"The best way to scale a company is to develop the problem-solving capabilities of every team member." — Régis Medina, Learning to Scale
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This page explains how we work at Finary, and why. We take a lot of inspiration from Lean (the ideas behind the Toyota Production System). Lean is not some consultant mambo jambo, it’s an individual learning system that allows everyone to get better at solving real customer problems, every day, while being profitable. It works for every position and departments.
As a company grows, the easy path is to add headcount and processes. Every hire adds distance between the people building the product and the people using it. We chose a different path: scale by raising the problem-solving capability of every person, so the company gets smarter as it grows rather than slower.
In short, we treat scaling as a learning problem, not a management problem.
Value is defined by real, individual customers with real problems, not by us. So we stay close to them: we use the product to invest our money, read tickets, store review, talk to customers, and treat each one as a signal. A support investigation isn't closed when the ticket is resolved, but when we understand the root cause and how to prevent it for the next user. Product managers and engineers talk to users and solve their problems.
A healthy company surfaces problems faster than it creates them. Problems aren't failures to hide, they're the raw material of learning. Any team can log an issue the moment it's seen in our shared database, run a root-cause analysis, turn it into a simple fix (”counter-measure”) and track it to ensure it doesn’t occur again. We don't celebrate firefighting, we celebrate the systemic fixes that stop the fire from starting again. If the fix doesn’t work, we simply start over.
Big-bang reorganizations rarely scale. Daily improvements do. If we become more productive 1% every day, we double our throughput every 72 days. Teams run a continuous flow of small improvements (we call this kaizen): quick wins that don't qualify as full projects but still move the system forward, made by the people doing the work. When we change something, we treat it as a small experiment with a clear hypothesis and a clear way to check whether it actually worked, then we write down what we learned so the next person starts ahead.
A manager’s job is to develop people, not to hand out answers. His or her value is measured by how many problem-solvers they grow around them. So 1:1s focus on what you're learning, not only what you're shipping; we hire for problem-solving instinct and curiosity over credentials; and managers are expected to coach with questions ("What problem are you solving? What's your hypothesis? How will you check?") rather than simply solve things for you. Important point: we have no “pure coaches”. Everyone that coaches (”managers”) is also playing to ensure they keep in touch with reality.
We borrow a small vocabulary from Lean. You don't need to know it to join, but here's the short version so nothing sounds mysterious: