Nilan Peiris
Nilan Peiris is Chief Product Officer at Wise, one of the fastest-growing (and profitable) tech companies in the world. Wise allows anyone to send money in more than 60 currencies to over 160 countries at low cost, and throughout its history has grown primarily through word of mouth.
AI & Technology Skills
Scaling a global product requires a single tech stack where regional teams have 'weak ownership' to contribute local requirements directly to the core code.
"we have a single global tech stack, and we have deep local infrastructure. ... you end up with a global product team that owns overall KPIs around conversion rate, et cetera. And you have local, regio..."
Growth Skills
NPS scores have a non-linear impact on growth; moving a user from an 8 to a 9 can double their likelihood to refer others.
"When we overlay the referral data over the NPS survey data, we saw something really interesting. There's very low invite rates at one to six, and not just invite, conversion rates of users that joined..."
A transparent, cost-plus pricing model allows you to lower prices for the majority of users by ensuring high-cost users cover their own overhead.
"every single bill we got, we allocated the cost back to the customer, or the transaction that generated it. And then we add our margin on top, and that's our price. And when you look at this and you a..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Asking about current frustrations reveals a candidate's professional 'limit' and their ability to navigate and fix broken systems.
"what is it that most frustrates you about... instead of why you're leaving, what frustrates you the most about where you're working right now? ... what's more interesting is they've been unable to fix..."
Leadership Skills
High-impact product development requires building conviction through qualitative and quantitative insights rather than relying solely on incremental A/B testing.
"You can't split test your way to love. ... 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 hubri..."
Marketing Skills
In-product marketing is essential to ensure users perceive the full value of the features you have built, which directly drives referral rates.
"closing this delta between what you've done, and what's perceived to be done is what I call product marketing within the product. ... we're doing instant transfers, and customers wouldn't know it was..."
Product Management Skills
To drive word-of-mouth, the product vision must aim for a '10x better' experience that users didn't previously think was possible.
"But to get to recommendation, you're going to blow your user socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible. And when you are in that place of doing something..."
True innovation comes from defining the theoretical ideal and working backwards to solve the hard infrastructure problems required to reach it.
"instead of incrementally going, doing a jump to make it a little better, a little better, a little better, you can never get there. How do we take two years, and end up there? ... What is the theoreti..."
Combine in-product attribution surveys with digital tracking data to accurately measure the impact of word-of-mouth growth.
"We ask customers, is the short answer. So, we have an attribution model, as you can imagine, and we've had one from the early days, and it overlays all the referrer data and cookie data you have on vi..."
Qualitative feedback in NPS comments is the most effective way to identify the core product pillars that drive user advocacy.
"And when you read the comments, and now obviously we've got all kinds of fancy models sitting on top of these things, customers kept telling us the same things, 'Make it faster, make it cheaper, make..."