Tell us a little about your role and what a typical day looks like for you

I’m a Senior Product Director at Wise, leading teams in Servicing and Finance, which includes areas like Financial Crime prevention, KYC, Customer support, Accounting, Treasury, and Pricing. My work largely comes down to the following themes:

• Supporting my team. Challenging them to achieve the best that they can do, thinking together on tricky problems, connecting the dots between areas in my team with our global products and regional expansion teams, and being there for them when they need support.

• Problem solving. I always have 2-3 projects I’m working on directly. It may be a particularly complex problem, something requiring a lot of cross-team collaboration, or something that no one in my team can pick up at the moment.

• Hiring. There are so many things that we can do to improve financial products for customers. That is why I spend a lot of my time making sure that, as we continue to grow, we hire people who will help us get us closer to our mission – to build the best way to move and manage the world’s money. I do 5-10 interviews a week, mostly for product roles, but also for leadership roles in other functions in engineering, compliance, operations, analytics. Finding new Wisers and getting a stronger team is one of the most important tasks to make sure we continue to build on our Wise culture and product for the years to come.
  
  

Can you share a campaign or project you’ve been part of that you’re especially proud of? What made it stand out?

The Wise Card

Earlier, I worked on Wise Cards, a great example of Wise's approach to product building.

As a product manager in the ‘pay in team,’ I was responsible for funding transfers via cards and other methods. Reading customer feedback about cards, I expected comments on bank card issues or payment form improvements. Instead, customers who loved our transfers expressed a desire for a "spending" solution. Consequently, my team and I decided to build a multicurrency card. This card would use the mid-market rate for transactions, maintaining transfer transparency and low cost – something banks don't typically do, reserving for FX spread markups.

Building our card processing from the ground up gave us a superior user experience and a technological advantage over traditional banks. For instance, I partnered with Visa to launch the world's first cloud connection to their payment network, now known as Visa Cloud Connect.

The Wise Card happened because teams at wise are empowered to solve customer needs. Building this product from a small team of myself and three engineers to a 40-person product engineering team trusted by millions was incredibly exciting. The card's success redefined the company, contributing to the shift from solely dealing in transfers to today’s broader product offering.

Linking customer contacts to their lifetime value

Another project I'm proud of is implementing a system to reduce the need for customers to contact our support team, leading to an improved experience and higher likelihood of them continuing to use Wise. 

Through careful analysis, I statistically correlated reasons for customer churn (attrition) with reasons for contacting customer support. In other words, customers were contacting us for the same reasons they were leaving Wise. This revealed a direct link between contact rate and customer lifetime value, which allowed me to assign a cost to every preventable contact with customer support. We used this insight to make Wise better for our customers: With my team I built a logic to categorise and allocate each contact to the responsible product team, providing insight into customer problems with different products and features as well as a metric showing the impact of fixing them, based on direct customer costs. 

We now use contact rate as a company-wide metric, which has incentivised teams with data and tools and reduced contact rate by 40% since then – making Wise more convenient for our users.

How would you describe the team’s way of working – any standout rituals, tools, or communication styles that make us effective?

Being in a leadership role, I'm in a sense part of two teams. One role comprises my Servicing and Finance teams, operating very much like other product teams at Wise, of which we talk about a lot publicly. The other is our Product Leadership team, whose less publicly known work is equally interesting. The product function at Wise is driven by problem-solving and first-principles thinking, often inventing and testing approaches (like hiring, performance management, talent growth, and collaboration) before wider adoption within Wise by other functions.

One example is the Product Career Map I've developed over years. Each new hire, calibration, and promotion helps refine our definitions of competency and compensation levels, striving for transparency, fairness, and clarity on what constitutes great product work at Wise. Following Wise's principle of transparency, we've published it publicly, outlining requirements and compensation for different levels: https://wise.jobs/product-career-map.

If you were talking to someone who may be interested in joining your team, what would be the main reason you’d say it’s worth it?

Having been at Wise for nearly 10 years, my initial excitement remains strong. Three key reasons stand out:

• Purpose: Wise genuinely prioritises solving customer problems, evident in our metrics, decision-making, and product discussions. This deep customer focus is rare in my experience within financial companies. Our pricing principles, for example – radical transparency, zero cross-subsidization, and a commitment to the lowest possible fees – exemplify this. While potentially impacting short-term financials, this long-term approach has driven Wise's current success.

• People: Wise is full of intelligent and driven individuals. Over the years, I've connected with countless brilliant people, forming lasting friendships. Engaging in deep conversations about our products is as common as discussing history or mathematics.

• Opportunities to Learn: I've been fortunate to work in diverse areas, transitioning roughly every two to three years, from pay-ins and card issuance to servicing and, most recently, finance and treasury. Each area offers significant depth and new learning experiences, a common pattern at Wise.

What types of skills or attributes would you say make someone successful or thrive in your team/role?

Problem-solving is a core skill at Wise, especially in product roles. Our interview questions, like "Tell me about a problem you've solved?" or "Tell me about a time you moved a metric," assess a candidate's ability to: identify, scope, and prioritize problems; proactively seek solutions; collaborate with teams on prioritization; and find optimal, buildable solutions leveraging skills across operations, design, compliance, and engineering, followed by launch and iteration. Ultimately, we're evaluating their capacity to make the world a little bit better by effectively solving challenges.