How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product)

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31:27Learn all the ways that Stripe can grow revenue for your business at Stripe .com. Let me go in a different direction and see if there's more to learn here. When it comes to running your teams, is there something that is fairly contrarian in how you approach running the product team that is maybe now not how other companies operate that you think is key to your success? I've changed in how I operate after a joint workload. Probably because Revolute is a founder, let company, and probably it's because SoFlet. And also because my role is quite spread across many things. So my role of travel is leading product function across company, but also leading retail, which is a core part of Revolve business.

32:17And it's very easy to be spread thinly across all those domains and catching up with 50 or 70 projects that are being executed simultaneously. Which would mean that you know you will just spend your entire a week just kitchen up on statuses, not really adding value to anyone. But it's also scary to not do it. Because why do there are some things going wrong, right? And you won't be able to stop it or steer it in a better direction. So I think that's why also a lot of managers, especially in senior positions, they kind of stay high level. They don't go very deep into details. But so how we did differently a travel is to go very deep into details.

33:16We take maybe seven or ten projects, which are most impactful for customers right now. and we go super deep into them, like really deep seating with engineers, like reading code level and understanding, okay, how it's built exactly and what's the underlying issue.

33:45And you could think that, okay, but what about others, like let's say, 50 or 60 items, or that have been executed. But the thing is that it actually, it's counterintuitive, but it works really well because, first of all, teams, they talk to each other. There are formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just, you know, meeting in the office. And they know which areas are being scrutinized right now and like which team is being scrutinized. and it also gives information of what are the current priorities in the company. But in addition, it's a signal to other teams that if they are not proactively executing things on the expected level, paying attention to all the details and being meticulous in all those data, especially in quality, they will be the ones that will be reviewed to a such deep level, like next phase, next cycle.

34:55So as a result, it also builds a great discipline and since like Revolute is such a high concentration of very ambitious people who thrive for being best versions of themselves and grow. And it's very important for them to prove that they can deliver great things and build next, like, great company. As a result, they do everything to operate autonomously and when you start diving deep into details, like you see the everything is fine. You see the modus operandi and you can understand, okay, if this team is on good track or not on good track and if it's not on good track, it means that it probably will be one of your next areas of focus.

35:53Okay, so what I'm hearing is there's, you said there's 50 to 60 things kind of projects being built in place. Maybe it's closer to 100 actually. Okay, okay, so there's like 100 things happening at any point, like features being built, products being launched. And you and this is you and the founders to 7 to 10 to focus on, or is it just you? No, it's just me. Just you. Okay. And by the way, do you have a leadership team that you're a part of, would like a design leader, or is it just you basically at the top? So the way it's structured, my responsibility is a product function. We also have a head of design function, it's also part of my team.

36:32But then all the other functions, they separate like engineering and data function. And all of them report directly into CEO. Got it. Okay, so you so out of a hundred things you choose, here's like the 7 to 10 things I'm going to go deep on. These are the things that matter most to the business that if they don't go well, it'll have the most down, down side. And then you just you're you basically said you sit next to the engineers, you get really involved in every detail. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. That is definitely counterintuitive. We had Brian Cheskin, the podcast, and the way he approached this problem is he just cut down how many things happen at Airbnb, and because he wants to be involved in everything.

37:12And so I think it's cool to hear a different approach for you. Okay. We can still do a lot of stuff, but I'm going to choose, I'm going to go deep on the things that matter most. No. I think we will know a cut down since it's just the epitite for the first time. for growth and also entrepreneurial approach in the company so high that we will never allow ourselves to give up on some great opportunities. But also this approach is way more scalable. So while leadership and obviously founders themselves, keep everyone accountable and go deep into details, it doesn't mean that they micromanage everyone, That's actually a very important thing.

37:59So the ideal position for any product owner is to be fully autonomous. And again, it doesn't mean that you will never be challenged. But if when you're challenged, you can show all the logic behind decisions you've made behind the road map. And even if metrics are not yet there, like you will still, like let's say have this credit of trust to keep building things the way you want to build them. Eventually, yeah, you will be presenting the outputs of your activity on this weekly product reviews. But again, it's not a micromanagement either. It's more like, let's say, a last line of control to make sure that what we're building is all makes sense and that's value and is thoroughly they thought in all details.

