As a product manager, you’re only as effective as your ability to influence. That’s true of more than just your team. If you want to have outsize impact on your goals, whether that’s engagement, conversion or performance, you’re likely to need the help of people across your company. But how can you persuade them to put their own priorities aside and help move your metrics?
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Grow Growth Turing Fest 2021
How to make friends and influence people (to move your metrics)
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Hi, everyone. Thank you so, so much for coming along today. My talk is how to make friends and influence people to move your metrics. So quick introductions. I'm Amy Dicketts. I'm a senior product manager at Wise. Before Wise, was at Monzo, and I started my product career at the British Heart Foundation.
More excitingly, I'm actually a recent resident of Edinburgh, so I moved up in June. I have spent my summer bagging Monro's like this one. I actually got my vaccine at the EICC and also came to a fringe show here, and I didn't really expect the EICC to feature so heavily in my life in Edinburgh, but here we are, happy to be back again.
Thank you, Nilan, for putting me up to this. Sadly, I'm not here to talk about bagging Munro's climbing mountains as much as I would like to. Happy to talk about that in the Q and A after. No. So the talk is how can I move my metrics?
So you're probably here thinking, how can I hit my KPIs? So as a product manager, one of our biggest stresses is often how we're gonna hit our KPIs. How are we gonna get there as quickly and effectively as possible? But this is the wrong question.
Really, what you should be thinking about is how you can have the most impact for customers. Your role as a product manager is to optimize for impact. That's your own impact and the impact of your team. If you're optimizing for having impact for your customers, then thankfully along the way, as long as you've set the right goals, you're very, very likely to hit your KPIs.
And when you think about having impact, you often think about your best tool as your team. So you probably have four engineers, you have a designer, you have an analyst. And you're probably thinking, how much can you get done in a quarter or a year with that team?
You're probably thinking, how can you unblock them? How do you make sure they're working on the right things and going in the right direction? But what if we didn't just think about how much how much we can get out of our team? What if we had every single product engineering team at Wise focusing on the same goal and moving in the same direction?
We could probably start to have a lot more impact with all of those people working on the same goal. And what if we dream bigger? What if we had all of our operations teams working towards the same goal? Our finance team, our legal team?
What if everyone was pushing in the same direction? Suddenly, the amount of people that you can have help you get there looks huge. And what if we thought even bigger? What if we also had our customers? What if we had other companies? What if we had governments all working towards a singular goal?
Suddenly, have an army, and your impact could be huge. So let's chart the course to world domination, as I like to do. If you start with your team, you can see that you're probably gonna hit your headroom, like, pretty quickly. You're not gonna move very far up the graph very quickly.
But if you add those other product teams, you start to move up a lot faster. And if you have all teams at your company working towards the same goal, you have an exponential amount of impact in the same amount of time. Add on customers, and you really do get close to world domination.
So this seems like quite a nice dream, but how do we actually get there? Let's look into three great leaders. First, you have Michael Scott. So you might say other teams are working on crap stuff. You know, they're blocking you. They're not helping you at all.
You can go and tell them that their work stinks, they should really think about working with you instead. But unsurprisingly, it's probably not gonna land. Or you can take the Leslie and Hope approach. So you can plead with other teams. You can say, if you would just work with me for one quarter and this one really important goal, we would get there really, really quickly.
And as sorry as they'd probably feel for you, they probably have ten other goals that they're trying to achieve. So pleading is not really gonna work. No. Let's turn to our great leader, Lisa Simpson. If you can inspire people to get together around a common goal, then you're much more likely to get their help on it.
But how can you practically do that? This is where you come in. As a product manager, you need to figure out what needs to be done, who is best placed to do it, and how you can actually inspire them to do it. But let's back up for a minute and explain a bit more about what we're doing at Wise.
Now, I wish I had seen Nilan's slides. I did promise I'd review them, and didn't. But he's told this story in the other room, so I'll I'll still run through it kinda quickly for anyone who didn't hear. So aside from making graphs about world domination, what are we doing at Wise?
Well, we were founded ten years ago by two guys called Christo and Tavitt. Tavitt was the first employee at Skype. He was getting paid in Euros, but he lived in London, and he had a mortgage that he needs to pay in pounds. So he would convert his money into pounds each month to pay the bills.
Now Christo, his friend, worked for Deloitte, and he was living in London. He got paid in pounds, but he had a mortgage back in Estonia, and he needed to pay that in euros. Each of them were converting money every month to pay the bills and getting massively ripped off by banks in the meantime.
But they figured out a clever hack. Rather than sending money around the world and paying for the privilege, Tavut would pay his euros into Christo's euro account, and Christo would pay his pounds into Tavut's UK bank account. So then they had the money to pay the bills, but it never had to cross borders.
