How changing roles 5 times in 3 years helped me discover what I really want from work
After multiple reshuffles at SumUp, I realized that all I need professionally is the opportunity to solve meaningful problems.
I was still a student when I joined SumUp’s Sales team in February 2017. Back then, I wanted to be a management consultant when college was over. In the meantime, I joined SumUp to get some real-life experience at a fast-growing startup. I fell in love with the company’s mission to empower small merchants.
Needless to say, I ended up staying. In a little over 3 years, I’ve worked on multiple projects. The first was our sales consultants program, that turned into a position to manage our third party provider specialised in sales. That was followed by customer activation setup, risk and fraud prevention, and finally the development and launch of our mobile payments solution in Brazil. This product turned out to be critical for our merchants as social isolation became the norm.
The reshuffles helped me realize the vision I had for my career. I have always feared early specialization — being forever tied to one field isn’t what I imagined for myself. But switching between multiple areas provided me with something else: the opportunity to work on meaningful projects and do what I love most — solving problems — while learning to work with different people and developing a more systemic perspective on how businesses work.
My first reshuffle was quite organic. I was a Sales Intern and SumUp offered me a full-time position in a project that aimed to hire, train, and develop a customer support team specialized in sales. It was something we had never done before, so we had to figure everything out as we went. It was a lot of fun to learn on the go, in such a hands-on manner. But not all reshuffles were as intuitive for me as this one.
The toughest was when I was offered a position in Risk and Fraud. I had only been in Customer Activation for 4 months; the team and I were just starting to discover what made merchants become regular users of our payment solutions. I was really enjoying learning about product discovery and customer research, so I didn’t expect to be offered a new position quite yet. It was a late Friday afternoon when the CEO asked if I would like to join SumUp’s Risk and Fraud team. I must say, I hesitated. I remember feeling anxious over the weekend, divided between the opportunity to help SumUp on something important and the certainty of how much I was enjoying my current project. To be honest, I was sure that I wouldn’t like risk and fraud as much as I liked customer activation, but I ended up accepting the invitation, as I knew that it would be the most impactful work I could do at the time.
The experience was very hard in the beginning. Not only did I know nothing about risk, fraud, chargebacks, and transaction refunds, but the area was in a particularly difficult setup. The team leader had just left and recent changes in card scheme regulations meant that we had to change the way we managed fraud — or the penalties could be severe. To my surprise, this ended up being my favourite reshuffle. I had to structure processes from scratch, design metrics, monitor them, and understand their implications for SumUp. As I did each task, I developed a good sense of how risk and fraud work in the payments' industry. Also, because I was in charge of the project, I was constantly in touch with all the other teams in Risk, generating reports and recommendations directly to the board of directors in Brazil and the Risk teams overseas. I gained hard and soft skills that would have taken me much longer to learn if I wasn’t on this project.
This reshuffle also taught me the important basics for my most impactful role so far, as part of the team in charge of designing and launching mobile payments in Brazil. Before mobile payments, our customers depended on either cash or card readers to sell their services and products. The team and I started to work on mobile payments in the second half of 2019. My previous experience in risk and fraud was really valuable for the project, given that higher fraud rates in card-not-present transactions required different features from this product. Because we’d been working on mobile payments for a while, it only took us a few weeks to expand it to thousands of merchants.
As the COVID-19 pandemic began forcing people to stay at home, many of our merchants’ businesses were threatened. But by rolling out mobile payments quickly, we were able to make an immediate positive impact. When I heard merchants in Brazil sharing stories of how their livelihoods were saved by mobile payments, I was even happier for having said yes to all the reshuffles proposed to me. Without them, I wouldn’t have had this opportunity to change merchants’ lives during the ongoing pandemic.
If you feel like you could use a change at work, here are some tips based on my own experiences of being reshuffled:
- Know your strengths and how you are expected to exercise them in your new role. Reshuffle opportunities will be offered to you based on what you do well, and not because of what you are yet to learn. Focusing solely on what you lack is a sure path to feeling frustrated with the new role and will make it harder for you to perceive the value of your contributions to the project.
- Know what learning opportunities the reshuffle will present to you. Perhaps your goal is broad, like mine, and you wish to learn as much as you can about different areas. Still, have some clarity about it. It will help you keep your sense of purpose alive when the tough adaptation times come.
- Be aware of your ramp-up time. It will take you a while to learn the very basics of the new area. Adjust your sense of performance in the beginning, so that it is linked to your ability to learn and not to your ability to deliver.
- Be open to non-traditional ways of thinking about career progression. When I was reshuffled for the third time, I knew I was close to being promoted to Senior Analyst, so it was natural for me to worry about what would happen if I changed roles at that time. In the end, it wasn’t a problem at all. But I only discovered this 3 months later, when I was told I had been promoted. At SumUp, career progression for generalists is less about being an expert at a topic and more about the impact someone can have on projects with different complexities.
Being reshuffled helped me realize that all I need professionally is the opportunity to work on impactful, challenging projects; it doesn’t matter which area I work in.
In our next story, you’ll meet Ariadne. She joined SumUp as a Sales Leader last March, but accepted to be reshuffled to Team Leader of our Remote Work Squad just a couple of weeks later. SumUp had the challenge of migrating 100% of the workforce to distributed work in less than 48 hours in order to protect our employees, their families, and the community, from the spread of Coronavirus.
