People Create Excellence, but Systems Make It Last

In this post, I want to talk about what I’ve been thinking about over the roughly two and a half years I’ve spent as a frontend chapter lead at Toss.

My job and goal as a chapter lead at Toss is clear: make the Toss frontend chapter the most excellent engineering organization in the world.

There are many ways to define “excellence,” but what I believe truly matters isn’t creating excellence in the current moment — it’s building an organization that can march toward excellence on its own, even without me.

Organizational Excellence Is Built from Individual Excellence

What Is an Excellent Organization?

I believe an excellent organization is fundamentally a collection of excellent individuals. When exceptional people come together, stimulate each other, and work side by side, organizational excellence naturally follows. And indeed, the Toss frontend chapter has many outstanding developers who quickly grasp complex problems, craft elegant solutions, and help each other grow.

When leading a small organization, you can build excellence by establishing clear technical and cultural hiring standards and focusing on collecting exceptional talent. That’s why at my previous company, I remember pouring the most energy into hiring.

But the Toss frontend chapter is a large organization — around 250 people across the broader community, with nearly 140 in the Toss Core frontend chapter where I work. Leading an organization this large requires a different approach than leading a small one.

At this scale, simply gathering excellent individuals isn’t enough. With more diverse people joining, the organization needs significantly more energy to understand each person’s strengths and capabilities and make sound decisions.

From 10 to 140: The Need for Systems

Back when the frontend chapter had around 10 people, everyone could know each other in detail — faces, names, personalities.

But when I returned to Toss, the frontend chapter had already grown into a massive organization compared to before.

Even within the same chapter, there are cases where people don’t know who else is on the team. If you’re not actively paying attention, you might not even notice when new hires join. The rules of the game are simply different with 10 people versus 140.

Even a chapter lead, without making a deliberate effort, would find it extremely difficult to understand this many people’s strengths, growth trajectories, and motivations. Right now, individual effort from leads still covers things to some degree, but if the headcount keeps growing, there will inevitably come a point where even that becomes impossible.

Information about individuals would fragment across the minds of multiple leads, and depending on who interacts with which lead, some people would naturally become more visible while others fade into the background.

That’s why I concluded that the lead’s role in this game needs to shift — from “directly caring for people” to “building systems that make the organization excellent on its own.”

Spin the Flywheel That Creates Organizational Excellence

As I mentioned, the key to building an excellent organization is designing one that naturally gravitates toward excellence on its own. This is similar to the flywheel effect borrowed from product development.

The flywheel effect describes a structure where small, repeated impacts accumulate to produce increasingly larger outcomes. It requires a lot of energy at first, but once it starts spinning, momentum allows it to generate bigger results with less effort.

Similarly, in organizational management, when individual activities connect into a virtuous cycle, excellence naturally accelerates.

The flywheel I’ve designed for an excellent organization consists of six stages:

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1. Recruit: Gather exceptional talent obsessed with growth.
2. Self-awareness: Understand the organization’s expectations and your current state.
3. Opportunity: Provide opportunities for prepared talent to experience the next level of growth in small increments.
4. Recognition: Deliver tangible and psychological rewards to those who’ve achieved growth, giving them a sense of acknowledgment and accomplishment.
5. Contribution: People with positive experiences participate in chapter activities, making the organization more excellent.
6. Branding: Organize and share the chapter’s excellent work externally.

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Stage 1: Recruit — Gather Exceptional Talent Obsessed with Growth

Building an excellent organization requires a continuous inflow of exceptional talent. The important thing here isn’t simply finding skilled people — it’s finding people who are obsessed with growth and have high growth potential.

Identifying these people during the hiring process matters, but what matters even more is branding that makes people on the outside think, “If I go there, I can grow even more” — naturally driving more applications to Toss.

We need to concretely show what technical capabilities the Toss frontend chapter has and what kind of culture it fosters. This is exactly where Stage 6 (Branding) connects back to Stage 1 (Recruit).

