Toss began with a simple, common-sense statement: "Let's solve our customers' inconveniences." The innovation Toss created at the time wasn't about functional complexity, but experiential simplicity. They shook up existing financial practices by eliminating user friction in financial experiences through complete UI/UX—addressing button language, flow friction, and waiting anxiety. While other players had to simultaneously consider financial regulations, legacy systems, and stakeholder interests, Toss first asked what users actually felt at their fingertips. This choice was both a small startup's challenge to the established market and a restoration of common sense from the user's perspective.
But does company growth mean the era when simplicity could overcome complexity has ended? Growth—meaning revenue pressure, customer acquisition, business portfolio diversification, and regulatory and risk management—demands that "customer-centricity" transform from a belief into an operable system. Providing users with beautiful experiences alone couldn't guarantee business sustainability. As terms like operating profit, CAC payback period, and unit economics became important, "company survival" gradually took center stage in team decision-making over customers. Like any organization facing this dilemma, they had to grapple with how to simultaneously satisfy "user-centricity" and "business sustainability."
Should we view this change not just as "change" but as a signal that business perspective resolution has increased? They've moved from a phase of throwing fundamental questions like a child asking "Why is this so difficult?" and boldly maximizing speed with simple solutions, to a stage of dealing with the inevitably complex affairs of adults. Regulatory compliance, security, partnership structures, diversified revenue models—all of these aren't unrelated to the value customers experience. Rather, they can serve to strengthen the foundation of experience by supporting safety and trust from invisible layers. The problem arises when this complexity takes precedence and erodes the intuitiveness and simplicity users feel. At the point when bureaucratization disguised as business maturity begins, user voices become smaller under the pressure of KPIs and numbers.
So what's needed in business at a time like this? Perhaps a clear redefinition of "user-centricity." It's an expansion from the "aesthetics" of delighting customers to the "practicality" of protecting customers and saving their time. This requires looking at two axes simultaneously: the axis of whether we've reduced customer time, anxiety, and effort through metrics like retention, time to problem resolution, complaint/churn reasons, and NPS; and the axis that determines business survival and expansion through contribution margin and regulatory compliance costs. Focusing on just one axis might be easy and seemingly reasonable in the short term, but it won't sustain business in the long run. We need to consider both axes together, and organizations need to clearly agree on priority rules when these two values conflict. I've experienced firsthand how desperately this kind of agreement is needed in the Ads Domain's in-app advertising. The balance between revenue and experience—creating "advertising that delivers benefits and value without harming customer experience"—is ultimately not a technical issue but one of priority consensus.
The role of UI/UX also changes. If early UX was interpreted as "beauty and simplicity," now it must take on an architectural role of hiding complexity that arises from scale. Even when segmented risk policies, differential rates, and partner-specific exceptions are intertwined behind the same button and flow, users should only see consistent rules and predictable results. Design moves from "surface aesthetics" to "designing invisible rules." If this transition fails, customers experience complexity; if it succeeds, customers don't even know complexity existed.
This is where we need to return to our original intentions. But we must reinterpret these intentions not as "naivety" but as an attitude of hypothesis testing. While unconditional growth and user-centric thinking were weapons in the early days, now we need bidirectional capability—translating user problems into the language of money and translating money constraints back into user language. We must constantly experiment with and rationalize what value customers are willing to pay for, what costs and risks are involved in providing that value, and whether that difference connects to steady cash flow. This isn't about abandoning customers, but elevating customer-centricity from belief to operable economics.
This is where we need to return to our original intentions again. However, we must reinterpret these intentions not as "naivety" but as an attitude of hypothesis validation. While unconditional growth and user-centric thinking were weapons in the early days, now we need bidirectional capability to translate user problems into the language of money and translate money constraints back into user language. We must constantly experiment with and verify what value customers are willing to pay for, what costs and risks are involved in providing that value, and whether that difference leads to sustainable cash flow. This isn't about abandoning customers, but about moving customer-centricity from belief to an operable system.
Perhaps Toss's next chapter can be summarized like this: The purity and execution power of the early business days provided direction, and today's structure provides sustainability. Growth is a reciprocating motion between these two. Not losing the child-like purity of asking "Why is this so complex?" while demonstrating through execution the adult answer of "Let's still make it feel simple." When strategy and culture evolve so that reducing customer time and anxiety ultimately leads to managing company profit and risk, perhaps we can become adults without losing our original intentions. And only then might we be able to say: "Our customer-centric DNA hasn't disappeared. It has simply evolved into a more complex form."