 Hello guys How are you doing? We are here again another week with an amazing webinar from proud school We have an amazing speakers tonight today depending on your time zone from transfer wise He's saying sorry, but before we start with the with the webinar I wanted to introduce a proud school for for those of you who are not familiar With our events or courses. So this way you at least have a little bit more of context So what we do at product school is to train Spying product managers on how to break into product management for that We organize these weekly free events where we bring amazing Speakers such as Eric to talk about their experience or different topics that we like to discuss every single week So for that that's amazing if you are thinking of breaking into product management It's a really good resource for you to start learning more and Also, if you want to take it to the next level and read and you are really excited and committed to breaking into product management We also offer on-site courses We have campuses all around the world, especially in the US, but we also have in London and Canada so please take our campuses around the world and see all the courses that we are offering right now We are offering four courses The main one is about product management and here we teach the fundamentals of product management and how to build products that people love and then during the last two weeks of the program We teach how to get a job as a product manager because it's good to learn how to build good products But also you need to get trained on how to land your first team job So these courses are part-time so they are compatible with your regular work schedule And they are amazing because all the instructors are not instructors to say they are Product managers working for the best companies in the world such as Google, Facebook, Tesla, Snapchat, you name it So yeah, that's what we do. If you guys are interested in learning more about product management or any of The courses that we are teaching go to productschool.com and then you'll find more information So tonight we are super excited to have with us Eric, I've been talking to him this week. He's been telling me his experience And it's a real honor to have him with us today. How are you doing, Eric? Can you hear me well? Yeah, thank you very much. I'm very excited to be here. So thank you very much for the invitation Amazing, amazing. Thank you for being here today. So yeah, I'll let you introduce yourself and and I'll let you Do your presentation and then we'll have Ten minutes for ten minutes for Q&A. So this way if you guys have any questions for Eric He will be more than happy to answer them. So yes, feel free to type them in the comments And then I will read them at the end of the event. All yours Eric. Good luck Thank you very much. So I brought two slides with me. So I'm gonna share them with you So yeah, my name is Eric Eden and I'm a product manager at TransWise And I'm gonna share a bit about what I've learned along the way as a product manager at TransWise And first quickly about my background. So I started at TransWise back in 2015 I have a background in finance and accounting. I mean from Finland to London to start an internship at TransWise where I then work as a growth analyst looking at viral growth And I've been a product manager since 2017. So I have about a year and a half of experience in product and before I get into my transition into product prompting an analyst And what I learned along the way, I'll give you a brief overview of how we think about product at TransWise And for those who don't know, TransWise was started by these two guys, Talbot and Crystal back in 2010 Two guys Crystal was in London and Talbot was in Estonia and they had to change money between the two countries And it was a big hassle. It was really expensive and really slow And they met up and they got talking and they said what would you swap the money between yourselves? And that's really the core idea of TransWise is people helping each other to save money on international money transfer And it's now this is from 2017. We've grown quite a bit since then And I'll share some of the things that has fueled this growth and how we use product to fuel growth at TransWise And at the core of it I heard one thing So I'm seeing that some people are saying that the audio the audio is a little low So if you can speak a little louder, that would be great. I'll try to speak louder. Okay. Thank you very much. Nice. Nice better All right, that's great So so at the at kind of the core of TransWise product is our product pillars Which is about making money move Quickly easily at a low cost and conveniently so it should be cheap fast and convenient to send money abroad and We do this by first of all being which strive to be 10 times cheaper than the banks That's kind of the starting point. And that's why most people decide to use TransWise We also want to delight you with sending money really fast, which is why we for instance integrated with Bank of England in the UK, which now lets us send money instantly to to anyone in the UK and similar projects happening all over the world And we want to make it really convenient. So that's why we have our apps for instance That's why we recently integrated with Monso so you can send money from the Monso app as well And we have more of these convenience products as well And this has resulted in something quite quite exciting, which is people recommend us to their friends and The TransWise growth story wouldn't really have been possible if it wasn't for our users Being in love with the product and telling their friends about it. And that's how we grow And that's what we call product driven growth or viral growth at TransWise And this has gotten us to this place today where we have three million users We have about two billion volume per month. We're growing 100% year-over-year And we're actually making money since 2017 pretty exciting So product release about growth and My journey was as I started at TransWise as as an intern And moved from Finland to London and thought I'll give this a shot. Maybe I can