YouSaid · the spoken record

Nilan Peiris

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-09-24
most recent: 2023-09-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You can find me online on Twitter, Nilan P. And always love to hear product feedback by email, by tweet, by LinkedIn, generally by Tweet's best, easiest for me to pick up and my team to reach into directly. So hit me up that way. Most useful for me, yeah, product feedback. And as I said, people working on other people working on hard problems that need help, do reach out.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one MOT would love to say. So from the early days, we got everyone together from all around the world once a year. I actually did it twice a year. And the founders are from Estonia. We still have like, we have 5,000 people now. So we have still have about 1800 in Estonia. So it's cheaper to flavor onto Estonia. So in the old days when it was winter, winter in Estonia is not fun, right? But somewhere in Estonia is amazing. And we still do this. And the funnest bit about this is I have a side hustle DJ. So I get to DJ there. And it's quite fun and embarrassing for my kids because technically I'm now DJ'd in another countries.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's the thing that I hold on to most because you kept getting knocked a lot, you know, high growth company, and it's obviously quite, obviously knocks you when someone says no to an offer, when somebody leaves the company, when a product doesn't work as you think it should, when you get pushback from a partner. But yeah, if you kind of like lose four hours being like spinning around it or you try and figure out, okay, this happened. How do I move forward and just learning how to shorten that time has probably been one of the most important journeys for me?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I sent it to my wedding team everyone and what I loved about it is Clearly, like if you could try to use arc with the same way you use Crow, you'd just get really frustrated. So they know, but if you use it the way they want you to use it, it'd be amazing. So figuring out how to get people to engage with you, use this fundamentally differently, they managed to almost get me to use it the right way, still struggling a little bit with it, but that I thought was really clever.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the limit? What's the thing they found? And what did they get stuck with? And you kind of say, okay, you're going to run into that here every day, every week, or you should be fine. And that's kind of why I ask that question.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's only asked to go down to asking just two questions over time. The first one is probably my favorite, which is what is it that most frustrates you about why, instead of why you're leaving, what frustrates you the most about where you work in right now? And this is as People always tell you why they want to join ways or join whatever company you're coming to, and that's not that interesting. But what's interesting, try and figure out, is what they're running away from. And usually there's something broken there that's really wound them up. But what's more interesting is they've been unable to fix it. And so, and I'll ask you this question on probing, you kind of get quite good at getting a sense of like.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where this guy kills somebody and they just like eats him up. It's pretty amazing. But it's not as heavy as it sounds, but book's like that pretty awesome. So I recommend that a lot. And the other end of the scale has like sometimes you read a book and there's a single sentence where each word has been just stitched together and like it's like again a workabout and they're rushy. It's like probably the pinnacle for me midnight children, which is about partition in India, which is pretty through a metaphor, which is pretty amazing.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two ones at the other ends of the spectrum. So, one is this sounds terribly pretentious, crime and punishment. And the other one is midnight children by Selman Rusty. I read a lot. I'm very passionate about reading non fiction mainly. Non-fiction is like too much like work. And so generally to read before I go to bed to decompress my brain, it's a generally escapist type stuff. But I'm curious what you think of this. For me, authors are people that create people with words is good artists, a good likeness to somebody. But imagine you create somebody with words and that person feels real. They have insight into the human condition. And what's amazing is if you learn something about what it means to be human from reading that. So like at that end of scale, Dostomesky, chromopunishment.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's essentially came out of Angel Invest things, probably the way to say it. So I invest in startups, generally fintechs, mission-led founders, word of mouth type stuff, all the stuff we've been talking about that I'm passionate about is less investing, more helping. And yeah, just getting through the Angel route. And then over time, I realized the thing I'm most passionate about is market failures. So generally I find that the invisible hand means most human needs get get fulfilled by the market. And there are a few things that don't. And there's a couple of exciting startups out there who work really hard in the space. A couple are Beam in the UK or working on homelessness, Affinity, Neobank in Ghana. And so this type of thing is stuff I'm most passionate about. So if any of your listeners out there know anyone doing it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When they actually know the value they get. So we got this on speed as well, where we do an instant transfers and customers would know it was instant. So when you get instant transfer, there's like this whizzy animation at the end and you kind of know the money's in the other person's account ready to spend. And again, you see big jump in referral rate when that happens, but people need to know it's happened. And closing this doubt between what you've done and what's perceived to be done is what I call product marketing, like within the product. And that in its own rights a discipline I've learned.