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Upscale 5.0 - Product Leads

Written by Liam Ward | Jul 9, 2020 1:21:48 PM

The session will bring together product leads from the rest of the cohort to discuss when and how to scale your product team, using the right metrics to measure success and prioritise resources and balancing growth with product improvement. It will also be an opportunity to create a community of like-minded Product Leads who can support you as you scale and share best practices.

Scale Coaches:

Session Takeaways:

  • Insights on scaling and building out your product team
  • Tips on using the right metrics to measure success and prioritise resources
  • Understand peer challenges and approaches that you can tailor to your situation
  • A network of Product Leads to support you as you scale

 


> SESSION NOTES

PRODUCT LED GROWTH with Nilan Peiris, Transferwise

6 steps to build a mission driven startup

  1. Find your mission
  2. Use NPS as a north star
  3. Capture less value than you create
  4. Build a 10x product
  5. Marketing ! = growth 
  6. Scale people

What are mission driven start-ups?

A mission driven startup starts with when founders are passionate about solving a problem in the world. Product people can then do something special in these environments. For example, Transferwise was started to solve the problem of hidden fees and high costs associated with sending money abroad. Talking to customers and understanding their problems can inspire you to think about your solution and mission. As product people, you need to build towards a mission.

NPS as a north star

Why do people recommend your product? 

Promoters - detractors = NPS

Total

 

If you manage to move NPS, it’s a great leverage for growth. Product teams can see the NPS form as a richter scale, where the amount of people a customer will recommend the company/product to can double from giving a 7 to an 8, and from 8 to 9, this figure can double again.

Moving NPS leads to hockey stick growth as a positive NPS means there are more promoters than detractors however, this is difficult  as you need to deliver what customers thought was previously impossible. Solving the unsolvable achieves viral word of mouth growth.

Product pillars

  • Speed
  • Price
  • Convenience 
  • Coverage 

In order to achieve advocacy, your product needs to be 10x better in these pillars than the alternative. 

Don’t do it as a ‘growth hack’ but because it is the right thing to do.

10x better product + Mission driven marketing = Word of mouth growth

Capture less value than you create

What makes customers happy vs what makes money

While the above may be the key objectives for many product teams, at Transferwise, there is only one list - what makes customers happy sustainably.

But how is this explained to shareholders and the board?

The sustainability refers to being able to reduce costs to ensure that you can make customers happy but still be profitable. The below cycle shows the constand iterations that can help generate word of mouth growth.

 



Build a 10x product

Not all products generate customer led growth, 10x products generate customer led growth.

How to build something 10x better than anything else in the market?

This means you are building something that doesn’t exist, that you don't know if it will work out or not.

If you aren’t in that state of existential crisis you aren't trying hard enough.

 

Marketing != Growth

Marketing does not equal growth, it is not a magical growth machine 

The infinitely marketing scaling channel does not exist

What is the problem marketing is solving?

Marketing gets people to believe the value of the product you are building.

 

Scale people

Conway's law 

Put teams around customers’ problems and build services around those.

You can’t keep hiring people into new teams without leaders.

KEY LEARNINGS

Viplov Patney, Transferwise

Top learnings

  • For decisions without data, start with gut feeling
  • Listen to your customers
    • Surveys, NPS, user tests, focus groups are all good ways to hear from them
  • Get feedback in as early as possible
    • Both internal and external feedback is crucial
  • Iterate quickly 

Ways to scalability & sustainability

  • Increase capacity of operational team
  • Reduce workload 
  • Automate