When 45% of Your Team Walks Out: Inside Wise’s Design Culture Reboot

Josh Payton at UXDX USA. Video: https://youtu.be/Q7zfWCR0VE0

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The wrong deck

[00:00:08] Hello. I have the wrong deck here, is what my problem is. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. This is going to be weird, because I'm pretty sure the slides are wrong. I have no idea what I'm about to present. I swear to God. But do you want to go on an adventure with me, then, and watch me basically probably blow this really badly? Nothing to it but to do it. Let's go. Okay, here, watch this. Oh, there's no sound. Oh, there's sound. Here we go.

What Wise is, and how we grew

[00:01:41] Hello. So, as advertised, I'm Josh. I am the design lead at Wise. And for the uninitiated, Wise was started about 15 years ago as a money transfer service by two guys named Kristo and Taavet, who both had one foot in the UK and one foot in Europe and had both been burned by moving money back and forth by their traditional banks. And they had this dream of, how could they make money borderless and make it move more transparently, more conveniently, more cheaply and faster.

[00:02:12] I really have no idea what's in this deck. And today we've gotten a lot of accolades for our recent rebrand that happened basically a year after I joined, and I think a lot of people assume that when I first started, the first thing I did was come in and start a big campaign about doing a big rebrand. But that's not what I did at all. I'm going to skip a bunch of slides now.

[00:02:34] We've been — this is wrong now. We've been around 15 years. We move about 12 billion annually. We are growing 30 to 40% year over year. 20% EBITDA margins. 16 million customers. 10 million — I forget what this one was. We get — we're getting about a million new customers every quarter, and 70% of that comes from word of mouth. That means that 700,000 people every three months are joining Wise because their friends like the product enough to tell their friends about it. That's two-thirds.

[00:03:05] The question is, how have we done that? The answer is design. Because money is the world's greatest commodity. You can't really create a luxury money movement product, because no one wants to move money from one place to another and then have less of it when it gets there. So what that means is that you're going to have to do two things that are kind of at odds with each other. One is build a better product than everybody else has, and two, drive down prices more than anybody else. Which means that there's not going to be a lot of room left over in the budget for Super Bowl ads and F1 teams and that kind of thing. It really boils down to great user experience, and user experience that's good enough that people will actually advocate for you.

The state of the design team in 2022

[00:03:48] This is going to be funny, because this isn't supposed to be what's here. But this glowing story of everything looking great, and this slick sizzle reel you see at the beginning, was not at all how things were four and a half years ago when I first joined the company. This was kind of the state of affairs in terms of the design system and what the look and feel looked like. Basically what had happened is the company had had this explosive growth over the first 12 or so years of its existence, and a lot of stuff had basically become a problem of startup-to-scale-up issues that are pretty common with things where you're adding people really quickly, you're inventing a bunch of systems and services from scratch, and basically things happen. Cruft builds up. Things that worked yesterday don't work today, and it starts to get a little rough.

[00:04:37] So when I joined four years ago, while the company was doing phenomenally well, the design team really wasn't. Every six months we do these Culture Amp surveys to kind of find out how employees are feeling and stuff like that, and when I logged in for the first time in 2022, this is what I was met with. The team was about 30 people. The team was 42% engaged. We had a 35% voluntary attrition rate, and our NPS score was -60. I don't know if you're familiar with NPS, but that's basically, would you recommend to a friend or a family member — in this case, to come work in the design team at Wise. I'm not going to dig into these numbers too much, but suffice it to say they're not very good.

[00:05:12] But today it's a very, very different story. We are 120 people. Engagement in the last survey we did earlier this year was at 93%. Voluntary attrition's down to 8% and our NPS score is +49. Anybody who knows anything about NPS, that's a massive turnaround of NPS. And all these numbers except for the headcount number have been stable for about two years. The headcount number keeps growing. We're hiring. If you're interested, move to London.

[00:05:40] How have we done this? What I want to talk about today is what we call the design agenda. And it's not that complicated, it's just a three-pillared strategic framework of things we focus on in terms of accelerating and engaging and building the team. It's delivery, talent, and culture. I'll go through each of these things one by one. This isn't going nearly as badly as I thought it was going to.