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's rexa sharing rate. We always had the share button after you completed a transfer, but putting that there with this graph. And that kind of got me to this, I'm curious in your take on this, on this definition of product marketing where Customers use the product and they think they got this value.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then they put this graph on the success page when you did a transfer. So you save this. And put a share button. And they bite your friend's button. And that's what really drove it. When you fast forward to today, we've now got hard. So we now have, I think, about 70 bank accounts around the world. So I think like the top three accounts banks in the world where we log on to every day and then we log the price and the quote for a bunch of different routes into a file. You can imagine how hard it is. I think I personally have about 17 of these still, you might name the Upper Out of the World to help the team get going. But that's kind of one of the biggest word of mouth growth or referral insights I got to this comparison thing, made it into our marketing, made it to our homepage, just went everywhere up front that insight.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the fun bit was the approach. So then him and the designer sat there and they sketched out an alternative email and they went down to the coffee shop downstairs and they showed it to people and they said, just ask them what they thought. And they kept iterating it till they got to a graph. And this graph is like when you go through a money transfer thing, it pops up in places behind the compare button. And this graph shows with your bank when you send how much is in the rate hidden as a this is how much you're sending, this is how much they take in the rate in a fee. This is how much you can see in the fee because the fees are hidden in the rate of the banks. And this is with wise. And they iterate this graph to the point that people looked at it like, oh my God, I'm never using my bank again. This number, this is crazy.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, I'll share this one because it's interesting. So we run many variants of referral friend where you'll get different kinds of benefit. We've tried chocolate. We've fried money. We've tried $200, $500, $10. You get some, I get some money, like all kinds of things. More or less headed towards three for $100 generally like a sweet spot. Anyway, a pretty creative PM. He was again talking to customers, and he spotted this thing, which was pretty cool, which is when you do a transfer with Wise at the end to get this email, the email says, well then, your money's there, the other person's account, and you saved $10 on this transfer. And he got this insight, which was pretty awesome, was he realized that people believe they saved money, but they didn't believe the number.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One tiny bit I'll share, which was around marketing and referral. This was super interesting for me. So we've been running it, like Airbnb, we've been running referral program for now 12 years. And after 12 years, you've kind of tested everything anyway. And like I said, by this point, you have literally tested everything. So when somebody comes up with something that has like a 300% increase, like, oh, whoa, that's super interesting. What just happened?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Today, I think that autonomy is at the squad level. So the squads are around products. So you'll have a wise account squad, a business squad, a wise platform, an enterprise product squad. You'll have a Northampton squad that looks after North American product and Latam squad, et cetera. And then financial crime fighting, et cetera. And inside those squads, you've got the teams. And the squad, like imagine the director for the WISE account, you can't have a vision for the account. You've got to say where it's going. You've got to keep your teams on track against it. The teams aren't off doing whatever they want. They kind of need to be on track versus the overall vision. And you're accountable for the results of that squad. And squads are in tribes. The tribe provides overall leadership and a light touch strategy on the squads. And that's more or less our structure and how we've evolved towards it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work till we got to up to 30 teams, you go from doing this in the afternoon to doing in two days and like it's just like whoa. So we started heading towards the Spotify model where we group the teams in squads and into tribes.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Figure, yeah, you more or less got it. So that's one bit on structure this global local thing. And the second one has been a bit more of a journey. So, when we started early on, we ran in autonomous independent teams, all focused on KPIs. And these KPIs rolled up to make it cheaper, make it faster, make it easier to use. You can imagine like a KPI tree and teams around bits of their KPIs and every quarter they talk through how they move their KPI, et cetera. This kind of worked. And the way we ran our planning is every quarter, every team would stand up and talk through his plan, get feedback from other teams, and then move on.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this second complexity we have is we have all these markets we have to be in because we're international by default. So a lot of our thinking is where do we take that into, turn that into a competitive advantage and which customer base really needs that, which is what zooms us into that positioning on the international account.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Commit directly to the code base, and then this global team's got this challenge of doing this, and we over time create sub teams around parts of the regionalization of the structure, around different objects as they emerge. But that, broadly speaking, is the first problem, like the global problem. And the other bit with us is this is quite unique to us because most fintechs out there, usually in one market. And that's like you take Robin Heard. It was in the US. It came to the UK, they went back to the US, you take Monzo, only the UK M26, only in Europe, up in Australia, China, in the US. And that's because their home markets are so big. And one regulator is a ton of work to manage.