Stage 2: Self-awareness — View Organizational Expectations and Personal Strengths Through a Shared Language

I believe growth always starts with self-awareness. So the growth that an excellent organization produces ultimately begins with how accurately each member recognizes their own capabilities and strengths.

It’s similar to a strategy game. Think of Lü Bu and Zhuge Liang from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Both are exceptional talents, but the moment they’re given mismatched roles, their excellence vanishes. Assigning Lü Bu to domestic administration or sending Zhuge Liang into single combat would obviously produce poor results.

The problem is that in reality, people often don’t know whether they’re a Lü Bu or a Zhuge Liang — or they might be a Lü Bu who says they want to do administration. I think this is less about willpower and more about a lack of self-awareness.

That’s why I believe the first step toward growth in an excellent organization is helping members accurately recognize their own capabilities and strengths, then connecting them with the right growth opportunities.

Along these lines, the Toss frontend chapter uses a tool called the Skill Tree. Rather than a device for defining excellence, it’s more like a reference line that helps members see their current capabilities and strengths more clearly, and articulate their next growth direction for themselves.

Once someone can articulate their growth direction and strengths, leads use this information to coach them so their strengths translate into real outcomes and growth.

Stage 3: Opportunity — Let People Experience Growth in Small Increments

Once self-awareness is established, what the organization needs to do next is clear: provide opportunities for members to take on challenges without pressure and experience small wins. No matter how well someone understands their strengths and current state, growth remains theoretical without a real arena to try things in.

This conviction became sharper through a recent leadership survey. The results showed that interest in leadership roles was far greater than expected. However, a common response was: “I’m interested, but I don’t feel ready yet.”

At first, I assumed members felt their capabilities were lacking. But analyzing individual responses more closely, it was closer to “I don’t know what I should be preparing for or what capabilities I need to build.” In other words, the chapter wasn’t providing enough hints about the direction, standards, and methods of growth.

So I decided we needed to create more of these opportunities and expose them more frequently. Growth isn’t built from a single giant leap — it’s built on many small wins. We need to create an environment where chapter members can take on challenges without hesitation.

This problem awareness led to the creation of the Next F-Lead program. This program focuses on three core competencies: strategic thinking, interview skills, and 1-on-1 coaching. The goal isn’t to suddenly turn someone into a lead — it’s to let them experience the F-Lead role in small doses beforehand. Through this, members come to see leadership not as “something far removed from me” but as “a next step I can gradually prepare for.”

Beyond Next F-Lead, we’re working to help members envision their next steps more clearly through various education and experience programs. The key isn’t pushing anyone in a specific direction — it’s creating an environment where each person can try things and choose for themselves.

Someone who has experienced small wins can imagine bigger challenges, and that imagination translates into real action toward the next stage of growth. That’s why the Opportunity stage is crucial in the flywheel.

Stage 4: Recognition — Let People Experience Achievement Through Tangible and Psychological Rewards

Growth isn’t completed by experience alone. Recognition must follow for those who’ve produced growth. Positive feedback as a reward is easily underestimated in organizational management, but it’s actually one of the most important elements for re-accelerating the flywheel.

Within the Toss frontend chapter, there are already many people contributing to the organization by showcasing their strengths — people who consistently share technical knowledge, participate in activities like the Open Source Committee or Code Quality Committee, or build and share tools that help colleagues work better.

These contributions elevate the organization, but if their value isn’t made visible enough, even the contributors themselves may struggle to feel their own achievements. That’s why I believe these people need to be recognized more often and more clearly.

The same goes for people in lead roles. They don’t just deliver their own results — they help colleagues grow right beside them. From the organization’s perspective, it’s an extremely important role. From the individual’s perspective, it’s no light responsibility. There’s a lot to do and a lot to think about. For me, every day working alongside these people is filled with gratitude, and their dedication absolutely deserves to be rewarded.

