W50 - Division of Labor and Anti-Division

I had the privilege of participating in most of the merchant's businesses. Recently, regarding the wallet and checkout areas, I've noticed some differences in how teams engage. You could also describe this as the difference between exploratory businesses and mature ones.

The checkout system feels to me like it has sufficiently granular division of labor and high reliability. The business chain is long, many stakeholders are involved, and system complexity is split across subteams — for example aggregation, Meituan Pay, transactions, unified payments, risk control, channel routing, gateways, and so on. Each subteam has its own non-functional metrics of concern; functional attributes can be strong, such as system stability.

The wallet feels like a smaller product-research-operations team: more agile, with tighter collaboration, stronger alignment on goals, and a clearer link between individual performance and business metrics.

A direct observation is team-building events — for checkout it's hard to gather everyone from upstream and downstream together.

This made me think of division of labor and counter-division. Society, companies, and teams naturally evolve toward finer specialization. But when everyone occupies a tiny niche within a vast specialization system, individual and collective goals can sometimes diverge. For the whole to operate effectively, there must also be a countervailing force — breaking boundaries, expanding collaboration, and so on. Division of labor brings efficiency, but thriving requires the boost of close cooperation.