Our Product Organisation
Alberto Barcelos, VP of Product Management, and Hernan Herrera, Lead Product Manager, share how we’ve structured our Product Organisation and why this setup enables our team to build more customer-centric products.
One thing that distinguishes us from other Product companies out there — at least in this phase of our growth — is that we chose to build country-specific consumer product teams. In general, B2C companies optimise for delivering global products, which they later customise for local markets. While they can launch in dozens of countries with relative ease, they never completely redesign products to meet a single market’s needs. We started our journey like this. It’s a logical approach to internationalisation. However, we soon discovered that taxes are special. Customer behaviour towards the tax systems, the complexity of tax law, and the requirements of each market are relatively unique. And these circumstances lead to vastly different user expectations that dictate the customer experience we build and optimise for, country to country.
That’s why we revamped our Product Organisation. In 2020 we introduced a country-first approach, which we’ve since built upon to ensure comprehensive ownership across all product teams. We believe this approach not only builds trust internally but also helps us build more trustworthy products for our users too. And fortunately for us, our self-built technical platform helps us do this at scale — but more on that later. Here’s a look at our Product Team structure in practice:
The Product Organisation at Taxfix
Our current Product Organisation has two main components — our external customer-facing product and our internal support products. In general, each team within these groups has resources from Product, Design, Data, Taxes, and Engineering. Of course, depending on the size and objective of the team, further resources are sometimes shared between teams.
Our Customer-Facing Product Teams
We’ve broken our consumer product organisation into three main groups: the Germany Group — our largest market — the New Markets Group, and the New Services Group. Our New Markets team acts as an incubator. Countries in this group go through an incubation period, grow, and become their own group once they’ve achieved product-market fit. Our Italian and French products are currently part of this accelerator. And as these markets develop and succeed, they will eventually become their own product groups. Our New Services Group, on the other hand, explores innovative features that aim to increase the financial well-being of our users. Although they’re just at the early stages of development, we’re very excited about what they’re cooking up.
Teams within our customer-facing product have an added resource. In addition to the typical team setup, we’ve also included an embedded marketing point person. The reasoning for this is simple. We can create an amazing product, but if we don’t communicate this to the user in the right way, we fail. This is just one example of how the market influences our team structure. In our Germany Group, for instance, we’ve even divided our teams according to three stages of the user journey — activation, core product experience, and retention.
Here’s a closer look at our Germany Group:
Activation — This stage covers everything from app installation to uploading a payslip — which is a necessary step for calculating a tax return in most cases. The team that owns this portion of the user journey, known as our “Speed Dating” Team, helps users get up to that point with as little friction as possible. We call this team “Speed Dating” because we’ve learned that time is of the essence in this stage. If users don’t go through this stage within the first few hours of registering, they are virtually gone. So it’s up to this team to make a great first impression to onboard the user and get a second date.
Core Tax Experience — The core tax experience includes the Taxfix question flow and all the data points we need to gather to estimate a potential tax return. The team that owns this stage call themselves “The Monks” — a reference to the monks in Age of Empires. Just like those monks, this team focuses on conversions. By reducing the number of questions users have to answer, the time it takes to answer those questions, and improving the overall calculations of our product, this team transforms registered users into satisfied customers. And considering all the tax complexities in Germany, it’s no surprise that this makes up a huge chunk of the user journey.
User Retention — Finally, we have everything related to retaining and re-onboarding a customer. Owned by our so-called “Postfix” Team, this stage tries to bridge the gap between submitting a tax return and next year’s tax filing season. And as you can file multiple tax returns in one go — up to four years retrospectively — the team aims to make this experience as frictionless as possible. Beyond this, the Postfix Team also looks at how to help users come back to us with excitement. They care about keeping customers informed, supported, and confident about their taxes year after year.
Our Internal Product Teams
Of course, there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes as a tax business. To support our overarching business needs, we also have several internal product groups:
Tax Platform — This Group’s mission is to create and maintain the platform that allows us to operate with a tax product in multiple markets. The catch? This platform also needs to be tax law independent, meaning we can accelerate multiple new market launches that iterate on that technology. To make this possible, we have two teams working in the Tax Platform Group. Our Tax Engine Team owns the tax technology that runs our whole product, TaxML. The Workbench Team owns the tooling that our tax experts and content designers use to convert tax law into tax logic.
