We never communicate enough — Stéphane Alizon (Younited Credit)
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Younited Credit provides an online platform to facilitate financial transactions between lenders and borrowers.
- Founded: 2009
- Founders: Charles Egly, Geoffroy Guigou, Thomas Beylot
- Funds raised: 103 M€
- Team: 220 (France, Italy, Spain)
- Tech team: 62 (feature teams)
What’s on your pizza ?
Tuna, at Pizza Capri
Background
Your life before Younited-Credit ?
I have 17 years of experience — I’m one of the old guys. I’ve done a lot of development and tech leadership and moved towards project management, with more responsibilities. I worked in big companies like Atos, Renault or PMU, but always in teams that were a bit independent from the main organization — in smaller structures that worked on all aspects of their product.
So I ended up wanting to do the same thing in a company where the ‘small structure’ comes natively.
How did you join?
A friend of mine got contacted for the job but it wasn’t the right time for him and he gave my name. After a few interviews with a great fit, I understood the project quite well and jumped in.
We were less than 10 in the team at the time, and now we’re over 60!
What’s your job, as a CTO?
Make sure the company can scale. We have about 100% growth a year — I guess you can say we’re a scale-up and not a start-up anymore.
My goal is to reduce the variable costs of the company, and all that goes through creating a great product with great UX. That creates a lot of tech challenges.
I think I can tell that my main job is to deliver — we have product owners and feature teams, so I’m here to make sure that the teams execute the roadmap well enough for it to become reality.
Has your job changed since you started?
When you’re 10 in tech, it’s one team. I knew everything that happened, every detail. I jumped in when somebody needed help to debug something or write specs.
I was pretty hands-on even if it was a quite different stack than I was used to — I used to work on open-source software, and Younited-Credit uses .NET.
My goal quickly became to make sure newcomers would have the best on-boarding possible. When the team reached 25 people, we split into feature teams and since then I’m not into every details of the product anymore.
I now make sure the teams can get the right tools to be autonomous while being in sync with the others.
We’re now organized around communities (project, architecture, quality, security, development and devops) and each community has an “animator”. I coordinate the animators and the community also has a head of engineering that coordinates delivery.
When you’re 10 people in a company, if you push hard enough you can make things move no matter what. When teams grow and become more autonomous, everybody pushes hard and you need to guide them to the right destination.
Tech
What’s your stack?
.NET on the back-end, Angular and React on the front. Everything’s on Azure’s cloud, with continuous integration and microservices. Modularity is very important, as your job can usually be decomposed in a series of quite simple problems, and your infrastructure needs to reflect that.
When I started, I had to create a modular architecture, an autonomous software factory and move everything to the cloud.
CTO Life
What’s your biggest challenge?
We have a business plan that shareholders follow closely and that is tightly linked to our product roadmap and how efficiently we can deliver it.
The business plan is very ambitious so my challenge is to get the entire team in order to execute it right.
Biggest responsibility?
It’s also to deliver the business plan! I participate in the monthly business reviews with the shareholders to talk them through our progress.
My goal is to make sure people feel good at Younited Credit which is not that easy in a scale-up. That goes through establishing an environment where people can grow the way they want to.
Anything you’d have done differently, looking back?
Communication. We never communicate enough, with our own team or with other teams in the company.
What seems obvious to you isn’t necessarily as obvious to others. We all need to keep that in mind at all times. So I’d have given more explanations on every decision and more information on everything I could.
When it comes to hard decisions like having to fire someone, you always try to find solutions when there might not be any. That can hurt your team and I wish I would have taken some of those decisions faster.
People
What are you looking for when hiring?
The capacity to apprehend the entirety of the job that this person it going to have. I don’t want somebody that can just write a lot of code, I want people that can understand the business behind what they do, because that makes them ask the right questions (performance, security, resiliency…).
Is there a fit with the company’s values? We invested a lot in them so now we’re using them heavily, with daily reminders to the teams when necessary.
Is the candidate genuinely interested in the project? It’s a hard world for tech recruiters so if the developer can snap and leave at the first issue in their job, that’s not a good thing for us. If they really are into the project, they will find workarounds and fix their issues.
Our technical tests also imply all teams quite a lot.
Any hiring tips for other startups?
Using a recruitment firm can save you a lot of time — if they can do their job well. You want to have as much cooptation as possible, as this is the best source of great candidates, I believe.
One last thing is that you should have a strong list of questions to be able to test the candidate’s fit with your company’s values.
Let’s take a look at the future
Where are you in 3 years?
Ideally, we will have filed and IPO. We’re not a unicorn yet but we’re trying to become one within 2 years.
It’s quite a challenge to grow a team, because we want to become more efficient everywhere and lower our variable costs. So there will be more and more of the operational efforts that will move towards the tech team.
In 3 years we’ll be the unrivalled leaders in Europe with new partners, products and countries.
But for all that we need to become profitable to show our full potential.
That’s all been an incredible adventure so far, and I feel really lucky to be part of it.
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