Wise

The mission: I loved the main goal of the company, which is lowering international banking costs to minimum possible levels while being transparent on fees and waiting times. It is a worthy task, and they have millions of real users with real problems.

About company structure: The company is a fast-growing ex-startup, with a mixture of startup and corporate. Hierarchically speaking, it has a flat structure with tribes organized around many consisting teams. All these teams have KPIs to push.

Good part of company structure: Since it is not yet corporate, there is still flexibility: people can work on stuff they know best, as opposed to only the things in their contract. Also, there is a lot of trust and openness to recommendations outside of your own team.

Good part of engineering culture:

• Lots of smart and world-class level engineers
• A lot of freedom in doing things
• Teams own their process, so no outdated processes to block you
• People can be convinced with reasoning; no bottleneck architects
• Engineers are treated as partners in the product, not just workers
• A chance to talk to the customers, customer support, and OPS as a participant! In my previous company, I could not talk with either of them, so it is a great opportunity to have some ideas
• The CEO picks up the phone to solve customer issues time to time, which shows that the company really wants to be customer-centric.

The best type of employee for the company (in engineering):

• Senior level; has to know how to weigh pros and cons
• Has a lot of willpower to tackle lots of threads and lack of direction (i.e., "I don't know, solve it!")
• Willing to do non-engineering tasks (gathering product requirements, assessing design, discussing team KPIs, etc.)
• Does not fear to decide and risk
• Has the necessary people- and verbal skills to voice criticism in a solely positive way

Mostly there are two sources of issue with the company: one is having autonomous teams in a flat structure at scale, which is a very new concept with not so many ready solutions. The second issue is coming from the fact TransferWise is being an ex-startup with breakneck growth; there was no time tackling them. So in detail:

Negative consequences of autonomy:

• Anything under a KPI gets better and possibly modern as well; anything not measured or easily measurable is not really solved.
• That means that problems outside the responsibility of a team are solved very late or not at all; usually these are the really hard problems.
• There is a cult of the Messiah Employee, who would be a person who can find time, energy, and willpower outside of day-to-day feature work to fix these cross-team really hard problems.

Negative consequences of being an ex-startup:

• The company did not invest in people skills; leads don't know how to solve interpersonal conflicts, so they just lay off people; nor are there employees who can intervene in these.
• There are senior product managers who make decisions over guesses or their own ideas, regardless of the team investing in data analysis and UX beforehand.
• Certain areas like data engineering are surprisingly unprofessional, and a lot depends on the coding skills of a given team's data analysts; the quality varies team by team.
• There is a lot of legacy code that is not tackled, and there is no human resource to do it (scaling issue); also, there are product managers who do not want to hear about these problems, consequently there is a lot of guerrilla engineering tackling tech debt.
• There are many questionable team leads who might have great technical knowledge but are really not mature enough or ready to tackle human issues.
• People are expected to be fine with not-so-great compensation; however, really hard issues require really valuable people who, in turn, might know their price.

My two cents:

• Invest in the "KPI-less" core infrastructure, from frontend to data engineering. Make sure teams are spending a reasonable amount of effort on their own productivity (by paying back tech debt). Unfortunately, it might not be easily measured, so let them have some "risk budget."

• Invest in regular soft skill training for team leads, or at least have personnel who possess these skills. Talented people laid off due to basic interpersonal conflict is a waste.

• Validate and QA the logic teams base their decisions on. Invest in a bulletproof data collection platform.

All in all, I wish the entire company my best. So, good luck, keep up the great work, and I wish you all the best!