This meant no exchange was ever done and saved them a huge amount of money. And now we're doing this on a global scale. So now we're moving six billion pounds of money every month. If you're paying to a friend in the eurozone, you'll pay your money into our UK bank account, and then we'll pay out to that person in the eurozone using money from our euro bank account, which has been topped up by other customers wanting to send money the other way.
So simple. No money is ever really crossing borders, and it's saving our customers loads of cash in the meantime. And we're driven by a single mission, money without borders. We want to be instant, convenient, transparent, and eventually free. So we have this clear mission.
I'm the product manager for speed, so I hold up the instant pillar of this mission. I'm responsible for making all transfers move around the world instantly. That means from sending your money to us to getting it to the recipient on other side has to happen in less than twenty seconds, which is no mean feat.
So this can get a bit stressful. So sometimes I just like to imagine myself in the airline business. Now bear with me on this. Imagine you ignored COP twenty six this week and you flew up to Edinburgh today. You'd have to check-in, fly to Edinburgh, and go through immigration on the other side.
Now, in this metaphor, you, the valuable customer, are the money, And you're gonna check-in. So the country that you're checking in with determines if you're gonna check-in online or go to a desk. Wise will have to kind of build that check-in process. So we either build the capacity to check you in online, which is very quick, or the desk at the airport, which is pretty slow.
Now, this is the same as banks. You need to send your money to us into our bank account, and the country that you're in and the banking system there will determine how quickly it gets there. For example, in the UK, all banks are connected to the faster payment system, the instant payment network, and this means they can get all money to us instantly.
So it's super quick. So you've checked in. We are the flight. We route your money around the world and get it out to the other side. And then once it's there, you have to go through immigration. So do you get to go through the e passport gates, which once in a while do work instantly?
Or do you go to the immigration desk, the unfriendly man, and stand there for a while and plead with him to get into the country? And then eventually, either way, you kind of get out on the other side. The money is in the other country.
So in traditional banks, let's take a quick look at their flight path. So say you're in the US, you're in a small bank in Kansas, and you want to send money, say, to Italy. Now, your Kansas bank isn't gonna have the corresponding bank account in Italy.
So your flight path looks a bit like this. They have to route the money to lots of different banks around the world in order to get it out on the other side. And you can see that's gonna take a lot of time and probably cost a lot of money.
But at Wise, we have the bank account in the US, we have the bank account in the Eurozone, and so we can make a direct flight, is much faster. Now, my team, the speed team, works out these routes. We work out how quickly we can get your money moving across the world and figure out that that really short route.
Other teams at Wise are maintaining the planes. Now we want to get as many of these journeys happening in under twenty seconds, but as you can imagine, it's a team effort. We have regional teams building the check-in. We are looking after the routes, and then we have other teams maintaining those planes.
And when we started measuring speed and instant, we started way down here on the graph at nine percent. But by working with other teams in the business, we've been able to get today to forty percent of all transfers moving around the world in under twenty seconds.
Now this is quite a big feat. So how have we done this? We've had to work out where the biggest opportunities were, what needed to be done to achieve them, and who could deliver them. And how have we done this? Well, let's start with my team.
So every team at Wise is autonomous. This means we decide exactly what to work on. We can work on stuff outside of our domain if that's where we can have the most impact. Crucially, no one's ever gonna tell us yes or no or tell us what to do.
We have to figure that out for ourselves. So recently, Brazil rolled out an instant payment network. In other words, they rolled out this instant check-in functionality. And we needed to connect with this network so that we could start to receive payments in Brazil instantly.
But usually, this is the job of the regional team, as I mentioned, the Latin America team. They usually build these integrations. So we pleaded with them. We said, guys, this is a huge opportunity. It will get loads more transfers moving instantly to Brazil, which is a great outcome for customers.
Like, please, will you work on this? It obviously makes sense. But they had a huge backlog. They had other regulatory things to attend to and other big opportunities they wanted to work on. So what did we do? We could have waited six months.
We could have said, they'll prioritize it eventually. It's fine. It's not in our scope. We're not gonna work on it. But instead, we made the problem our problem. If there's a big impact piece of work we should we could do, we should be doing it.
And we looked at our backlog, and we were honest with ourselves. There was nothing else in there that was gonna move the numbers as much as this. So we did it ourselves. We worked on the integration. We borrowed a LATAM engineer to bolster our firepower, and we built the integration.
And we actually shipped it really recently, and I'll leave it to the customer to tell you how successful it was. So doing these integrations, we did one in Mexico and other places around the world. It's added about ten percent more instant transfers, but you can see we're a long way off at forty percent.
So one thing here is, like, it's really important to show the solution as well as the problem. And this is what we did with our product teams. So how do we get our product teams working on this problem as well? Well, when we looked at our transfers, we could see that four percent of instant transfers were delayed.