Business Services
Operation Services aims to enable our Customer Success Team by providing the best tools and processes to reduce costs while still keeping customer satisfaction high. As tax declarations are a high touch relationship, we know that customers are more likely to reach out to us with questions. So the work of Operations Services is critical to help our team scale a high level of customer support as we mature.
Marketing Services helps us acquire users efficiently and smoothly. Through integrations with our different marketing channels, they enable us to invest marketing budget effectively while also engaging customers better. Additionally, this team also owns the infrastructure of our website to ensure that content is ready to meet customer needs.
Data Platform empowers Taxfix to better understand and serve our users through data. This team ensures that our data platform can scale as we grow while also maintaining consistency across the organisation. They’re big believers in helping others to help themselves, which is why they work towards providing self-serve data solutions for our team.
Monetisation is a new team coming in Q3 2021. They will take on everything related to our pricing infrastructure, such as vouchers or discount codes. In addition to supporting internal customers, like our country managers, they will also focus on maintaining a seamless payment experience for our users.
Technical Services Platform — Their job is to make all other Product teams as productive as possible in the way that they build software. This group currently consists of three smaller units — Front End Platform, User Management, and DevOps. As a team, they are responsible for constructing and maintaining the foundation that allows our Product Organisation to do their best work.
How did we choose this structure?
We like the idea of ‘fit for purpose.’ Every team and organisation is fit for a purpose, and if the purpose changes, you need to change how they’re structured to fit that new purpose. You can’t compare Taxfix today to Taxfix one and a half years ago. We’ve grown not only in size but in business goals and experience.
Back in the early days, Taxfix had a technology-based structure. There was a mobile app team, a web app team, and so on. That structure created excellent technical ownership and ensured a high level of quality for technical components. On the customer experience side, however, it became much more muddled. No one owned specific moments of the customer journey, and multiple teams had to support even the simplest of product changes.
We then pivoted to a customer-experience based organisational setup. This structure included different groups for each of our countries of operation plus tech communities that owned elements of our technical architecture. With this significantly reduced complexity, we were suddenly building lots of customer features and launching at light speed. On the flip side, however, technical ownership started to get blurry. Our tech communities found it difficult to deliver business objectives while balancing technical ownership. Additionally, this setup made it harder for us to optimise for structural stability. With less clearly defined goals, teams sometimes changed missions from one quarter to the next and lost time ramping up their knowledge for a new challenge.
So we iterated and introduced comprehensive ownership, a simple yet elusive concept. We began this process by painstakingly listing out every single thing a team could own: markets, user journey segments, KPIs, and technical components. We then ensured that every element belonged to one team and one team only. Technical ownership became clearly defined and distributed between teams, leaving technical communities to focus on knowledge-sharing rather than maintaining software. We also established more long-term missions for each team, providing stability to specialise on a topic over time.
How does this structure enable our team?
This organisational design empowers our people in a few ways. First of all, each team has clear boundaries and a good amount of control over their scope. We believe that when teams own specific problems and know them better than anyone else, they don’t need end-to-end approvals to move forward with decisions. Secondly, teams can take on challenges without actually making any one person 100% accountable or responsible. This means that even if one person leaves, the culture of the team and the know-how stays in place. So newcomers can hit the ground running in a supportive team with a clear goal and timeline. Additionally, owning a more narrow scope of the product means you can go deeper into understanding the challenge. On an individual contributor level, the depth of the problems you might find in any of these teams is very explorable. In many ways, we haven’t even treaded the shallow ends of what we’re doing right now.
With these changes, we’re already experiencing better collaboration, faster decision making, and even more risk-taking across the Product Organisation. We created this organisational scheme to enhance a culture of ownership and trust. And we’re excited to see how that will influence the culture of the teams as we progress.
Why join a tax product?
Alberto Barcelos, VP of Product Management: “I joined Taxfix because I enjoy complex problems and products — that’s where I tend to thrive. Coming from a background in engineering and moving to business and innovation, I’ve learned that there is no one way to approach a challenge. Taxfix is a fascinating problem because it’s a mix. It’s a complex technical problem — taxes — that, at the same time, requires design thinking and business thinking to abstract that complexity for our customers.”
Hernan Herrera, Lead Product Manager: “It’s simple to work on a product that’s inherently exciting for the user, but it’s a challenge to take on something people don’t necessarily want to do. When you work with taxes, a product that can help so many people, you’re trying to make something that is not enjoyable, enjoyable. It’s a problem worth solving.”
Interested in joining our team? Check out our open roles.
