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

RTP: Real-Time Payments With Real-World Bottlenecks

Exploring the promise of real-time payments and the practical bottlenecks that limit their true potential in production systems.

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Wallets & P2P Networks: Venmo, Cash App, PayPal, Zelle

Consumers think Venmo = cash. Engineers know better: wallets are ledger-first abstractions that sit on top of ACH and card rails. If you mistake 'instant...

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Why Card Networks Don't Have NOCs (and How to Build Your Own Downgrade Feedback Loop)

Unlike ACH, where Notifications of Change (NOCs) tell you exactly what to fix, credit card networks provide no standardized correction feed. If your transactions downgrade...

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Why Credit Card Interchange Fees Differ at Authorization vs Settlement (and How to Reconcile Them)

Understanding why credit card interchange fees change between authorization and settlement is crucial for payment system design. This article explores the reconciliation challenges and provides...

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