How to drive word of mouth | Nilan Peiris (CPO of Wise)

Sep 24, 2023 1h 16m 18 insights Episode Page ↗
Nalan Piras, Chief Product Officer at Wise, shares how the company achieved 70% word-of-mouth growth by building a 10x better product. He details their strategy of using NPS comments to identify core product pillars (price, speed, ease of use) and relentlessly optimizing them.
Actionable Insights

1. Blow Users’ Socks Off

Focus on creating experiences users didn’t know were possible to drive strong recommendations and word-of-mouth growth. This means going beyond merely ‘working’ or being ‘slick’ to truly amaze users.

2. Build 10x Better Product

Aim to create a product that is fundamentally 10 times better than existing alternatives, rather than just incrementally improving. This often means solving systemic, hard problems that no one has tackled before.

3. Work Backwards from Ideal

Define the theoretical ideal experience or limit (e.g., minimum cost, maximum speed) and work backward to achieve it, instead of incremental improvements. This approach leads to transformative product changes.

4. Leverage NPS Comments Qualitatively

Don’t just track Net Promoter Score (NPS) numbers; deeply analyze the qualitative comments to identify core product pillars. Customers’ direct feedback reveals what truly drives their advocacy (e.g., faster, cheaper, easier).

5. Prioritize Customer Happiness for Growth

Structure your business around a single list of priorities focused on making customers happy, especially by tackling hard problems with high impact. This approach, when successful, aligns customer value with shareholder value and growth.

6. Allocate Costs Granularly

Implement a system to allocate every operational cost (people, risk, partner fees) back to the specific customer or transaction that generated it. This allows for dynamic pricing where high-cost users cover their expenses, enabling lower prices for others and driving advocacy.

7. View People Costs as Product Quality

Consider customer service and operations team costs as indicators of product quality issues. Invest in engineering and automation to reduce these ‘people costs’ by making the product clearer and more self-service.

8. Empower Customers to Lobby

When facing regulatory or systemic barriers, engage and empower your customer base to advocate on your behalf. Wise leveraged customer complaints to the government to secure the world’s first EKYC license in Singapore.

9. Connect Emotionally Through Mission

Share your company’s authentic mission and values with customers to foster an emotional connection. This can lead to organic sharing and advocacy, even without traditional marketing calls to action.

10. Make Strategic Bets on Pillars

Develop conviction around key product pillars (e.g., price, speed, quality) and make significant, long-term investments in them, even if immediate incremental returns aren’t obvious. Trust that these foundational improvements will eventually drive growth.

11. Build Conviction with Qualitative Insights

Before extensive A/B testing, gather qualitative insights by talking directly to users to build a strong ‘gut feel’ and conviction about what truly matters. This approach helps focus engineering efforts on high-impact changes rather than broad experimentation.

12. Close Value Perception Gap

Actively show customers the value they’ve received within the product to ensure they understand and appreciate it. For example, visualize savings or confirm instant transfers with animations to increase referral rates.

13. Incentivize Solving Hard Problems

Foster a company culture that rewards tackling difficult, systemic problems rather than just incremental improvements. This philosophy encourages teams to pursue ambitious, transformative solutions.

14. Structure Global Product Teams

For global products, use a structure with central global product teams owning overall KPIs and a single codebase, complemented by local/regional teams. These local teams contribute feedback and code changes, ensuring the product adapts to diverse regulatory and market needs.

15. Evolve Team Structure with Scale

As your company grows, adapt your organizational structure (e.g., from independent teams to squads and tribes) to maintain autonomy while ensuring alignment with overall vision and strategy. Squads should focus on specific products or regions with clear accountability.

16. Prioritize Speed of Recovery

Cultivate a personal and organizational motto focused on the speed at which you recover from setbacks. In a high-growth environment, quickly moving forward after challenges is crucial for sustained progress.

17. Ask About Frustrations

When interviewing candidates, ask ‘What frustrates you the most about where you’re working right now?’ to understand their limits, what challenges they struggle with, and how they might fit into your company’s problem-solving culture.

18. Invest in Market Failures

If passionate about social impact, consider investing in or supporting startups that address market failures. These are areas where the market doesn’t adequately fulfill human needs, offering opportunities for meaningful impact.