TransferWise focuses on building a product culture with customer-centric teams. They organize into vertical KPI-driven teams to focus on key metrics. They use an MVP approach, testing small changes before polishing and scaling. The company culture is blameless to encourage risk-taking and learning from failures. They structure their organization and architecture according to Conway's Law so it is optimized for customer outcomes.
3. CUSTOMERS > TEAM > EGO
-‐ no politics, no career ladders, everybody is part
of a team, everybody contributes.
- pushing back ego very important for
honest feedback
- a very small number of people who don’t
directly affect customer happiness, mostly
important admin functions
4. KPI driven vertical teams
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I CAN FOCUS
ON WHAT’S
IMPORTANT
FOR ME
I KNOW
OWN MY
KPIs AND I
CAN MOVE
THEM
IT MAKES ME
FEEL
STRONG &
EMPOWERED
5. BRUTAL MVPs
6
Every change must serve a purpose
Test small, THEN polish and scale
PROJECTS AND FEATURES
ARE INPUTS - NOT OUTPUTS
6. BLAMELESS CULTURE
8
DO FIRST,
APOLOGIZE
LATER
* People close up when blamed
* Fear stops learning and taking
initiative
* Pushing people out of their
comfort zone is hard anyway
7. PRODUCT CULTURE
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They don’t let
CxO/board
tell them
what to build
People are
PASSIONATE
about
product
Build the
right culture
& it will build
the product
for you
- we have a very tight customer->product
team feedback loop, pulling even tighter with
metrics/dashboards
- we’re all responsible for providing input
9. 7
CONWAY’S LAW
"organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication
structures of these organizations” - Melvin Conway, 1968
WE
STRUCTURED
OUR TEAM
AND
ARCHITECTURE
FOLLOWS
WEAK
OWNERSHIP
MODEL
KPI
TEAM
COMPONENTS
10. ROLES
We don’t believe in
"enablers"
- no testers
- no project managers
…but…
- automation
- testing in teams
- code reviews
- pair programming
- cross-functional teams
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11. Loads of metrics
(and not just metrics of loads)
-‐ Cannot change what you don’t
track
-‐ Visualization really helps kick
things off
17. 7
CULTURE
BUILDING THE TEAM
A CLASS PEOPLE HIRE A CLASS PEOPLE
WON’T SURVIVE
BAD APPLES,
ESPECIALLY IF
GROWING SO
FAST
GROWING THE
TEAM IS
EVERYBODY’S
BUSINESS
ATTITUDE IS
PARAMOUNT
SKILLS WILL BE
LEARNED
18. PRODUCT CULTURE @ TW
CUSTOMER > TEAM > EGO
VERTICAL TEAMS with CLEAR KPIs
FEATURES ARE INPUTS, NOT OUTPUTS
BLAMELESS ENVIRONMENT
CONWAY’S LAW
VISUALIZE
alvar@transferwise.com
@alvarlumberg
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