Delivery

[00:06:04] Let's start with delivery. Oh, this slide looks bad. I'll skip this. Like I said at the beginning, when I first joined, I think a lot of people thought that I started just by starting with the rebrand, but this is actually the first thing I launched when I joined the company. Everybody gets an onboarding project. They stick you in with a team straight away. And this is basically the international multi-currency debit card campaign landing page.

[00:06:31] And the team that was working on this at the time, they'd been spinning on these three product-marketing-type pages for like nine months. And it was a really scrappy situation. They didn't have a PM to get stakeholders aligned. They were just kind of really treading water. So I joined and basically one of the things we did was take a fresh approach, tried to speed up delivery, and the number you see on the top is the target uplift, the number on the bottom is what the actual uplift was.

[00:06:59] And this totally beat expectations in terms of how things were done, the approach we took, and all that kind of stuff. It was just one of these small wins that helped me, as a new person coming into the team, build credibility, build trust with the team, and all that kind of stuff. I tell people all the time, if you're new to the job site, it's probably a good idea to pick up a shovel before you start picking up the blueprints and questioning everything.

[00:07:17] This slide's not going to go by fast enough. I can't skip it. This was the home page. It's not very good. I'm going to make you look at it. And it's going to take forever. That's kind of the point. Not very good. The story of this is that this page hadn't been touched in about five years. People had added to it and experimented with it and all that kind of stuff, but it just became like an assembly of a million different things that people had just tacked on and added over time. And no one was very passionate about it. When we started doing stakeholder interviews internally, people were very ungenerous when you got them into a room one-on-one and there was no one else listening. I think I have successfully vamped to get past this.

[00:08:01] But yeah, we relaunched — moving from the card page to the home page was basically, it just built credibility to overhaul this from scratch. The point I made to the team at the time was, you could sit there and A/B test a million components and isolated changes in the test-and-learn sort of way of doing things, or, in the same amount of time — it's just HTML and CSS on the internet — update the whole page and see what happens. And again, we turned this around really, really quickly. In the first three months, first 90 days, basically redesigned the entire logged-out website. And in this case the really controversial thing was we moved the send calculator below the fold, and still the other metrics were really high as well.

The rebrand that wasn't a rebrand

[00:08:45] Going to skip this. Going to skip this. Going to skip this. Oh, so yeah, the rebrand. When I first joined the company, the rebrand wasn't really a rebrand. It was basically a collection of product problems that we needed to correct. We had some accessibility non-compliance issues. We had font scaling problems. We had a font licensing deal that wasn't where it needed to be. There was a cruft dimension, a couple of other things. And so the trope at the time was like, the rebrand, it's not a rebrand, we're doing just some refresh stuff on a bunch of usability issues that we've got. It just, if you zoom out, it looks suspiciously like a rebrand.

[00:09:22] And there was a lot of trepidation around this in the company when we were doing it, because it was like, well, how do you know what's going to work? Can we test it ahead of time? And it's like, well, this is a big bang launch, we don't really do these things. How do you know it's going to work? And I was like, I just do. Just trust me. It's vibes, dude. It's fine. Yeah, no big deal, we're just a billion-dollar international company.

[00:09:45] But yeah, we launched the rebrand, and again, a really interesting thing happened, which is that we didn't actually change anything functional in the product. It was just basically a new color palette that was better, more accessible, new illustration styles, new photography guidelines, new tone of voice, new logo, new kind of everything, new iconography, and a custom typeface, better font scaling stuff and all these things.

[00:10:09] And then they kind of thought it was, oh, this is going to be a do-no-harm test, no big deal. And then when it launched we saw everything was up and to the right, and it was kind of an aha moment of, oh wow, design does more than what we thought it did, in terms of it doesn't just make things functional, it makes them engaging. And so what we saw right out of the gate was a 26% uplift in existing customers adopting new products, a 34% uplift in new users adopting multiple products, a 9.8% uplift in conversion from the home page. And this was basically from, we made it look nicer, if you want to be really ungenerous about how much work this actually took.

