile framework for that! Like you said: it's a lot of work. Maily because you might find out during this quarter that OKRs are not really useful and you have to throw them out of the window and try something different, and then maybe the next quarter you have to drop Flight Levels in favor of something else. Nobody really scaled a company by using one framework.
Digital Professional | People Enthusiast | Inclusion Advocate
2y“As professionals we need to be able to draw the line between what is acceptable to proceed, given the circumstances, and what is completely misaligned from our values, and not negotiable.” I love that! Thanks for sharing your journey Luca!
Imperfectly happy
2y"Practice makes progress" 😍 😍 😍 Carefully read the article, twice. Inspired and inspiring. Left me curious about one (or more) sketches of what those 5-9 teams look like :=)