A while ago, a former Rakuten member joined us. It finally feels like we have someone who “knows” the e-commerce business inside the company.

Having experience with e-commerce business once before is really huge. Currently, operations and systems in each department are being thoroughly examined and continuously optimized. I was amazed by how much speed and change can happen with just one person joining, and I was reminded once again that experience is treasure.

Until now, we’ve been working in a trial-and-error state with no one in the company having done e-commerce business before. With the addition of someone with EC experience, the path forward has become clearer, and we can reduce unnecessary failures. They say “failure is the mother of success,” but if you already know the points where failure is likely, you can skip those areas without failing.

Speaking of experience, my recent concern is that I don’t have experience developing with a team of about 20 people. Actually, being in my 4th year as an engineer and constantly dealing with things for the first time, my concerns are endless.

For about the past year and a half, I’ve been doing team development with a small group of about 4 people. However, recently as members have increased, including development partners, we’ve come to develop one product with a team of about 20 people. With small teams, the concept of team building was unnecessary, but with about 20 people, team building’s impact on development speed becomes significant.

Given this situation, as development members have increased and we’ve changed the team structure, if we’re going to do it, I’d like to know best practices. I want advice from someone who has successful experience building good teams multiple times. Even thinking about it, we can’t immediately recruit the right person, so we have to figure it out ourselves.

So, we’re steadily building a good team through trial and error within the company and consulting with engineers from other companies for advice - that’s the current situation.

That’s all from the Gemba.