From Feature Teams to Impact Teams

Within the last 18 months, Pennylane’s tech and product organization grew from 3 founders to 60 people. Hence the endless question of how to best organize our teams and their respective scopes.

By nature, Pennylane serves 2 personas with specific needs

Pennylane wants to be the financial OS for European SMEs. We build a complex product — a platform. On one side, our platform enables SMEs to better manage their finances and collaborate with their accountant. On the other side, it enables accountants to efficiently do the accounting for those SMEs.

Accountants and SMEs both want to save time, collaborate better and grow their businesses — but what they expect from the platform in terms of features is significantly different:

• Accountants already use various legacy accounting software. They spend nine hours a day in the tool, have a huge focus on productivity, reliability, and the ability to cover many edge-cases.
• SMEs are looking for a tool that is simple to use. Financial management is not their core business. It needs to be quick, efficient, reliable — and they want actionable insights out of it.

Why we chose to start with “Feature Teams”

It’s generally agreed that to build a great product, one needs to focus on a specific user/niche first — and then extend it to other personas.

We wished we could have done this but in our case, it was impossible: accountants are not specialized by lines of business. So we had to build a product focused on the core value that’d let them do bookkeeping for any SME or line of business.

Considering the huge gap between the needs of accountants and SMEs, we initially decided to have an organization chart based on feature teams. We identified the core features required to satisfy SMEs and accountants — and assigned those key features to specific teams.

On the SMEs side, we’ve historically had 3 teams:

• Invoicing
• Expense management
• Cash management and actionable insights

On the accounting side, we also have 3 teams:

• Handling incoming data from banks and invoices
• Revision work of handled data
• Declarations & Internal management of the accounting firm

It seemed to us the best organization since each of these areas requires a deep understanding of the persona and extensive user research.

Why we decided to move away from “Feature Teams”

We think no Product Manager — no matter how talented she is — can build the right infrastructure for each of those needs if she’s not 100% focused on it.

The downside of that organization is obviously that each Product Manager thinks of their own features in silos. In our case, this resulted in two central problems:

• Lack of a consistent overall User Experience as each Product Manager was optimizing for their own feature
• Lack of collaboration features as no Product Manager was really thinking about the accountant and the SME at the same time

We feel like we’re getting closer to having built the infrastructure for the six key features listed above. So we decided to start experimenting with a new type of team: one focused on a persona instead of a feature.

We set a single goal for that new team: to build a differentiated and delighting User Experience for a specific line of business — both for the business owner and their accountant

We needed to have a cross-functional team making sure we built the right experience, market, and bring it to market properly and then onboard and support our users properly.

We picked our most experienced Product Manager, Damien, to lead this cross-functional team.

How we built our first “Impact Team”

Damien did some research to identify the best line of business/persona to start with, then put together the key principles of that new Impact Team.

Damien decided to focus on restaurants owners and their accountants, for a couple of reasons:

• The market of restaurant owners is large — and adjacent markets (all kinds of brick and mortar stores that work kind of the same) are even larger
• He felt that with a limited number of additional features specific to restaurants (namely connectivity to POS and to food delivery platforms, display of key ratios, and financial performance benchmarking), we could offer a game-changing user experience to restaurant owners and their accountants. Hence, hopefully, a rather quick feedback loop on that experiment.
• We already have a reasonable number of our users who are restaurant owners while we never really targeted them — this being a good signal that there is demand in that space.

Damien gathered around him a cross-functional team at the beginning of the summer — someone from Marketing, someone from Sales, someone from Customer Onboarding and Support, and an Accounting topic expert, as well as his tech and design team.

Damien is the Squad Owner. His role is to set priorities and animate the team but he’s not the people manager of those different specialists.

Our takeaway from this switch

We’ve launched that about a month ago. The feedback of the team is great. They get a holistic view of their work and impact, they get to collaborate better. The velocity of the tech team has been great as well.

We’re eager to see the commercial impact of this experiment as we’re about to communicate about those new exciting features in October.

If things go well, we’ll create more of those impact teams — as well as Product Growth teams focused on end-to-end experience and growth metrics. These new teams will coexist with product teams focused on core values, that master one feature and area of the product.

Do not hesitate to contact our Product Team if you have any questions or to apply for a role within our Product and Tech team if you’d like to see how it feels from the inside. :)