Every Thanksgiving table tells a story.
There is the relative who brings the perfectly seasoned stuffing. Someone else shows up with a store-bought pie that everyone still eats. There is always a cousin who wants to “experiment” with the turkey, and someone in charge of keeping the whole thing on schedule.
If you work in fintech or payments, this group probably sounds familiar.
Teams today mix specialists, innovators, traditionalists, planners, and problem-solvers. Everyone brings something different to the table, and the magic happens when it all comes together. Surprisingly, Thanksgiving dinner is a great analogy for how high-performing fintech teams operate in real life.
Here is what this classic holiday can teach us about building strong and well-balanced teams.
🧑🍳 The Chef: Your Product Leader
No Thanksgiving meal happens without the chef. In fintech, that is your Product Manager or Head of Product.
They set the menu, coordinate timing, listen to every opinion, balance the different requests, and still decide what ends up on the table. A good product leader blends engineering, compliance, design, partnerships, and operations the same way a chef blends ingredients. If one ingredient is off or the timing is wrong, the entire meal can suffer.
Product teams today sit at the crossroads of regulation, user experience, and technology. They are not just building features. They are coordinating a full meal.
🧂 The Ingredients: Data, Infrastructure, Engineering, and Partnerships
Even the most talented chef cannot overcome bad ingredients.
Your core ingredients in fintech include:
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Data
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Infrastructure
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Engineering
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Partnerships with networks, processors, and Banking as a Service providers
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Product tools and internal resources
These elements form the base of everything you create. They are the building blocks that define how your product tastes and performs. Teams that know how to combine these pieces with intention will always outperform teams that rely on improvisation.
⏱️ Timing: Your GTM Strategy
Anyone who has hosted Thanksgiving knows that every dish finishing at a different time creates chaos.
In fintech, timing problems look like:
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Marketing pushing announcements before support is ready
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Launching features before fraud controls are finalized
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Announcing partnerships before compliance reviews them
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Engineering shipping work before onboarding or CX knows what is changing
When your timing is off, the entire experience feels disjointed. When teams are aligned, everything comes together naturally.
🧪 The Experimenter: Your Innovation Team
Every family has someone who wants to deep fry the turkey or add jalapeños to the stuffing.
In fintech, this is your innovation group. They are the ones exploring new ideas, trying new technologies, imagining what is possible, and occasionally taking things a little too far.
You need people like this. Innovation keeps you competitive. It just works best inside clear guardrails so nothing accidentally burns down the kitchen.
👵 The Tradition Keeper: Compliance, Legal, Risk, and Fraud
No Thanksgiving is complete without someone reminding everyone that “we do it this way for a reason.”
This is your Compliance, Legal, Risk, and Fraud leadership. They protect the process and make sure nothing compromises safety or trust. Their work keeps everything consistent and secure, even when teams move quickly or pressures rise.
Fintech moves at high speed, but regulators do not. The strongest organizations bring these leaders into conversations early instead of waiting for the end.
🦃 The Turkey: Your Core Platform
The turkey is the center of the entire meal. Everything else depends on it.
Your core platform functions the same way:
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Payments stack
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Ledger
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Card issuing setup
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Banking integrations
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Platform infrastructure
If your platform is strong, everything built on top becomes easier. If the core is unreliable or rushed, no amount of pie can make up for it.
🥧 The Pie: Customer Experience
Everyone remembers the dessert.
In fintech, that is your overall customer experience. Clean onboarding, fast payouts, easy dispute handling, clear communication, and smooth UI are the pieces people talk about. These are the moments that create loyalty. They do not replace the “main course,” but they complete the experience.
🪑 The Table: Leadership Alignment
Thanksgiving dinner only works when everyone understands the plan.
Fintech is the same. Leadership alignment is the table everything sits on. When leadership is united around priorities and communication is clear, teams move faster. When it is not, even the most talented groups struggle.
🎉 The Big Lesson
A strong Thanksgiving dinner reflects everything a successful fintech team needs: planning, communication, timing, the right mix of people, and the ability to bring different strengths together.
Fintech teams face pressure every day, and the expectations are high. The ones that thrive are the ones that know how to coordinate like a holiday kitchen working in sync.
Want to build a team like this?
IMPACT Payments Recruiting helps companies find product, payments, engineering, compliance, and executive leaders who work well together and elevate the entire organization.
Contact us anytime at contactIPR@go-impact.com.
Wishing you and your team a warm and Happy Thanksgiving.
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