How a South African fintech start-up designed the operating model to support rapid team growth while maintaining product velocity.
A South African fintech start-up had built a successful digital payments platform serving 2 million South African users. After raising funding, they planned to double their engineering team from 30 to 60 people within six months to expand product features and enter new market segments. The founding team recognized that their current operating model—built for a small, co-located team—would not support this rapid growth without fundamental redesign.
Growth ambition was colliding with execution reality.
The leadership team was experiencing the friction between hiring velocity and product delivery:
As the team grew, feature delivery slowed due to coordination overhead, unclear ownership, and competing priorities
The CTO was still approving every technical decision, creating delays and limiting team autonomy
No defined engineering organization structure—hiring was happening without clarity on roles, reporting lines, or accountability
No structured planning process—roadmap priorities changed weekly based on whoever spoke to the CEO last
The CEO recognized they needed to design the operating model before continuing to hire.
Duration: 5-week strategic operating design engagement
FORMA mapped the current operating reality through interviews with the leadership team and engineering leads:
Working closely with the leadership team, FORMA designed:
Squad-based model with clear ownership of product areas, reporting structure, and career progression framework for 60-person team
Clear delineation of what squad leads own (feature prioritization, technical decisions) versus what requires leadership approval (architecture changes, hiring, budget)
Quarterly planning cycle with transparent prioritization criteria, stakeholder input process, and roadmap communication framework
Sequenced hiring plan aligned to squad formation, with role definitions and onboarding process for new team members
FORMA created a practical implementation roadmap including:
From bottleneck to blueprint.
Early results from implementation in progress:
"We were about to double our team size without any operating model to support it. FORMA didn't give us generic startup playbooks—they designed a bespoke structure that fit our product, our culture, and our growth trajectory. We now have the operating architecture to scale to 60 people without losing velocity."
— CEO, FinTech Start-up
Form gave shape to meaning.
The leadership team had the ambition (meaning) to scale the engineering organization, but lacked the operating architecture to execute it (form). FORMA's approach didn't impose a generic scaling framework—we designed a bespoke operating model that fit the company's product structure, team culture, and growth stage.
The focus was always execution, not documentation. Every design decision was tested against real hiring scenarios and refined with the leadership team to ensure it would work in operating reality.
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