Alvar Lumberg @ TopConf Nov 20th 2014

PRODUCT ENGINEERING @ TransferWise

CULTURE

PRACTICES

PEOPLE

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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

KPI driven vertical teams

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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

BRUTAL MVPs

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Every change must serve a purpose

Test small, THEN polish and scale

PROJECTS AND FEATURES ARE INPUTS - NOT OUTPUTS

BLAMELESS CULTURE

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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

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

CULTURE

PRACTICES

PEOPLE

4

7

WE STRUCTURED

OUR TEAM

AND ARCHITECTURE

FOLLOWS

WEAK OWNERSHIP

MODEL

KPI

TEAM

COMPONENTS

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

ROLES

We don’t believe in "enablers"

- no testers - no project managers

…but…

- automation - testing in teams - code reviews - pair programming - cross-functional teams

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Loads of metrics(and not just metrics of loads)

-­‐ Cannot  change  what  you  don’t  track  

-­‐ Visualization  really  helps  kick  things  off

Payments  by  platform  vs  last  week

Issues by team

A bit on releasing

- planned releases daily - urgent fixes ca 1h cycle time

CULTURE

PRACTICES

PEOPLE

4

7

CULTURE WON’T SURVIVE

BAD APPLES,

ESPECIALLY IF GROWING SO

FAST

GROWING THE TEAM IS

EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS

ATTITUDE IS PARAMOUNT

SKILLS WILL BE LEARNED

BUILDING THE TEAMA CLASS PEOPLE HIRE A CLASS PEOPLE

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

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