That means we've put in all the hard yards, we've got the instant pay ins and payouts, but something's going wrong and all that effort is being wasted. When we looked into this, we could see that four percent of delayed transfers were going to India and Pakistan.
Essentially, customers are getting rejected from those really fast e passport gates and being sent to the immigration desk. We needed the Southeast Asia's team help on this. They really understood the integrations a lot better than us. They had the regional context. But they had a lot of other problems that they needed to work on, and just saying that, hey.
There's delays in going to India is just another problem to them. It's just a lot of noise. So we decided to look into ourselves. We found something really interesting. We actually found that delays were happening at the same time every day. That's that little spike.
It was at six PM every day, and it was happening with certain banks. So suddenly, we started to define this problem. We could say certain banks are rejecting our payments every day at six PM. What on earth is going on? So we'd pointed them towards where the problem might lie, but it still wasn't a priority for them.
While the speed team is focusing on instant transfers, these teams are focusing on growing cross currency volume. So this obviously isn't the same kind of aligned problem. So we needed to show how speed and improving speed could contribute to growth to get it on their radar.
So again, we turned to the data, and we built a really interesting model which was able to show that customers who had slower speeds were less likely to use us again, whereas customers who got fast transfers were much more likely to make repeat transfers.
So suddenly, we can show how having faster speeds will drive growth. In this way, we help them to size the impact of fixing the delays and tie it back to their priorities, which was growth. And as you remember, we had done the legwork ourselves to say where the problem was happening so that they had a bit of scope to to kind of figure the figure out what's going on.
So suddenly, the problem wasn't as big, and they had a really good reason to prioritize it, to drive growth. And this actually worked. So they then looked into the problem, and they changed their logic to make sure people were being routed to the right gate.
And delays for customers more than halved, which was a really, really good outcome. Now optimizing partner performance in this way across all of our different regions got us to about twenty four percent instant, and that was thanks to having lots of other teams working on the problem at the same time as us.
So then let's look more widely at what's going on in the company. So we looked at the operations team and how processes were working to help or hinder fast transfers. Now in this scenario, our treasury team is a really interesting example. They provide the planes.
So they provide the planes that are gonna fly your money around the world, but planes are expensive, so we can only keep a certain amount on standby for passengers in each country. How do we decide which passengers to take? Well, we prioritize trying to get as many people on those planes as possible.
So if we have a plane ready to go, we're gonna try and put thirty people on it rather than one large elephant. So if Nelly the elephant wants a trip to the circus, she's gonna take out a whole plane, and thirty other people are gonna be stuck in departures, which isn't a really good use of those planes.
Instead, we charter a jet specifically for these large customers, as it were, And it takes longer to arrive, but it slows them down. But these other thirty people are moving quickly, which is great for them. How does this actually work for money? So, in other words, the treasury team makes sure that we have enough money in each bank account around the world to pay out people's transfers.
But, course, have a finite amount of money, so we have to be really strategic about which transfers we're making move quickly, and which are gonna have to wait a bit longer. We prioritize lots of small transfers, so lots of customers, and if someone wants to send a large transfer, like a hundred thousand pounds, we make them wait, we order the money specifically to pay out their transfer, and we get it going again.
But this takes a long time. So in Canada, any transfer that was over thirty thousand dollars was having to wait for us to order the money to pay it out. And these transfers are taking way over a day to move. And if you imagine thirty thousand pounds being stuck, that's really not a good experience.
So we wanted the treasury team to order money more frequently into these bank accounts, but this is more work for them. They weren't actually prioritizing growth. Their priority was reducing the cost of moving this money around the world. So that growth chart I just showed wasn't really gonna help with them.
But I had another trick up my sleeve. So I have the fortune, or perhaps misfortune of having to present to the company every six months on their performance of speed because it's one of our mission pillars. Now this is a really effective way to align everyone around the problem.
Everyone in the company is listening to this, and I knew I had a good opportunity to get people working on speed. But I knew the graphs weren't really gonna do the trick. I mean, I'm sure all of you are feeling a bit of conference fatigue right now, and you've seen enough slides, and just showing you more graphs isn't really gonna get your attention.
So instead, I whacked out the baby pictures. I told everyone in the company a story about how I used to borrow money from my big brother Alex, who you can see here, and how slow I used to be at paying him back, and how mean he would be about my slow transfer speeds.
He would send me these really sassy messages with gifts to try and chase me up for his money. But now if I ask to borrow money from him, he will not lend me money. So basically, he doesn't trust me to get his money to him quickly enough, and so he just doesn't lend me money anymore.
