Tribalization at SumUp

Let us start with a short journey back in time. In 2018, we had great ambition to scale our products and our team. However, in reality, we were a one-product ‘payments’ company. 

Let us go back even further. In 2012, SumUp was born out of a desire to disrupt the establishment and serve – with absolute focus – the underserved small merchants whose businesses craved flexible fintech solutions. 

As we grew, teams across SumUp that helped build our successful one-product company were eager to do more. But they couldn’t – not without breaking the very thing they had built. We wanted to empower these teams to shape the future for our merchants and deliver new solutions to help their businesses thrive. That led us to a period of “mitosis” –  disentangling our monolithic payments infrastructure into distinct components owned by different teams so they could work autonomously in parallel. This eventually led to Tribalization.

In 2018, we came together to chart a new course. We clarified what SumUp was and what we wanted it to become. From there, we created Tribes: teams of teams with the autonomy and resources to bring product visions to life. Each tribe has a specific mission aligned with SumUp's vision and values. Each is built around one or more value streams stressing the focus on providing our customers (merchants) with what they need to successfully build a thriving business. Tribes have the headcount, budget, drive and autonomy to materialize the value proposition from initial concept through various stages of development to delivery, support and beyond. 

For example: 

  • The Hardware Tribe designs and delivers world-class devices for in-person payments. 

  • The Platform Tribe provides shared infrastructure and enables SumUppers to build, run, and communicate innovative and cohesive products and services – globally, at scale.

For our tribes to succeed, we believe in autonomy and collaboration over efficiency and synchronisation. Tribes commit to using The Advice Process, a disciplined and thoughtful process to make inclusive, thoughtful decisions that affect others, discussed in the book Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. 

We embrace tribalization not as a rigid structure, but as a way to give teams what they need to create value for our merchants. Each Tribe shapes its own culture and ways of working, while remaining rooted in the broader SumUp culture and ecosystem. Autonomy may feel different from Tribe to Tribe and may develop as a tribe matures – and that’s okay. The key is that, no matter the Tribe, the feeling of being part of SumUp remains. 

While our commitment to tribalization remains, our structure has evolved to support better end-to-end execution and merchant value delivery. Inspired in part by the Zones to Win framework, we organise our work across four zones: the Performance Zone drives revenue growth, the Productivity Zone contains functions that are our operational backbone, the Incubation Zone is our testing ground for bold new ideas, and the Transformation Zone enables company-wide shifts.

This model brings sharper accountability, faster execution, and better alignment between product and go-to-market. Tribes remain a foundational unit at SumUp. Some tribes have been integrated into business lines to simplify execution, but many continue to operate within this new structure. Our success depends on teams who can execute with clarity, accountability, and trust – whether they’re in a tribe, a business line, or a zone. That’s the spirit of tribalization – and the evolution of it – that continues to shape SumUp today.

An example of tribalization in practice

Each Tribe hires for and builds its own skills and expertise and is responsible for understanding, utilising, and maintaining its key tools. However, we don’t want this to happen in a black box and we do encourage collaboration for two reasons: we believe that by collaborating we reduce waste and increase learning from other teams. What does this mean in practice? 

Tribalization of DevOps – example 

DevOps is a culture, not a role, and everyone involved in software engineering should feel responsible for strengthening it within the organisation: breaking down silos, integrating the delivery process and optimising for continuous improvement. DevOps should not be outsourced to an individual or team.  Rather, work flows through the entire technology value stream from Design & Product Management, Quality Assurance and Software Development to IT Operations in fast iterations leading to fast feedback and learnings. We expect business application developers to be familiar with DevOps culture and practices as part of their autonomy and responsibility as full owners of their resources in all environments. Having said that, within our Platform tribe we have teams responsible for the standardisation of our infrastructure and specific DevOps practices. 

How do we make sure all tribes collaborate in a cohesive, efficient manner without sacrificing security, scalability, or speed?

Our Platform tribe enables SumUppers to build, deploy, and operate innovative and cohesive products and services – globally, at scale. DevOps engineers and experts in other tribes contribute to it while pursuing their own goals and missions. This happens via Chapters (communities of profession) and Guilds (communities of interest), making sure people working on similar problems use the same set of standards, best practices, and tools.

In practice, this means each tribe:

  • Leverages shared software and infrastructure patterns our Platform Tribe teams create;

  • Contributes back to shared infrastructure consistently;

  • Onboards new DevOps team members to the DevOps chapter by giving them an introductory learning phase upon starting; and

  • Leverages the Platform tribe’s training offerings, e.g. on Terraform, Github actions, logging, grafana, etc.

Platform Infra is the umbrella framework for SumUp’s infrastructure-heavy engineering teams. It institutionalizes agreed standards, ways of working, and product mindset, extends them across all the teams in the framework, and provides a single, transparent interface for the rest of SumUp.

The Platform Tribe Infra teams provide::

  • Standard software and infrastructure patterns for all teams to use

  • Documentation and guidance on how to operate infrastructure;

  • Suggestions and recommendations for tools;

  • A core set of observability tools;

  • Best practices; and

  • Training to improve DevOps skills throughout the organisation. 

We generally expect that teams follow this “advice process” when hiring new people who are not only going to be a member of their own team but also of a chapter (like in this DevOps example). 

It’s important to say that we are learning daily how to improve this way of working, which is not perfect. Every day with feedback and radical candour we get better and we improve and, as such, the way we work together as Tribes improves. This is a human process that requires each one of us (and each person who will join us in the future) to be collaborative, open, and dedicated to making a great environment where we can accomplish great things together.