[00:10:46] I'm going to skip some slides. Oh, we also did that for Wise Platform, Wise Business, etc. We got a bunch of cool industry press. If you can read really quickly. Under consideration. Thanks everybody. The customers loved it. We got a lot of great feedback on social media and from customer interviews and stuff like that. And what's really cool is we started to win awards and we started to get a lot of this kind of recognition. Which to me is amazing, because banks don't win awards. But Wise does win awards. That's very, very cool for design, I should say. Yeah, more of this, more of that. Is this going to — no, this isn't going to animate. We'll skip past that. Cool.

Talent: leaders, not managers

[00:11:21] Anyway, the next pillar of the design agenda is talent. The delivery part is kind of straightforward, kind of what you would expect. Talent was a much heavier lift. And the first thing that I tried to convey to the team when I joined was that I very strongly believe in the idea of leaders, not managers. If you go to any top-tier design agency in the world, whether it's Pentagram or Work & Co or any of those, there's nobody there with the title design manager. It's just a given that the most senior people in the company are the best designers in the building.

[00:11:59] And so now at Wise everybody in the design team's hands-on, including me. I'm still in the work every single day. And this is just an expectation of doing work there. I tell people all the time, people need to be actively managed in places like McDonald's. Any creative that's on your team that needs to be actively managed is probably more of a liability than an asset. People need mentorship and they need leadership. Oh, cheers, man.

[00:12:27] The other thing I kind of maybe controversially started to poke at is that this isn't design. And I'm not saying — this isn't to say that UX workshops and this kind of thing are a waste of time, but it's important to differentiate between what an activity and a deliverable is. This is an activity. It's not a design deliverable. And like I already talked about in the delivery section, we care about delivery. We care about what's in the customer's hand. So these types of things — there's a whole cohort of designers out there who've convinced themselves that this is their whole job. And unfortunately there's a whole bunch of business people that believe them. And that's not good for us. It's not good for what we do. Because at the end of the day, design is a strategic function, similar to goodwill, data, intellectual property, that kind of thing.

[00:13:14] This was supposed to be a bit about working our way up the UX maturity ladder, but I have like 3,000 slides in here that I just get past. So, cool, do that. Wait, what is this? Oh, this is like, hey, you need to define what maturity is.

One mission, one set of skills, one career ladder

[00:13:28] Okay, so this gets into the really, really hard stuff. I talked at the beginning about how there was a lot of fracturing from rapid growth, and that teams were kind of starting to drift apart. So what we had to do was basically pull design together to be one cohesive unit. When I say design, I'm talking about capital-D Design, as we refer to it: product design, content design, user research, and design operations. And there was a lot of variance between what people's evaluation criteria were, how they were being paid, and it varied from discipline to discipline, but also varied from manager to manager.

[00:14:06] So one of the really big things that we did was try to get down to: there's one design mission, there's one set of design skills that we evaluate people's performance based on, and there's one set of design principles that we really care about. And this is it. It all fits on one slide. It's very simple. Everyone loves it. It's my favorite thing. It's not. This is not my favorite thing at all.

[00:14:26] And the really difficult, challenging thing we've done is basically we rewrote the entire career ladder so that everybody is adhering to the same thing. So this is written in a way that if you're a content designer, a product designer, a user researcher, a design operations person, there's one frame of reference and everybody is being judged by the same thing. If you care about this kind of stuff and you want to know more, there's actually a really good podcast about it. Nikki and Rob — Nikki was chief of staff at the time and Rob's our head of content design. They did a ton of work on this, and if you just Google episode 68 Content Strategy Podcast, they do a whole deep dive on this. This is a presentation in and of itself.

Culture: town hall and appreciations

[00:15:09] The third thing is culture. I'm going to actually be ahead of time on this. This is kind of amazing. The third pillar of the design agenda is focusing on culture, and this starts with team culture and it radiates out. Oh, this is the part where my slides are missing. Oh, this is going to be really fun.

[00:15:28] So when I first joined, there were no real rituals or ceremonies that we did as an entire team. At Wise, squads and teams are very much encouraged to be independent and to be autonomous. But what that means is that there are a lot of designers who are like a single designer with a whole team full of engineers and product people and analysts and stuff like that. And when I was talking to people early in my tenure at the company, I heard a lot of times people being like, "Oh, I don't work with any other designers." There was a real sense of disconnect and the team being fractured, and there was no shared identity.