And then I related this back to our customers, and I showed how if we move their money around the world slowly, they don't trust us. They feel really let down by us, and they aren't gonna use us again. Now this caught people's imaginations much more than a graph ever could because suddenly they could see the human impact of the things that they worked on and the outputs that they delivered.
And other people in the company were suddenly really excited about speed. It suddenly seemed funny and interesting and also very, very important to our customers. So we told this story behind the statistics, but we also gave the team the tools that they needed to improve it.
So as I mentioned, we already pointed out that if they just added another payout speed, we could really get this money moving a lot quicker, which was really helpful for them because then they didn't have to do the legwork to figure out what the problem was.
And it worked. So they bought into this, and we got transfers moving for those large Canadian dollar customers in under a day. So you can see how the speed is almost halved for these customers, which is great. Optimizing processes in this way got us to about thirty two percent instant transfers.
So then it was time for world domination. The UK had an instant payment network, but we weren't allowed to connect to it. That's the faster payment network that I mentioned. In other words, we had to use other people's checking machines. We had to hold a bank account at a different bank.
And this was less reliable, slower, and a lot more costly for our customers. So we wanted to get that direct integration. We wanted direct access to that network. We had to lobby really hard. Christo, our CEO, tried to convince the chairman of the Bank of England to get access to the FPS network, the faster payment network.
But it took us seven years. Now, the Bank of England only ever let banks integrate to this network, and we're a tech company. We're not a registered bank. So we actually had to help write the regulation to figure out how non banks could integrate with this network.
Again, it's come down to us helping to define what needs to be done. We didn't just go to the Bank of England, ask them to give us access, and then complain when they didn't. We literally sat down with them and helped figure out how this could work.
And we succeeded. So transfer wise, as we were in the day, we're the first tech company to get direct access to that UK faster payment service. And these direct integrations so we replicated this model with Hungary, Singapore, and actually recently in Australia. These direct integrations were the final piece of the puzzle that got us to forty percent instant.
Now what's been our key to success? Customer first, always. So what you've heard in all of these stories is that the customer problem is at the heart of each of these initiatives. We're not asking team to fix minor problems to move numbers on graphs.
We're asking them to solve customer problems and deliver genuine value. And I'm sure all of your companies put your customers at the heart, so you always need to tie your work back to how you're having impact for them. This helps to get people moving around a problem a lot more easily.
And you need to understand the entire problem space and not just your own part of it. If I'd only been looking at those kind of flight paths, I wouldn't have seen all the other problems around that could have been fixed and delivered so much more value both to us and to our customers.
So how can you replicate this in your role? As a product manager, you really need to understand that whole landscape and not just your part in it. And this is actually the most useful piece of advice I've ever had as a product manager.
It's not just your small piece of the puzzle. You need to understand how everything is coming together, what all those levers are, how they move, how they work. And then you can be much more compelling when you're trying to get people to work on your problems.
And you can also spot the biggest opportunities, which often, weirdly, aren't even in your domain. Always make the problem your problem. So I think what always got teams really impressed with this was that we had done the legwork ourselves. We didn't just point out a problem and give it to them and expect them to do something about it.
We did that work because we thought it was important enough to try and scope out what was going on. And I think this really sold them on the problem as well because they could see that we cared enough about it to do that preliminary investigation.
So always make sure that you're making the problem your problem. And finally, tell the customer story. So a lot of product management is about data, it's about strategy and all of these things, but at the heart of it, you need to have a great narrative.
You need to be a great storyteller, because if you want to influence people, stories are always the most powerful thing. You also need to understand how the customer experiences your product and where their biggest pain points are. It's not just good enough to look at the graph and whether it's up or down.
You really need to speak to customers and understand what matters to them, and therefore you can figure out where you can have most impact and where you should be optimizing for. If you're a product leader, I would really encourage encouraging autonomy in your teams.
So all of this succeeded because no one at TransferWise or Wise is telling us what to do. We have to figure out where the biggest opportunities are, and we're empowered to step out of our domain if that's what we want to do. If every team was really encouraged to stay in their lane and only figure out their metrics, then no amount of encouragement would have got them on board with these problems.
So you need to enable people to move to where the biggest opportunities are. The second thing is to make sure your teams are always aiming towards impact. This was like a last minute slide I put in after chatting to Josh, who's also at Wise.
We realized that we're often challenged every quarter when we look at our plans to say, are these the biggest things to have impact in the company? That's not just, are these the biggest impact things in your roadmap or your backlog? Are these the biggest problems that are going on in the company that you should be working on?
As a leader, you need to encourage your teams to be really honest about where the impact lies across the company and where they should be putting their time. And if that means not working on their problem space but another, then so be it.
If you can follow all of these things, then I have every faith that all of you can really chart your own course to the top of world domination as well. Thank you.