make it work And I spent about two years after the internship as an analyst I was working on viral growth analyzing what made customers tell their friends about TransWise How can we get them to recommend us more And along the way I picked up a bunch of skills that turned out to be really useful When you want to be a product manager And so I listed three here, which I think are really key things. So I think any product manager starting out anyone aspiring to be a product manager should figure out What is your superpower? What's the thing that you know that can really contribute to your team and and help your your users? And the second thing is you should try and talk to as many users as you can And and product management is really about representing the user inside the company and being the voice of the customer And what often happens is you have a big team. Everybody's very busy Everybody's everybody knows they should be talking to their customers But not everybody has time to so If you can be the voice of the customer, then you're taking a great step towards that role as a product manager And the last thing is you should get into the details. I'll cover that a bit more later as well so What what's a superpower and so that can be many things And product managers come from a range of backgrounds. It can be designers or engineers analysts You name it. But my thing was really I I love data. I love analyzing customer behavior And I love love understanding how things fit together And coming into to trans wise I guess my things I knew from before was a bit of SQL it's very handy to excel as everybody in finance We know and a bit of are which is a great language for automated things and the analysis And do my years as an analyst. I really hold in on this ability to understand complex data sets And uncovering insights from it And this is an amazing assets even as a product manager. You spend a lot of time thinking about data analyzing your kpi's understanding customer behavior And if you already have those skills, you already one step ahead The next thing is talking to users and I got this small anecdote here, which is as an analyst I I got to talking to some of our customers and this guy in the middle is called yet And he is really my my favorite customer in all of the world And he was he was a big fan of trans wise He was working for a company called bonus bay and they were paying out Cashback rewards to people all around the world and using trans wise for this But poor yet. I had spent all of his time just making payments one at a time And we actually would build a tool for yet. We shall talk a bit about more later That really helped him and his company and many more companies afterwards use trans wise more And in this picture here, you can see us giving a trophy to them for being our most frequent customer back then Having made a couple of thousand payments, which today is really nothing but then was a lot And my point here is as A person aspiring to be a part manager If you're already inside a team or inside a company where you're trying to transition into a new role Then being close to the customer and talking to lots of customers Getting those insights and bringing those back to the team Also puts you ahead and gives you One step further being being a great part manager And the last thing is getting into the details and this is probably the hardest one on the one that That you maybe you want to skip and I thought what was getting into the details meeting at trans wise, right? So in any product team, there's the code, right? And the more technical you are The better your chances are of doing a good job. That said You shouldn't Have to get a CS degree or computer science degree to be a product manager. It's definitely not necessary but you shouldn't be afraid of code either and If you have a hobby project or something to show that you do understand what it means to to build products and to to write code That's a great great sign In a fintech company like trans wise, there's also this regulation And no matter what company you're going to work for there's always going to be some company specific complexity That people shy away from and a trans wise understand what regs mean Is crucial to building great products if you don't understand what they say You're not going to do a good job And that's also a great way to put yourself ahead and get noticed is if you're an expert in what's actually The rules of the game You'll be able to make better decisions Uh operational process is an interesting one. Maybe not every company has this but certainly it trans wise understanding how How the sausage is made or how the payment actually gets made in the in the background how problems are handled by operations That will let you uncover a lot of opportunities Now let you uncover problems in the product that can easily be fixed But it takes time and effort and an aspiring product manager has a great opportunity there to go and understand What's the problem and then define it and bring it to the to the product team to fix? and lastly user needs and understanding the details of what the user needs is is really crucial and Lastly growth Is learning so this is a slightly slightly different topic. It's something we'll be working on more and more inside trans wise, which is Product living growth is really a function of the rate at which you learn And in in its essence every new product idea is an idea for an experiment And there's this idea about making your product hypothesis explicit. Now, what does that mean? It means you can use the idea of the experiment to get buying from the company for your idea And then once you test it you'll learn something about the customers And even if you fail at achieving the objective, you'll have learned something valuable about the customer So at at trans wise it looks like this We go out we talk to our customers And I'll give you an example here. So my remit as a product manager trans wise is our business customers So for me talking to customers means going out and understanding what do businesses need from From their payment provider. What specific problems do they have and