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work between the local and the global, but unlike every other business, most businesses solve this probably, as you know, is you have, you usually have the US and then you have international law. And international law is usually a bump type where everyone's arguing to get their thing prioritized, right?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Domain model, let's call it that for the onboarding flow should look like. And you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local regional teams that are the conversion rate and the cost to do KYC for their market. And they contribute to the global product code base. So we have weak product ownership where anyone can make code change and pull requests. And these guys own the vision in the center. But the only way that vision can evolve is by getting the feedback from these guys in the market as they're constantly pushing stuff forward. And through that process, like artifacts start emerging where other markets are like Japan and slowly you start splitting off that and creating subtypes for it and slowly the model emerges from there. And so with this structure, the thing to optimize for is a really hard one, that problem that every global business has, is how do you get this collaboration?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Imagine you're the product manager from onboarding and someone tells you design the onboarding float to give somebody a bank, just imagine gathering all the requirements from every country in the world because there's very little similarity. You can't just say I take the US and copy it somewhere else. It's very, very, very different. Take forever to try to get that and then normalize that into a domain model and try to figure out how you're going to structure the data around this. So then becomes like, what is the organization structure that enables us to discover”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regulation in Australia and Brazil is really different. And it isn't black and white in any country, right? So there's like a bunch of like, you get a bunch of things you just shouldn't do in terms of letting people get so kind of people who shouldn't get access to accounts. And then you need to check these people I'm using it and different jurisdictions are completely different requirements. An example is Japan. You can take a picture of the front of the ID, the back of the ID and the side of your ID. The only country in the world that you have to do this.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a single global tech stack, and we have deep local infrastructure. Now, from a technological perspective, take a step back and peek through this, this is actually non-trivial to figure out how to design. So let's take something like the onboarding flow. We have global product teams who are one part of product teams called Global Product Teams. We have a single onboarding flow that will give you a Waze account. It's the same code that runs, whether you're in Brazil or New York or Australia.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you take a step back and look at how the market looks, you have at one end international banks, which are local tech stacks. So there's a core banking system in the US and one in the UK and one in Europe, say for Citibank or for Asia BC. They have deep local integrations. So they're directly integrated in the payment system. CDBank and the US has got a relationship, say, with the Federal Reserve, et cetera Other end of the spectrum, we've got something like PayPal, so it's tech company, it's got a single global tech stack, doesn't run a digital version of PayPal in Australia, then to the US. It doesn't have deep connections. It hasn't got 5 central bank accounts, right? It hasn't got any of that. And I like to think of in the middle, you've got wise.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two unique lenses on this. One is in the macro structure and one is in the microstructure. At the macro level, if you look at international, actually international banks, they don't really exist. I'm not sure if you've moved around between countries, but say you open a bank account with Citibank in the US, and then you go to Citibank in the UK, your Citibank account doesn't exist in the UK. You have to go to Citibank in the UK and open a Citibank account. And it actually turns out with some of these banks to move money between your bank accounts is an international transfer. It's like, it's crazy.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's two beds. So, one is definitely the founders have this philosophy that. Unless you're doing something hard and new. Kind of a waste of time. So I think that also kind of runs through the culture. So it's quite a rude way. Do you think when people join Wise, they're like, okay, I've got to come and just play around with a few things. You're like, no, actually, the culture of the product team is like, we're super incentivized to do the hard things. And that's what's rewarded. And that's quite hard to create the air cover. You can imagine in the early days or months when growth was slow and people turn on the money tabs in marketing and you're trying to keep focus on plugging away up these hard things, it's quite hard also to get there. The management cover in order to let the teams keep doing this. And then it's also hard just to turn up to work and really keep, you can imagine being in Singapore very fine customers face to face thinking this is going nowhere. This is going no way. This is going nowhere. And then suddenly changes this rate. That's what progress very much feels like wise. And we try to recognize that and create a culture that enables that.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And imagine you're a startup. How the hell do you get a bank account at the central bank? But that kind of thinking, we now have a bank account at the Bank of England, National Bank of Singapore, Bank of Australia, and each of these was like as hard as, you know, getting that face-to-face verification thing in Singapore, it took like years of lobbying and all kinds of stuff in order to make it happen, right? But it's setting your goal all the way up there. That's what enables you to build a 10x better product. That's what gets you to work about. So the first step is getting super clear on what's the problems that the customers are caring about worrying about. And then once you're clear there, like you said, how can I solve that completely? And what's the best it could possibly be? And then the hard bit is figuring out how to move that.