Coinbase is a digital currency platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system. Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more intuitive to use.
Salesforce Stack
Leadership
Developers
Administrator
Business Analyst/Product Owner
Architects
A big factor that stands out in the structure of Coinbase's org is how efficiently the org is designed as well as the emphasis placed on Analytics as a discipline.
While the in-house Salesforce team is large, experienced, and well structured, it is what you'd expect in a 3,000+ person org with complex Customer Experience / Support Operations that spans a B2C (Retail) and B2B (Institutional) customer base. The Salesforce team has an overarching Sr. Manager guiding strategy across Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Communities, and Mulesoft while delegating much of the project planning to a team of 4 Product Owners. These individuals each have a 'product area' within Salesforce and manage small pods of Salesforce Administrators / Developers - team sizes of 11 and 6, respectively.
A key advantage to how Coinbase has staffed this team appears to be the seniority of these Product Owners. In some organizations, the Product Owner layer serves more as a Business Systems Analyst, gathering requirements that are turned into strategy by Salesforce Architects. However, the seniority of these Product Owners (some coming from Slalom and other top-tier Salesforce Consulting Partners), enables them to liaise with stakeholders, gather requirements, design solutions and translate to requirements for Admins / Developers, and then manage the actual build work. This is a significantly more efficient way to structure an org.
Similarly, the support for other applications has the resource allocation you'd expect with 3 Administrators focused on Workday and 1 that splits time on Netsuite support. However, the Analytics emphasis was a pleasant surprise.
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