Growing mobile capabilities at Nubank
Article Summary
Nubank tripled their mobile team while shifting from a shared service model to autonomous squads. The growing pains? Brutal but worth it.
Vinícius Andrade, Engineering Manager at Nubank, shares how the Latin American fintech giant restructured their mobile development organization. As they scaled from a centralized mobile team to embedded engineers in product squads, they faced allocation nightmares, context switching, and ownership chaos.
Key Takeaways
- Mobile engineers as shared service created allocation complexity and constant context switching
- Developers lacked ownership and couldn't participate in squad OKRs or long term planning
- Created Mobile Platform squad to handle tooling, pipelines, and release trains
- Traded cost efficiency for responsiveness by accepting some developer underutilization
- Code reviews became harder but slack time enables architecture discussions across squads
Critical Insight
Nubank successfully embedded mobile engineers into product squads by aggressively hiring and creating a dedicated platform team, gaining autonomy and belonging at the cost of some efficiency.
