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.

1. PRODUCT
ENGINEERING @
TransferWise
Alvar Lumberg @ TopConf Nov 20th 2014

2. CULTURE
PRACTICES
PEOPLE
4

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
7
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
7
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

8. CULTURE
PRACTICES
PEOPLE
4

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
3

11. Loads of metrics
(and not just metrics of loads)
-­‐ Cannot change what you don’t
track
-­‐ Visualization really helps kick
things off

12. Payments by platform vs last week

14. Issues by team

15. A bit on releasing
- planned releases daily
- urgent fixes ca 1h cycle time

16. CULTURE
PRACTICES
PEOPLE
4

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
5