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it just comes back to talking to customers, and this is the question we've kept coming back to, like, what would it take to make it 10x better? And then you get clear in your head what it would take. And then it's usually the thing that everyone's looked at before and thought it's the thing that's impossible. One more example is like on the partner side. So rather than find a cheaper bank for a banking partner, you think, oh, the cheapest banking partner.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's exactly it. And so now then you have all these other problems because we got like about $12.5 billion in deposits now, which is like a time. And the next prop customers are at is like, I want to return, right? And we don't quite deliberately don't have a banking license. You have to figure out how we're going to solve that. So we now put customers' money in government bonds, US bonds. And when you pay with your card, it dynamically sells those bonds. And that's how we give you an interest rate in like around about 5% right now given where bond rates are.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with whites, you can get an Australian bank account number with three clicks. Anyone can, and any business can, and you get an Australian balance and a US and a UK and a Swiss balance. And this is killer for businesses that receive money internationally. And then the next big jump we did. And for consumers, there are plenty of people like if all your banking is in the US, you probably shouldn't use WISE. But if you're somebody who uses another currency a lot, then you probably should use this as your primary bank. There's some people, for example, who live in one country and get paid in another currency. And this is great as an account for managing that. And we found with that, we got about, like, as we launched the account in markets, it was about, you know, like a 20 to 30 percent more volume, cross-border volume coming through wise from that market. So it's a good example of how, well, it's not price, not speed. You could argue is kind of a.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, really good example is for businesses. So, if you're a business, say, in, say, a business in Europe, you've got a customer in Australia and you want to get paid, you send them an invoice in euros and someday somebody is going to turn off in your account. You're like, I don't know, right? They paid you an AUD. You got changed by three banks of the way through. You don't know what it is, what you'd love to do. Is it more in AUD? and get AUD in your bank account. You might even have people need to pay an AUD. It's cool to keep it there. But to get an Australian bank account, I found out you need to fly to Australia. You need to incorporate a business in Australia. You need to go to a bank with all those papers and then they will give you an Australian bank account.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aunt Tony, the business one example is relevant and we use it a lot when we talk to investors in the market and public kind of helps validate this low cost cutting price story. What's interesting is what changed though. So we started with transfers, but we got to account and then we got to enterprise and just how what changed was we realized with account if you just have to move $10, you're not going to download an app and do it If you do it once, you're just going to do it in your bank. And so that was a little bit of the insight behind building the wise account. And we kind of focused on there's a real problem with international banking.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you Google currency competitor, there's tons of traffic, right? And that converter on the WISE homepage obviously includes our price and lets you sign up. And so like, should we build a currency competitor? Should we try to capture this traffic? Is it more effective to try to push our own product there? And you can kind of understand why it was Christ actually, not me. It was like, this is a crazy idea. And the founder and the SEO team went out and built it and it's like huge, all right, in terms of visits. I think we've got a currency converter app out there. I think we've got Multiforth out there. And yeah, people discover why is through that. It's like example of off-topic traffic. That's a good example of one of those things where, yeah, the founder said no or must have a bad idea. We kind of went ahead and did it anyway.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Year a couple. So, the one point that ahead of us he always talks about is a currency converter. So the wise homepage is a pretty good currency converter, it's got a decent one up there. There's tons of traffic on currency converter. So if you click wise, now it's a little bit hidden on sand. It's there. It's pretty cool.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, as I say, we almost everything we do, we have some way of understanding the impact. So that's always there. We definitely have things where the team does something where Crystal and I will say, this is just crazy. It's like, there's no one's ever going to use this. And then we have a culture where people encourage to do these things if they believe in it.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then this generally is what you said, where the team needs a validation, mainly for themselves and maybe in a performance, but not too much. And so there were ways in which you can maybe get some breed on it that isn't quite as strong as a split test, right? Which we're using these things. So it's more just getting some, you can understand that people worried when you do split tests that slow down the release of something, but in order to get an impact if you know you're not going to roll it back, then, okay, you just roll it out and try to reduce the need for the.