Leadership lessons from code to culture

From debugging code to guiding teams, these essays share the hard-won lessons of building systems, scaling payments, and leading with clarity.

Written by Suma Manjunath, an engineering leader with 20 years of experience in systems, payments, and scaling teams. Build Tales shares lessons from the trenches of building resilient platforms.

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How U.S. Payments Really Work

Demystify the rails moving trillions daily.

Build, Break, Lead

Lessons from the trenches of engineering leadership.

Designing for Failure

Patterns for resilient systems that don’t go down.

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Browse all engineering leadership, systems, and payment articles

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Recent Articles

ACH Dishonored Returns: Interbank Operational Disputes and How to Handle Them

How to handle ACH dishonored returns (R61–R70): what they mean, why they occur, and how to design operational workflows that resolve interbank disputes without harming...

Payments

ACH Retries: Designing a Safe, Compliant Retry Engine

Building a retry engine for ACH payments that handles failures gracefully while staying compliant with NACHA rules and avoiding duplicate submissions.

Payments

ACH Limits at Scale: Surviving Entry File Dollar Caps

How to handle ACH dollar limits when processing millions of transactions and why entry file caps matter more than you think.

Payments

ACH Cutoffs: The Hidden Clock That Breaks Your UX

Understanding the invisible time constraints that make ACH payments feel slow and how to design around these hidden deadlines.

Payments

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