Wise: Creating a culture expects “thoughtful mistakes” with Clara Nobre, Senior PM

As a Senior Product Manager at fintech company Wise, Clara Nobre brings a background in marketing to inform her product management approach. She serves the company’s business growth team.

Show Notes

At fintech company Wise (formerly TransferWise), product managers — and all employees from designers to engineers — are empowered to speak directly with customers to advance the product.

But the company, which enables people to transfer money abroad at lower costs, also recognizes that you can’t have innovation without failure. 

“We are quite open to people failing because if you're not open to people failing, they're not going to take risks,” Clara Nobre, Wise’s Senior Product Manager, says in this episode. 

Wise understands “informed failure” — or failure that results when due diligence was done and a good process was followed, but a new feature or integration doesn’t work out as anticipated. 

The company culture tolerates and expects “thoughtful mistakes” and then encourages employees to “take this learning and move forward,” explains Clara, who joined Wise in 2019. 

The company is growing quickly and Clara’s team has almost tripled in size since she started.

On this episode of People Driven Products, Clara discusses the role that quantitative vs. qualitative research plays when determining how to prioritize product features. She talks through Wise’s integration with QuickBooks, and reveals what she looks for when interviewing candidates for her team. 

What is People Driven Products?

As a PM, your job is to make products and features your users love. But we all know that’s easier said than done.

That’s why we made People Driven Products. You’ll learn how to make products people love and get insights from the PM leaders behind some of the fastest growing and most successful tech companies in the world.

The show is hosted by Ryan Glasgow, who has over a decade of experience managing products at companies like Weebly and Vurb (acquired by Snapchat) and is now the Founder and CEO of Sprig (formerly UserLeap).

In each episode, he’ll be talking with PM leaders at companies that are masters of gaining customer insights, and making customer-centric products.

You’ll learn from some of the best PMs in the world and get practical advice on how to create a customer-centric product team, build a customer-focused culture (and get your company on board), get user feedback quickly, make decisions from those insights, craft a compelling story from the data you gather, help your company make the right product decisions, and most importantly, make products people love.

We can’t wait to share these insights with you, and truly hope that each one helps you and your company, create people-driven products.

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