This week’s Sunday Rewind is a 2020 ProductTank London talk from Sharon-Anne Keen and Ane Silva, then part of the senior product team at fintech Wise. They discuss Wise’s data-driven, tactical approach to growing its product teams, and why diversity is so important.
Autonomy is at the core of a great product team, says Ane, and it’s a blessing and a challenge, and Wise has a clear mission to enable autonomy.
But its teams are not that diverse - for example, only 20% of product managers in its London office identify as women - is that a problem? Increasing the diversity of its product teams will help the company to achieve the mission faster, Ane says. It should enable faster hiring, improvements in customer empathy and more creative solutions.
She then runs through the company’s product management approach to building a more gender diverse team, looking at data, working up hypotheses and then trying to validate them. They learned that the top of the hiring funnel - they weren’t getting applications from female product managers - was the problem.
Sharon then explains the steps they took to address this problem:
- They introduced a ‘women referral power week’ to raise awareness and encourage their team to consciously consider referring more women. They also extended our employee referral scheme to people who are not close connections.
- They interviewed female product managers – at Wise and externally – to understand what might be discouraging them from applying.
- They reviewed every product manager job description on the website, and re-wrote them to ensure the language and tone were not excluding or off-putting to potential candidates. They used a tool to check for gender-coded language bias.
- They ensured that all case studies, content, and posts about what it’s like to work at Wise represent the type of team they were trying to build.
- They set targets for sourcing to ensure that they searched beyond the usual channels to find more female product managers.
- They adapted the interviewing process and to have two interviewers in every interview, one female and one male to create balance.
Sharon closes by saying that Wise is committed to transparency: “I believe that applying this principle to ourselves as a team, to ask ourselves honestly and openly if we are doing everything we can to build the strongest possible team, is important.”
Watch the original talk: A product manager's approach to growing teams
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