going back to Yeda again? It's about understanding How can we make his life better? And once you have talked to the customers you can form a hypothesis about the problems And once you have the hypothesis, you can do some tests and then you can learn from it I'll show you a bit more detail about this. What does that mean in practice? So we have my my favorite customer here And he spends hours every day creating payments And we thought can we not speed things up with a single prototype and And make life better for him So of course just helping one customer isn't enough right you gotta gotta have a big impact For a party to be willing to go out and invest time and effort into it and We said if we get 10 customers to really use it We think we're on to something if we can build a small enough test Try it out Now we did we built a got an intern to build a hacky java script Uh script in the front end to just create payments really quickly And even at that basic state The most simple solution They loved it Right, so they really got the benefit from it Even though we just spent a couple of days building it and then you know it's time to get to work And this is kind of the transition so you start out And blue here is overall growth and orange is the new product goal And you always start with a small test to see what this work will customers use it And as you can see here You tried it out a couple of years ago And it started growing and once it started growing, you know, it's time to actually build the proper thing once you have Have those first 10 customers using it and loving it. You know, it's time to build And eventually you get to a point where where you realize you have to scale up as well And that's where we're at today where we're We are taking the platform to scale it up to work for a hundred times more growth or a thousand times And once you got into a point where you actually have customers, right? So you've You've built something that that's valuable and now you want to improve on it then You should really look at the bottom of the funnel So as a product team your role is to to get grow for the company and A common mistake that product managers make is they start too high up in the funnel They start thinking about engagement or education or even awareness and What we've seen happening time and time again is you can move conversion rates at the top of the funnel You can get more and more customers down through but at the end they all churn Now why is that? that's because You're gonna get high-intent users. You're gonna get low-intent users coming through your growth funnel And the high-intent users they're gonna convert no matter what and the low-intent ones They're gonna be very hard to convert So you're always best off looking at your your happiest customers. What's stopping them from using your product? How can you get them to use you more and then working your way up from there? And this is what we've got to today. So we built this batch payment tool That lets customers process thousands of payments at once We started out with a very humble experiment and it's now one third of all business transfers are trans wise That really shows how you can start from a very small experiment and iteratively by listening to your customers work your way towards something that's truly scalable and truly usable and That's what we got to today Now this is an example of a successful experiment But you shouldn't shy away from failing either sometimes failure is even more valuable and I always get a bit suspicious when people only have successful experiments So a failure is equally valuable because that learns teaches you something interesting about what your users don't want and that's very valuable information for a product team as well all right, and kind of to rough up a bit so We had this one customer yet a who I started talking to two years ago just before I became a product manager and he was making payments day in day out and he was Sweating away by his keyboard using our regular one payment at a time interface We listened to him we listened to our customers and we built something that's better for them and and this is him from our our company conference this summer Speaking about how they have managed to grow their business thanks to trans wise and how they've managed to launch new markets And how excited they are about all the new things we're going to build for them this one in the future And yet it's now busy advocating for trans wise to all of his friends. We're getting referrals from them And thanks to you the product keeps on growing more and more even beyond the company where he works at and then the last point right so It doesn't stop when you get the job you always have to keep on learning and The best way to learn is always talking to customers But you should also think about what other books or what other Events can I go to? I think Progress school is a great example of a place you can go to learn about building great products And I just wanted to bring out three of my favorite books here. The first one is the mom test So it's all about how to talk to customers Without leading them or without having them say what you want them to say But it's really truly listening to what their problems are The second one is more And it's a great book for anyone who isn't very familiar with statistics And that still want to do experiments and to to really make sure that they're doing the right experiments It's called qualifying user experience and it's one of my favorite books about statistics. It lays out how to build Proper tests and I really play language And the last one is maybe my my my absolute favorite one is called build better products And I would say it's mandatory really for any aspiring product manager All right, so here are my takeaways for you. Thank you all very much for listening So first of all ask an aspiring product manager Figure out what your superpower is and get really good at it. For me. It was analytics data Maybe for you, it's design. Maybe it's A special insight into the customer needs Maybe it's that you're a great writing code and and helping developers The second