W50 - Division of Labor and Counter-Division

I was fortunate to be involved in most of the merchant-facing businesses, and recently I noticed some differences in team participation between the wallet and cashier businesses. You could also describe this as the contrast between exploratory businesses and mature ones.

The cashier system feels highly specialized and reliable. It has long business flows and many stakeholders; system complexity is split across multiple sub-departments—aggregator, Meituan Pay, transactions, unified payments, risk control, channel routing, gateway, and so on. Each sub-department tracks its own non-functional metrics and often has strong functional responsibilities, such as system stability.

The wallet feels like a smaller product-research-ops team that’s more agile, works more closely together, has stronger alignment on goals, and where individual contributions are more directly tied to business metrics.

A straightforward example is team-building activities: for the cashier team it’s very hard to gather all upstream and downstream stakeholders together.

This made me think of division of labor versus counter-division. Society, companies, and teams naturally evolve toward finer division of labor. Yet each person occupies a tiny local role within a vast division system, and individual goals can sometimes diverge from the whole. For a system to work effectively, there must also be forces that push against strict division—breaking boundaries, expanding collaboration, and so on. Division of labor brings efficiency, but thriving outcomes also require close cooperation.