[00:16:02] And so we instituted town hall as a way of basically bringing everybody together once a month. It's just an all-hands meeting, really. But the goal of it is to build that sense of community and help people share what they're proud of, talk about their work, share what they're thinking about, ask for help, and basically create a little bit of what I like to call good competition. If the person sitting next to you is doing something amazing, it kind of encourages you to do something even better. And so that's really the underlying goal of design town hall: to create that kind of good competition where everybody's trying to outdo each other for the benefit of the greater good.

[00:16:39] A major component of design town hall, however, is appreciations. At the end of every design town hall we save the last 10 minutes to do live appreciations, which is basically just the thing of having people say thank you to each other and call out people who've gone above and beyond, who've done a good job. And it's just really nice for the team to hear from their leadership team, from their peers, from their colleagues, that their effort and their actions have been appreciated, and that it's good for other people to see people sharing kind words with each other in that way. Oftentimes a pat on the back gets lost, and I think this has been a big part of really building a cohesion in the team that wasn't there before.

Company culture, and the definition of quality

[00:17:24] These are going to go bad. This is going to get worse. So, going from team culture and radiating out goes to company culture. One of the things I wanted to do when I joined the company was really just influence the company culture. You hear a lot of times designers saying, "Oh, design doesn't have a seat at the table." But that's not given to you. You have to actually go get it. And realistically you've got to build your own table and invite other people to come to it.

[00:17:52] And one of the ways we've done that is, basically one of the things you hear in the design team all the time is, design has the biggest tent, we throw the best parties. And so we have tried to really build this kind of culture of, this is here if you need it, not, why do you want this. And then we also actually throw parties. I think there might be a slide in here about that, but I think it's got deleted.

[00:18:15] One of the most challenging things, however, from a company culture standpoint when I joined, was everybody started asking me about quality. They're like, "You're the design guy. Tell us how we handle this topic of quality." They're like, "How do we define it? How do we measure it? How do we maintain it? How do we this, this, this?" And this is an incredibly gnarly problem, because I don't like doing that.

[00:18:39] And so I did something that I thought was a little cute at the time, but it's actually worked. This is our definition of quality. It's just exceeding expectations. That's it. There are no standard SLAs. There are no metrics that you have to chase. There's no top-down edict of, you have to meet all of these different sorts of numbers and criteria. It's just exceeding expectations. Oh, the transfer is fast, how do you make it instant? Oh, the rate is cheap, how do you make it free? Oh, our app is as good as Chase, how do you make it as good as Airbnb?

[00:19:06] This is always the thing that we're trying to push teams to do. And again, this is about pushing accountability and responsibility onto the teams for their own destiny, and creating that kind of good competition. If you set a standard like this, it's no longer like, "Oh, that's the SLA, we need to meet it." It's, "Well, are my standards higher than yours? Are my expectations higher than yours?" How do we constantly one-up each other in terms of trying to make the product better, trying to make things overall better? It also means you don't have to constantly go back and review, "Oh, we need to change all of these metrics," because basically teams are just defining them for themselves whenever they're kicking off new projects and new work.

[00:19:43] Oh, they also asked me to write — this is kind of a funny story. I took it out, but it's here, so I'll talk about it. One of the things they asked me for when I first joined was, "Can you write us quality guidelines?" And what was funny is that I think it was a bunch of product managers asking for a manual of how to do good design. And they just wanted to read it and thought that that would be able to be the way that they executed. So I wrote this, but the whole time I was just sitting there like, man, Dieter Rams already did this. Why am I doing this? Just go read that. So yeah, this is seven. There's actually 10.

Industry culture

[00:20:15] And then the last bit on the culture front is industry culture. We talk about team culture, company culture, but we also want to influence industry culture. Design at Wise, we really want to set a benchmark. We want to be the best in the industry in terms of user experience design and all this kind of stuff. And so really we're trying to set a benchmark.