thing is talk to as many users as you can and I think one of the most impressive product manager interviews I've done was A person that had actually gone out and done user research on our product before coming to the interview Really sets them apart in in the pack is they have truly understood that it's all about the user The third thing is figure out What's the nitty gritty details that everybody finds a bit too boring to get into and figure out what's in there For us, it's the regulation operational process But whatever your line of businesses, maybe you're in a company already with transition Figure out what's the hairy details of your product that you could become the expert in And then once once you are product manager It's about running experiments and learning about your users needs based on what those experiments tell you And lastly Continue learning. So once you got the job, don't stop there. Make sure you continue evolving continue developing as a product manager And I got two more minutes. Uh, so I have this bonus tweet from no aways from He's uh I can't remember the company now, but he's he's excellent. I'd recommend anyone to follow him twitter He's got great, uh, writing about being a product manager. And maybe this is the best one, right? So Pms have diverse backgrounds, lurker responsibilities and wildly varied expectations across companies, right? So that's one thing to take away that There's no one way to be a product manager. Everyone does it in a unique way But nevertheless, he shares some great just commonalities in one part managers So with that, I'm gonna flip back to my key takeaways And uh, I'll think I'll wrap up there. So thank you very much for listening and I'm looking forward to your questions Okay, Eric. That was amazing. Thank you very much. It was very insightful and I Feel very inspired with the with your favorite customer because I'm a big fan of transfer wise and you guys are a really good example of How to disrupt a whole industry? Uh, so yeah, congrats on this presentation On this presentation because it was great. So now I'm going to be taking some questions from the audience So if you guys want to ask any question to eric, I will read them now The first one is from lora brashwell. She's asking How did you start the process of reaching out to customers and building relationships with them? Ah, that's a that's a great question And it's almost like the secret sauce, right? You sit there in your your job and you figure How do I actually talk to these these customers? How do I get home the emails or how do I? just talk to them and The best first step right is if if you know someone that used the product, right go talk to them But maybe you want to get get more out of it and it really depends on what the product is But in the case of trans wise I had the fortune of being an analyst. So I had access to I was working with marketing and with product So emailing out customers was not a problem So I wouldn't be afraid to get a hold of some emails of people who think could have good feedback for you And and send some emails out to them get on the phone call them And what we at trans wise love doing as well is we always work with customer support So a couple of times a year everybody goes to our office in talin and we take customer support calls And you learn a ton from that Nice, nice answer. Okay. The next question comes from arty patel She's asking about Your integration with monso So what she wants to know is how did you work with them to better understand their users and their needs and Give me a second Yeah, so basically it's how did you work with them in order to understand better their users So no one understands their users better than they do So in that case we might a lot on on their product teams to understand what the user is expecting from it But of course, whenever you're working with partnerships, it's more tricky, right? But how do you get access to the customers? But we're fortunate in the sense that all the Monso customers using integration will also become transverse customers. So we do get the opportunity to talk to them as well Yeah, I totally agree. Okay. The next question comes from alexandra kadilokva Kadikova sorry for the pronunciation So, how often do you Now talk to your customers. What's your favorite approach interview? User testing ab testing Um, yeah, how do you find the customers you want to talk to? That's a really good question and I said there's maybe It's quite a lot of different channels. So you talk to customers all the time and that's one of the reasons I still love the job so much is that I get to speak to all these amazing customers So let me lay them out for you. One is I email loads of customers whenever I see someone doing something interesting I'll send them an email and ask hey I'd love to speak to you. Can you get on the phone with me? The second thing is customer support. So all the customer support calls as well Go out to our support team and just listen into customers to see what what problems do they have and then What else I had a couple in mind we use Give a shout out to use testing.com. It's a great service where they'll actually send users to An invitation page and they'll leave feedback along the way and they'll get prompting questions So that's a great way to get lots of feedback quickly And then finally the trickiest customer interview is the one you don't have yet And there I really recommend if you can use an agency that can recruit customers with a specific profile for you So when it comes to business customers, I have a very specific user in mind. I can't just find through the street So it's got to be 50 more 50 or more employees. So so many transfers, etc Agencies are great for those very specific requests Nice So the next comment comes from I mean smart He's saying what do you think about pushing new features to the users? I mean not always getting their opinions Then making for them. You think they need something you make it. We used to be very careful about Big bang releases or about dedicating a lot of resources to To the idea itself So we really want to focus on getting something small