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a good one. This one is definitely an ongoing debate. So I generally ask teams what's their impact, right? So every quarter, every team, what sound of Krista will ask, what did you ship? And I generally ask how many people used it, what was the impact on volume, et cetera. And we have analyst teams that can answer to this, either with pre-post analysis, all kinds of techniques, or through split tests. We generally have this. The debate is where the analysis slows us down. And we wouldn't make a decision off the back of the analysis.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, so we definitely do. So you're right, but there's a very different thing to when you look at from a sample size perspective, you want to do a beta and understand the negative impact. It's a holdout group that's smaller than a test to get a significance. Like it's quite define the criteria to know whether something is breaking is generally a different thing to say, is this a material result in a test.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have some way of using data to kind of get this conviction and show why this is what we should do, but try to learn how to build that faster CME slight difference. So it's less product managers on me saying, hey guys, I think it's eggs. It's generally data driven and qualitative insights driven as well.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the challenge of this is because it does become this hoop hoop thing of where it's like, okay, someone's opinion, right? So I think it's X, right? And everyone thinks they're kind of Steve Jobs type thing. Yeah.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to go talk to people and get cognitive insights and build your own gut feel around what matters and then launch it and test it and see if it works. But this thing of building conviction on what matters. And I watch how teams slowly build this. And you need the data there to make sure it doesn't become a hubris, right? That enables you to make much bigger changes than just experimenting away and it forces you to get clearer on what actually is the problem to solve here and how do I solve it really, really well. Does that make sense? Lenny, do you disagree? It's a bit provocative. There's some people are pretty strong on the experiment-led approach”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After corner, I said, So, what are you going to build? And he's like, I'm going to test everything. I'm going to test the landing page. I'm going to test the subject line. I'm going to test the program. So I don't know yet to like run through all the tests. Then I'm going to come back and tell you what I'm going to build. They're not going to do this. I'm going to give you three weeks. You're going to pick one thing to change”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's it. You got it. And that conviction is to kind of our product management approach on the UX. So this is a great line for us internally. I'm sure you've heard it. You can't split test your way to love, right? So this experiment-led product management approach where you kind of throw a bunch of things on the wall and then you kind of see what sticks generally we don't advocate this. Obviously there's a bit of it that happens, but generally don't advocate it mainly because engineering is expensive and you can actually figure out what matters to customers through other means. Some of the techniques we've talked and build it. There's a story I like to share. I had a product manager join our referral friend team, a viral gross team and invite team.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And just marginally getting there step by step by step and trying to trap the incremental return is actually slower. And there's a point that comes that you go, I feel really comfortable investing in price. I feel comfortable investing in speed because I know it's going to pay back. Not necessarily this month, but eventually it will. And I need to make gains on all three levers in order to get there. Does that make sense?”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This word around conviction is one I use a lot where you build this conviction that praises what matters. And through these incremental split tests, you will take a long time to go there. But at some point, you kind of go, actually, I've got enough conviction. So there's one kind of strategic bet at the heart of ways that is if we have the lowest cost platform and it's really fast and really high quality, the world's volume will switch to us.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely on the journey at the beginning you're into split testing, right? Let's try to take apart a split test on price. So you've systemically dropped the cost. Imagine we dropped the cost. And the question is, do we drop the price? Do we pass that all on to customers? And then we keep some of it. And split testing on their price thing The split test is going to mean you end up with more revenue. It means you drop the price by 10% and there happen to be that day more than 10% more customers in the market who what they saw the price at one pound but they see the price at 90p 10 lower and they're like i wasn't going to shift buy it but i'm going to buy it 90p so this is like pretty hard to kind of do this”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You generally do everything you need to do to make money. You do two things with the customer lessons. You go, customer led business. And the neat thing about Y's that I'm pretty sure you'll see the same thing on Airbnb is we just had one list, which is this list of things that you need to do to make customers happy and is prioritized by impact on the really hard things. If you do these really hard things, they have an incredible impact for customers, but hence on your growth and on your shareholder value.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It just sounds again very twey, right? And like tweet, like sounds very cool for it, sounds like it's never going to work. But I think it's also Airbnb, the authenticity is there, right? Passionate about making that experience work for both sides of the marketplace is kind of clear. So I'm kind of taking a step back personally, very passionate about customer-led growth. And how that turns into shareholder value. So taking a step back, we're kind of, every business I've ever worked in, it's always got these two lists and lists of things to do for your customers. And then it's got a list of things to do to make money.”
2023-09-24 · Lenny's Podcast · How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source