[00:20:35] And what we've done as part of this is basically a whole bunch of different things. We've partnered with D&AD for the last several years on D&AD New Blood. We're doing a ton of meetups and stuff like that in London and other places where we have design teams. And we're, like, tomorrow, literally, we're doing a mentoring speed round where young creatives can come. A bunch of designers from the team have volunteered their time and are just trying to help young creatives in the industry get a leg up.

[00:21:06] But the big thing we do every year now is what we call Art Meets Science. This is the website from last year. There's actually another one happening next Thursday. If any of you are going to be in London, come find me and I will get you an invite so you can come. It's at the Tate Modern. It's in the tanks. It's this huge thing where originally it was just our all-design all-hands offsite that we were doing every year, but we decided to open it to the public and turned it into kind of a big conference. It's not a tech conference. It's not a design conference. It's something in between, but completely different.

[00:21:42] And what we've done is basically focused on bringing in people from all walks of life that are doing interesting things either in the arts or in the sciences communities. At this one we had a company called Hawkins Farms[?] that does lab-grown meat and did a whole conversation about how do you convince people that you don't want to put this in your mouth. And then we had — I don't know if you all are familiar with Meow Wolf — we had a couple of designers from there come in and talk about immersive art and all this kind of stuff. And then of course there were other bits about tech and screens and all this kind of stuff. There was a circus artist as well. Very cool.

[00:22:17] I'm out of slides. I have three minutes left. But I'll go here. Oh, you know what, I might have — oh, that was it. Okay, there you go. I guess that's me for today.

Q&A

[00:22:31] Josh: Oh man. Let's hold on that. You can stay in the — oh, the hot spot?

[00:22:36] Host: In the hot spot, and we'll ask you some questions. Start at the top here. During the rebrand stage, how did you justify that testing wasn't necessarily needed for the launch, and how did you get stakeholders who were skeptical to trust your instincts?

[00:22:49] Josh: There's a lot of nuance to this question, actually. I'm not saying we didn't test anything. We did a bunch of silent launches. So with the tone of voice guidelines, in those initial page launches that I was showing you, we were actually updating the tone of voice as we were doing that. We did a bunch of — a lot of the cruft issues that we had, where we'd use a lot of flag icons and iconography and all that kind of stuff, we replaced those in place as we were going, and so we were testing stuff like that. It was just the bigger sort of, you know, color changes that really kind of made an impact that we didn't test ahead of time. But a lot of the stuff that seemed risky, whether it was things like font scaling and typography changes, those things we did test kind of under the radar, and in ways that we could, before we launched.

[00:23:39] Host: And then a two-parter on the next one. How did you decide or justify that pushing the card page as the home page was the right choice? And question B disappeared — oh, there it goes — and then get buy-in from stakeholders and leadership to make that big of a change.

[00:23:53] Josh: Yeah. So the card page was one thing, the home page was another. The thing that we do at Wise whenever a new person joins is we give them an onboarding project. It's basically a good opportunity for you to get stuck in with a team and just find out how delivery works on the ground. And everybody does this, regardless of who you are. And so the team that I got stuck in with was the onboarding squad, and specifically the product discovery team. They're basically the team that's tasked with updating and maintaining the logged-out website. So they'd been spinning on these product marketing pages. We did the card page, we did the account page, we did a whole bunch of them kind of in that period of time. But because we were able to get those out effectively, and we were showing forward progress and that they were having impact, it allowed us to level it up, do the home page, and then go broader.

[00:24:38] And then the buy-in from stakeholders and leadership thing. It was interesting, because the autonomous teams thing means that a lot of times what would happen is teams would launch stuff, and then if somebody didn't like it they'd get chased down after the crime had already been committed. Well, the crime had already been committed. And so with the page redesign and stuff like that, one of the things I just started doing was calling meetings. Wise is very much not a meeting culture. We kind of have that ethos of just move fast and ship.

[00:25:07] And so, but with home page and stuff like that, early on we were just doing things like content outlines and then bringing them to the head of marketing, the head of product, the head of tech, kind of saying, is this what you guys think is the right story to be telling? And then working it through that way. And really it felt like it de-risked everything, got everybody on the same page. But most importantly, it also got leadership to have skin in the game, in terms of making sure that what we were launching — they couldn't come after the fact and be like, why did you do that? It's like, well, we did that because you were in the meeting and we talked about it ahead of time. Yeah.

