Case Study#2: Wise: Secrets of 'Building in public'
Product Case Study on Wise (Previously Transferwise)
Product roadmaps always used to be the secret sauce and tech companies would go to any lengths to guard the secret. This mindset is more prevalent in companies from early 2000s when ideas were everything and had to be protected. But modern day tech companies have found a new way to develop products by making their product roadmaps public. In this edition, we dive into this new phenomena.
First of all, the big question is : How important is the Idea or the Business Model for the success of the company? Should it be protected?
Bill Gross (Founder of Technology Incubator Idealab) assessed 100s of successful companies (including likes of Airbnb, Instagram, Uber etc.) and failed companies (Kozmo, Pets.com, Friendster and more) and shared the surprising answer (in his TED talk) to the question: What is the SINGLE most important factor that makes a company successful?
Aha! Moment 1: Timing of the idea/company is the SINGLE most important reason why companies succeed
And close second is Team and Execution. Ideas and Business Models are important but are not the top 2 reasons why companies succeed. This also proves: Great people and execution can triumph over another company working on same idea but poorer team/execution. Hence, Ideas are no more the goldmine and product roadmaps are nothing but representation of ideas.
There are numerous companies that are building their products in public, but the one that stands out is Wise (Previously Transferwise). In May 2021, Wise launched their first public roadmap and used this opportunity to get feedback from users on the roadmap 👇
Aha! Moment 2: Wise did not only make their roadmap public but also their product team structure and regional focus areas 🤯
If you look at the tweet above and also the detailed roadmap on Wise homepage, you can see the product tribe (Customer Experience, Spending etc.) that is working on each of those features and also their strategic focus areas for each region.
Wise is not the only one. Even Slack’s platform team actively shares their public roadmap trello board with public. This move from Slack is unique because it targets developers, and not users.
“As we grow, developers are able to succeed with us; sharing our customers and joining us in changing the way people do work. In turn, our customers are delighted, new customers have even more reason to use Slack, and the cycle continues.”
Of-course, these are not isolated phenomena. Buffer, StoryGraph, Upfeed, Front and many more are building in public. Why are companies doing this? Let us find this out.
If you look at the hardest currency to earn as a company - it is not # of users but their Trust. Wise started with the mission of “Money without borders - instant, convenient, transparent and eventually free” and when it comes to money, there is nothing that customers want more than Trust (and transparency). Building in public builds trust with users and also allows them to give feedback. No doubt, today more than 10M customers trust Wise when it comes to transferring money across borders.
Wise also went a step further. They started representing “building roadmap in public” phenomena and started promoting it by helping other companies do the same.
The second biggest reason companies do this is to build an Idea Funnel. Users continue to give feedback on what they like about the roadmap and what they don’t. This gives the company a great channel to accumulate ideas (Imagine the dollars saved).
Wise also holds “Mission Days” twice a year and as part of this event also invites users to collect ideas and shape their future roadmap. In-fact in one of such events, Wise team went ahead and almost implemented a user request🤔
Lessons for Product Managers
There are some unique learnings that can change the way companies build:
✅ If ‘Customer Trust’ is one of the big factors that can determine the success or failure of your company, propose “building in public”. This doesn’t have to be whole company’s roadmap, but just your team’s.
✅ ‘Building in Public’ is a great tool to get more ideas from your customers. You will stop worrying about what to build and start worrying about 'how to prioritise (still a better problem to have)
✅ Execution is the new secret sauce, not your ideas or business models (as much as one would think)
While I agree that execution trumps idea, the challenge is for upstart cos whose ideas could be implemented in a better faster way shunning them out of the space.