That’s why the Toss frontend chapter is preparing a dedicated leadership education program for leads. Beyond just training, we’re also planning opportunities for deeper participation in chapter decision-making, along with explicit expansion of authority and roles. This isn’t just a reward — it’s a clear message: “The organization takes your growth seriously.”

Recognition isn’t the end of achievement — it’s the signal that starts the next phase of growth. Someone who has experienced accomplishment naturally wants to contribute again, and that contribution makes the organization more excellent once more. That’s why the Recognition stage is indispensable in the flywheel.

Stage 5: Contribution — Positive Experiences Make the Organization Excellent

People who’ve been recognized and experienced achievement naturally start contributing to the organization. And when these contributions are met with the recognition mentioned in Stage 4 — shout-outs, expanded authority, participation in decision-making — the behavior is naturally reinforced. This is the core of the flywheel.

I believe an organization becomes excellent when knowledge sharing, new ideas and feedback, and vigorous debate appear frequently. These are what contribution looks like, and these contributions collectively make an organization excellent.

The Toss frontend chapter has a long history of such contributions.

In the early days when the team was small, efforts like building internal libraries, developing TDS (Toss Design System), and creating admin tools were all driven by this kind of contribution. Now it takes the form of technical tool and knowledge sharing, the Open Source Committee, the Code Quality Committee, Frontend Accelerator mentoring, user accessibility improvements, and more.

Leads who completed Next F-Lead improve the program. Developers active in the Open Source Committee propose new libraries. Chapter members who’ve used the Skill Tree provide feedback. All of this is contribution.

Systems are improved by individuals, and improved systems in turn make more individuals excellent. The small flywheel is already spinning.

Stage 6: Branding — Share Excellence with the Outside World

The final stage is branding — organizing the excellent chapter’s activities and sharing them externally.

Currently, the Toss frontend chapter is building its brand of excellence through various activities: the Open Source Committee, Frontend Accelerator mentoring, the Frontend Fundamentals documentation project, and the Bonfire YouTube content series, among others.

For example, the Open Source Committee has produced several libraries including es-toolkit, es-hangul, and overlay-kit. es-toolkit in particular has been adopted by big tech companies like Microsoft, as well as well-known tools like Storybook and Yarn. It currently sees around 9 million weekly downloads.

Frontend Fundamentals and the Frontend Accelerator mentoring program aim to grow the broader frontend ecosystem. The hope is that this produces more excellent developers in the ecosystem, which in turn naturally funnels exceptional talent toward Toss — creating a virtuous cycle.

Content like the Bonfire YouTube series is an excellent vehicle for creating positive influence among many developers at relatively low cost. It naturally shows the standards by which the Toss frontend chapter writes code and who the developers within the chapter are, generating branding effects.

All of these activities deliver the message: “The Toss frontend chapter is an excellent organization.” People obsessed with growth who see this message are drawn to Toss. When branding works well, it feeds back into Stage 1 (Recruit), completing the flywheel.

Closing Thoughts

The thing I value most as a leader is building “an organization that runs without me.” It might sound paradoxical, but this is what true sustainability looks like.

Reducing individual dependency and leaving behind clear standards and functioning systems. Making the flywheel keep spinning even when I go on vacation, focus on something else, or even leave this role entirely. That’s why I’ve spent the past two and a half years focusing not on directly caring for people, but on building systems that make the organization excellent on its own.

A truly excellent organization is one that can continuously produce excellent individuals. And those individuals, in turn, make the organization even more excellent.

In truth, each system still has much room for improvement. The Skill Tree needs to become more refined. Next F-Lead needs to produce more leads. The recognition system is still being built. Above all, I’m still searching for a clear answer to whether all of this is truly “making the organization more excellent.”

But I’m confident the direction is right. Small wins are accumulating. Feedback from chapter members keeps flowing in. And most importantly, the small flywheel is actually spinning.

Organizational management isn’t a problem that yields answers overnight. But with a clear direction and functioning systems, I believe the flywheel will spin faster over time, and the Toss frontend chapter will become an even more excellent organization than it is today.