out first And maybe that's just some slides and walk up and validating it So we get lots of feedback before we actually start building anything And once we were to build we always release it as a split test So we put hot traffic onto the new version of the old and then we make sure that Our hypothesis was the new one's going to be better and then we measure if that was true or not Okay, that sounds great. So the next question How is your day typically organized? For example, how much time do you spend on experiments talking to customers, etc There's no data to like except for the stand-up. So we start every day with a stand-up at 9 30 And then it really depends on what's needed, right? So The role of the PM really fluctuates depending on what part of the part life cycle you have to be So at the beginning I'm working closely with Our design team to come up with prototypes. I work with Lots of user research We have actually now a user researcher will help me but also just Collecting customer feedback and understand what they need and once you get past that phase to get into implementation Then it's about working with engineers to come up with a strong plan That's narrowly scope that will deliver maximum customer value at the shortest possible time And then once you pass that phase Then it's about the rollout and then you got to work with marketing or sales And then you got to iterate on so you do the whole thing again And the quicker you can iterate on the product the quicker you'll improve as well Okay, um, the next question is uh, how Um, do you adjust your product to different types of clients? Big and small do you have any example of a case where a solution was good for a big one but not for small one or vice versa Oh, yeah, so many of them and that's really Part of the remit of my team is making transverse better for for businesses. So we started out as a very consumer focused company and That meant our entire user experience and back in most fields around people making a couple of payments And then we brought in some customers that made tens of thousands of payments And in the back end all the processes broke. So we had to quickly fix everything to make it scale So whenever you introduce a new customer type, it's not just the front end that you got to change but it's Everything's gonna gotta kind of level up to to meet the needs Hey, I think we lost your sound there Sorry, now we're now we're right. Okay. So paul is asking at what stage of growth does an earliest An earlier state start up need a product manager Oh, that's uh, that's a great question. And I joined transverse when we were about 200 employees and You already had a couple of product managers then But I think you can go quite a while depends on what the strength of the founder is if you have say If you're a technical founder, you might want to bring that in sooner But if you're more of a product founder, you're probably gonna gonna do most of the product yourself for quite a while But I'm no expert. So it's hard to say That's that's a pretty good question. Especially when you start the company You are the product manager. You are pretty much everything. So it depends on your product Uh, but yeah, it's a hard one. Um, I would say in the moment Like you are able to shape a product thing in the moment you have a designer and also an engineer That's probably the the moment when you start like shaping the product Probably if you are the founder, you're gonna be the product manager as well And then in the moment that thing grows a little bit. That's probably the moment where you will need to hire A product manager. So yes, um, I have one last question for you Uh, Eric, which is a question that I always ask to all our speakers Which is like Which is your biggest piece of advice for someone that is uh, willing to break into product management? I know that you spoke a lot about this, but if you have to give one tip Uh, yeah, I would like to know it It's definitely that's easy. Just talk to as many users as you can You can never talk to too many and make sure you uh, you share the learnings with the rest of the company and with the team That's the the one thing I would say you have to do Nice nice, okay, Eric. It was amazing having you with us today. Uh, it was very insightful. It was fun Thank you very much for taking the time to be with our community as you see We have so many people watching this live over a hundred people now. We had over 200 before it This is just amazing. So thank you very much for your time. And guys before you leave, um, I want to share with you More news. So we have more events coming up These three events are great for you to learn more about product management As you see we bring amazing speakers working for the best companies in the world as a transfer wise Facebook, netflix, you name it. So if you guys want to learn more about um product management Feel free to join these weekly webinars. We also have um weekly AMAs which stands for ask me anything on our Slack community every Tuesday And then we have in-person events every week in each of our campuses So if you want to check the list of campuses that we have, please go to our website productschool.com and see What are the locations that are closer to you? And then if you are thinking of taking these to the next level and get a job as a product manager That's what we've been doing for four years so far. We train people on how to get a job as a product manager We have four courses for now The first one is about product management. The second one is coding for managers The third one is data analytics for managers, and then we have a fourth one called Blockchain for managers because that's what we do. We train people on how to become a manager or a product manager In a software company. So if you guys want to see dates Instructors and more news, uh, please go to productschool.com and you'll see all the information. So yeah guys, it was great One more time. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you, Eric. It was a big pleasure I hope you have a good rest of the day. Take care. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. Bye