This is the Day 9 article of Money Forward Engineers Advent Calendar 2024 ๐
Before joining Money Forward, I've had the privilege of experiencing both ends of the tech company spectrum. Early in my engineering career, I joined a startup with less than 30 people, and grew with the company from seed funding to Series A. Everything was fast - we made decisions quickly and built things even faster. Later, I switched to a big tech company and built products that used by billions of users. There, things moved slower with more hierarchy and processes.
Money Forward sits at an interesting sweet spot between these two worlds. With over 2,000 employees, it's well past the startup phase, but it's still growing fast and expanding with global ambitions. Earlier this year, the company hit a significant milestone: ยฅ30 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR). But what's more interesting is where we're headed โ our CEO Tsuji-san has set an ambitious target of ยฅ100 billion ARR within the next five years.
But here's the challenge: when companies get bigger, they usually get slower. Anyone who's been through organizational scaling knows that growth often comes with a speed tax. As teams expand, decision-making gets more complex, processes pile up, and that startup-like agility starts to fade.
However, at Money Forward, speed isn't just a metric โ it's baked into our culture. One of our core principles literally translates to "accelerate decision-making, move to action fastest, and achieve results fastest (ๆๆๆฑบๅฎใฎในใใผใใไธใใๆ้ใง่กๅใซ็งปใใๆ้ใงใใ้ใใใใ)."
In this article, I'll share how our Accounting Plus team at Money Forward maintains this high-velocity culture while scaling up. It's a practical look at keeping the speed high even as the organization grows.
Split the Team to Move Fast
Amazon's Jeff Bezos famously championed the "two-pizza team" rule: if you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too big. It's a simple idea that's worked well for us in practice.
I've seen this play out firsthand. Earlier, my team grew to a size that created real friction in practice. Our daily standups stretched long, and even simple decisions required some lengthy discussions to get everyone aligned. Before a new Epic started, we split the team into several independent teams. Each new team is autonomous, with its own Product Owner, Team Leader, and engineers, capable of building full-stack solutions end-to-end.
The impact was immediate: standups became focused and short again, alignment became easier, and decision-making accelerated.
These small teams run their own weekly sprints and retrospectives, unburdened by cross-team dependencies or coordination meetings. Alignment comes naturally when everyone sits at the same (small) table, and code ships quickly because the feedback loop is tight and the communication overhead is minimal.
Highly Aligned, Loosely Coupled
Small teams are fast, but they can create their own problems. The most obvious risk is teams accidentally duplicating work โ imagine three different teams building nearly identical components because they didn't know about each other's work. This isn't just inefficient; it creates a maintenance nightmare and a inconsistent user experience.
What I've observed at Money Forward Accounting Plus is an interesting balance. We're experimenting with a guild structure, starting with our frontend guild where developers across different teams regularly collaborate to maintain consistency and share knowledge. While we're still in the early stages, our setup naturally evolved into "highly aligned, loosely coupled", an idea proposed by Netflix's founder Reed Hastings.
Above is an example of a guild structure. Developers from each team regularly collaborate to maintain consistency and share knowledge. Note that this is for illustration purposes, the guild structure may be different in different organizations.
Our frontend guild has already shown some promising results. It breaks down silos by bringing together developers from each team to discuss common challenges, share best practices, and standardize our frontend approach. Instead of following top-down rules, guild members collaboratively shape our technical direction in frontend development.
This initial setup gives us the best of both worlds. Teams maintain their autonomy and speed โ they can build and ship features without waiting for other teams. Through the frontend guild structure, we're seeing improved consistency and knowledge sharing without bureaucracy, allowing teams to benefit from collective expertise while maintaining their independence.
Impact Beyond Team Boundaries
Small, decoupled teams help us move fast. But here's the counterintuitive part: keeping teams small doesn't mean limiting the impact.
At Money Forward Accounting Plus, our guilds demonstrate this perfectly. For example, recently, the frontend guild took on the challenge of standardizing our approach development and testing โ an initiative that impacts every team working on the frontend. These improvements spread across all Accounting Plus teams, raising our collective code quality and product stability.
But the impact can reach even further. Take our recent company-wide adoption of AI development tools (such as GitHub Copilot) as an example. When Money Forward introduced these AI-powered tools to boost development speed, one team from Money Forward i took the initiative to create a central repository for sharing AI prompts and best practices. This repository helps every developer across Money Forward easily find and reuse language-specific and framework-specific prompts. A single team's contribution is now accelerating development across our entire engineering organization.
At Money Forward, we're building products at scale without sacrificing speed or quality. Our teams maintain the agility to ship quickly while upholding the rigor needed. If you're interested in working in an environment that balances speed with engineering excellence, you can find more details about opportunities at Money Forward at https://recruit.moneyforward.com/en/
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