“Do it, do it, automate it”: FINN’s CTO on courage and no-code

When it comes to efficiency, Andreas Stryz doesn’t pull his punches. 

FINN, a fast-growing German platform for new car subscriptions, had to take on large incumbents to enter its ultra-competitive market. So its CTO and Co-Founder Andreas (Andi) Stryz knows just how vital it is for a young company to find efficiencies that drive speed and innovation.  

For Andi, driving efficiency throughout the company is critical to ensuring FINN can deliver on its mandate to make the global economy more sustainable.

“Efficiency is ultimately just your ability to achieve results without wasting resources. We’re talking about sustainability here. We’re talking about CO2 emissions. So don’t waste freaking resources. Do your freaking job. This is something essential.”

At FINN, this mindset translates into a ruthless focus on improving processes all across the business, with both technical and non-technical people empowered to identify and build solutions wherever necessary. So how does Andi foster this mentality?

A “do it” attitude

For businesses to continuously improve their processes, there needs to be a persistent cultural appetite for change. For Andi, this means there needs to be an almighty, relentless willingness to ‘break things’ in order to make something better. 

“I have a strong belief that if you are not breaking something at work, if you aren’t making existing processes fall apart in some way, you’re not working. If you aren’t making any mistakes, you’re either too slow or you’re just not working. 

“So how we established this at FINN was very simple. I did the onboarding sessions, I recorded videos about how to use Make.com, how to use Airtable. I literally took away the fear of people breaking things.”

With such strong leadership from Andi and his co-founders, this commitment to a cycle of continuously breaking processes to improve them could be construed as a top-down initiative. But the way Andi sees it, his focus is really about doing everything in his power to ensure there’s a bottom-up commitment to this culture. 

“The focus is on building up the DNA and culture, to equip everyone to break everything. If you can break it, that’s fine, we can fix it. The idea is to enable chaos for a while and then put a structure on it, instead of starting with a structure and avoiding chaos.

“Look, if something breaks and it's not a problem, then that automation wasn't really valuable, was it? That's the reality. So I think it's very important to have monitoring and alerting. We’re applying well known engineering practices on the no-code and automation infrastructure. We have a dedicated DevOps and platform team. A centralist team for tooling and security of two individuals reporting to the CTO.”

A culture of fearlessness powered by no-code

Central to Andi’s efforts to establish this fearless culture of relentless innovation and efficiency is the widespread use of no-code platforms to empower even non-technical employees to build solutions wherever they see fit.

Andi explains:

“In my very first days of hiring, I didn’t have enough engineers but we nevertheless had to move forward. So I equipped all non-engineers with no code so they could build automations themselves. And what we see every day is we’ve removed the annoying tasks for engineers. So engineers can focus on solving problems that truly only engineers can solve.”

In fact, since Andi also actively tracks engagement with the tools he provides to ensure his people love using them, he knows for certain that more than half of the over 400 employees at FINN are currently using Make’s no-code automation on a weekly or monthly basis. 

“It’s baked into our DNA now. They know about the tool, it’s part of the onboarding process, but it’s up to them to use it. Every new starter would feel weird not using Make because everyone else is using it.”

For a technologist like Andi, this emphasis on taking advantage of no-code is in line with FINN’s mantra of ‘“Do it, do it, automate it”’. It is this strong belief in the value of automation and the importance of pursuing efficiency that have helped Andi build such an enviable culture at FINN. It’s also why this dynamic, young company has been able to establish such a strong position for itself in both Germany and the US car subscriptions markets. 

Armed with this mindset and these tools, there’s no telling how far their courage will take them. 

Find out how Andreas and 5 other experts scaled their businesses with no-code. Read our guide, Scale without code: The path to rapid automation and growth.