Post by Product School

"The best PMs I've ever worked with don't wait for certainty. They build conviction." Nilan Peiris has been CPO at Wise for 15 years – since it was just two founders with a dream to move money without borders. Today, 5% of the world's money flows through Wise. Here's what he's learned about product leadership at that scale: 1️⃣ Prediction is the job, not a bonus skill. PMs who wait for data to confirm direction before committing are too slow. The role is to develop a strong point of view about the future before the evidence is obvious – and then validate or invalidate it fast. 2️⃣ Conviction compounds. The most impactful product bets at Wise came from teams with a deeply held belief in why something would matter to customers, regardless of whether or not it was in the roadmap. That conviction drives better experiments, better tradeoffs, and faster learning. 3️⃣ The human layer is the moat. Technical capability is table stakes. What separates great product organizations is the quality of judgment – reading signals, synthesizing context, making calls when data is incomplete. That can't be automated.

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