Banksalad EM's Team Growth Strategy: Scaling from 15 to 40 Members

Lee Seungmin, Product Manager of Banksalad's UX Strategy team, shared his experience as an Engineering Manager (EM) growing four Frontend platform teams—Android, iOS, Web, and QA—from 15 members to over 40. He defined the EM's role from three perspectives—Task, Vision, and 1on1 (People)—and presented concrete management methods for each area.

Managing Work and Team: Clear Standards and Shared Vision

In terms of work management, he ran a process of understanding tasks and assigning priorities through Jira tickets, and removing blockers through real-time follow-up. When the team had 5 or more members, he received all Github and Jira actions via email and checked them frequently to quickly recognize issues.

In team management (Visioning), he defined a short sentence embodying what the team valued as the Vision, and shared it periodically without reversing course. Through evaluation criteria linked to Banksalad's competency standard BACAS (six criteria including Excellence of Outcomes, Data-Based Decision, etc.), he established team members' behavioral patterns as culture. Feedback was delivered based on specific cases, requiring improvement of behavior rather than criticism of the person.

People Management: Personalized Motivation Through 1on1s

The core of people management is 1on1. To understand each team member's different definition of 'their own success,' the EM conducted periodic 1on1s, listening to various concerns such as adjusting task difficulty, mediating conflicts, and career direction. In particular, the manager also honestly shared his own concerns to help team members feel a sense of contribution, and built trust by always giving feedback on the progress of derived Action Plans.

He finds a manager's own growth in creating an environment where team members grow well. To this end, rather than simply directing company work, he matched it with opportunities team members wanted to provide motivation, and automated repetitive manual tasks to increase productivity. He also emphasized that finding opportunities for cross-team collaboration through communication with other team managers and upper management, and building stress management capabilities such as physical strength, resilience, and avoidance skills to prevent burnout, are important.