[00:25:36] Host: Okay, so the top question here I think is getting into the performance side of it, which is something that you had addressed: "people who need to be managed are more of a liability than an asset," they put that in quotes. But how do you handle a situation where you find yourself as a leader in an organization with team members like that?

[00:25:51] Josh: Yeah, I mean this happens all the time. As a line manager of any kind, you're going to end up in situations where people are having performance issues. It's a nuanced question. The only simple answer is, be kind. And I think there's a thing too of, there's a difference between being kind and being nice. Being kind with people is basically the only way you can really approach this stuff.

[00:26:19] If there's ever performance issues with somebody, it should never be a surprise the first time you talk to them about it, because the conversation ramps up over time and you try to coach them along and all that kind of stuff. And then you really shouldn't — if you ever get to the point where you're doing a PIP or whatever, it should never be like, oh my God, this is the first time I've ever heard about any of this. If that happens, you're in a really bad place. For the most part, if you get to that point, you've done a lot of legwork ahead of time to get there.

[00:26:49] Host: And how do you manage burnout when quality is defined as exceeding expectations?

[00:26:53] Josh: Great question. Set boundaries. Turn off notifications at 6:00 p.m. Take Slack off your phone. Exceeding expectations is one thing, but that doesn't mean kill yourself. And I think, at least in my team, we do have a big focus on mental health and making sure that people aren't going above and beyond.

[00:27:18] And one of the reasons that I went out — we did not have design operations when I first started. I worked agency side for a really long time, and one of the things I hated most about working in an agency was, always had to do timesheets. But then the thing I realized when I stopped doing that was, oh wait, now I have no way of tracking utilization or knowing how many hours people are working. And so we started to institute design operations and tracking people's time and all that kind of stuff. And then what we were finding is there were these huge deltas, where some people were cruising and not really killing themselves, other people were working late nights and weekends and stuff like that.

[00:27:51] And so at first I think a lot of people thought that the design ops thing was going to be a way for us to keep tabs on people and make sure that they were doing their jobs and tapping on their shoulders and all that kind of stuff. And in reality, we were building a shield to protect the team's time, to make sure that people had the space and the bandwidth to actually do a really good job. And then also go home and see their kids and have a life. Yeah.

[00:28:17] Host: So one thing that you touched on that I just wanted to add in here is the engagement score. How do you go about measuring your team engagement score outside of what may be an annual or maybe biannual corporate-led initiative for engagement surveys?

[00:28:30] Josh: That's a good question. I think a lot of it is just basically — I don't have a good answer for this, honestly. At least not one that's pithy. The thing that I say all the time is, all the teams I've ever worked in that were really high performing, the vibe has just been like, oh, I'm here making cool stuff with my friends. That's basically how the team should come together and think about things.

[00:28:56] And I think, in the deck I was supposed to be using today, there were some examples of things where — you're just going to have to imagine this in your mind's eye — but there's a designer who's working on the design system. He's relatively junior in the team and he's working on what we call prompts, which is basically the alerts and notification system. And this guy did the most amazing job of just meticulously working through it. And then when he launched it, realistically it's a token update in the design system. It's not that monumental of a thing. But he created this whole splash video, this whole thing around it. He did a talk at town hall about all the sorts of decisions that he made and stuff like that. And he was genuinely excited about what a lot of people might have otherwise thought was a relatively boring and straightforward design system update task.

[00:29:41] And it's just stuff like that where you start to see people going above and beyond, really sweating the details. I think that's kind of when you realize, yeah, people are really engaged. I think too, some of that in that industry culture stuff, when people are being proactive about — the things that we're talking about here didn't come from me. It was one of the design directors who wanted to partner with D&AD. There's a group of designers who do charity design DJ nights and stuff like that. These are the types of things where people are going out of their way to do something more.

[00:30:09] Host: Cool. I think we're at time here, but there are a lot of questions coming in. I believe there's a Slack out there for ask-a-speaker, or if you're here, connect with Josh in person. That was great. Thanks a lot.

[00:30:22] Josh: Thanks y'all.