38:48And then you said still every screen that has shipped the founders review at some point. So it's not like someone shipping stuff without the founders seeing it in some form. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They have like full overview over everything. But also it actually allows us to build so many things because there is actually little micromanagement. If founders had to be involved in everything, they had to cut the things down. But by giving people autonomy, they actually boost company growth. And as a result, I think, revolution is a strong outlier in the industry in terms of how many products have been shipped and how fast they ship.

39:41Another thing here is what I mentioned previously is us investing heavily into platform and so that every solution is scalable from the get -go so that we don't have any custom solutions and I don't for example take our credit team they ship new products like loans or credit cards in a country literally literally every month. And it's just maybe 300 people. And I think that a credit division in a incumbent bank is maybe like 2 or 3 ,000 people building just created products for a single country. And our team is building it for 50 countries. So, and yeah, it's enabled through this approach with platforms which we build on top of, small in -teams, which are fully equipped with necessary functions and also have autonomy in defining what they're building.

40:51And the flat hierarchy with everyone being accountable and founders have in direct view over everyone and intervenient if necessary. I'm going to give people a list of the things you guys do. I didn't do this at the beginning because it would take too long, but you talk about all the products you're building and all the things that's going on. So I have a list here that it made. It's probably incomplete, but just to give people a sense. So you guys have credit cards, debit cards, savings accounts, multi currency accounts, domestic international transfers, joint accounts, miners accounts for less than 18 years old, stock trading cryptocurrency, purchasing loans?

41:35Is there anything big I missed? I mean, some of those things are huge by itself. Let's say stock trading, right? It's not just stocks. It's also ETFs, bonds, and we're working on tax -efficient accounts in different countries. and crypto, it's also allow staking crypto, for example. We have on -ramp or from products. We have acquiring products. On -created, we have loans. We have by now, per later product, we have... We even launched mortgages. We launched first mortgages in the... In the millennia recently. And then all of these across 50 different currencies and countries. Yeah, 50 different jurisdictions with each with its own regulation with its own requirements No boy This is it's a good example of Paul Graham has this concept of schlep blindness or schlepping where people Want to avoid hard problems, but that's where the big opportunities are solving really gnarly Painful problems and that's basically what you guys did.

42:45Yeah, that's one of the things that excites me maybe the most, to be honest, the market is so big and there are still a lot of very inefficient players. And as a result, customers have a lot of problems that are unsolved. While we grow insanely, and I think we'll soon be, so when I joined, we had maybe just slightly enough to 20 million customers. Now we are 50 million customers, soon we'll be at 100 million customers. The degree of surrounding each customer with the ecosystem of our products extends a lot. So they become more and more people start using Revolute as their main bank account. They start receiving their salary into Revolute holding their savings into Revolute because they love the product more.

43:42And so we can easily do another, I don't know, two, three X for X in customer based growth, but we can also do another 10X growth in how actively these people are using the product. So it's let's say what, 30, 40 X to current 45 billion valuation. right? So it's like a trillion dollar company easily. And on that note, what I'm hearing is it's still a great time to join. There's a massive upside. So I know you guys are hiring. We'll just note that real quick. There's your hiring product donors and a bunch of other roles I imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as someone who owns the product function, I'm especially interested in product products obviously.

44:33But we, yeah, we hire a lot of roles. I think we have maybe a three or four hundred open positions currently. Oh my God. Okay. I want to talk a bit about new stuff that you work on. So new products that you decide to invest in. Is there anything that you've figured out about just like how to set up new products for success? Because a lot of the stuff we've been talking about is staying on top of stuff that you're iterating on and making better. What if you learn about just helping new products succeed? Yeah, so we launched quite a few products that you actually maybe wouldn't expect from a bank starting with crypto that was insanely successful, but also non -financial services like booking a hotel through Revoltape, our loyalty program, Revitpoints, which is sort of disrupting European market where people don't get great benefits from spending it with cards.

45:28In the US you can easily get like what 2 % cash back with a credit card or in some sort of point. In Europe they don't have it and we are actually the first to build a program on cards and rewarding people with really meaningful or monetary rewards. In the manner that I described like we understood okay what's the recipe of this success to then scale it and reproduce. So we built a new batch framework and essentially everyone can come up with a new idea. It could be a product owner but it could be anyone like. And they need to show some important things we usually can expect from startup like market is there, business cases there.

46:16We know that we can do it way better than competitors leverage and for example, something that we have, obviously, some concepts of product and then what customer problem we're solving and so on. And there is very little bureaucracy. Again, thanks to having founder and so on, we can easily get a green light on anything, start launching it quickly. What we do is assemble a same lean team with just a few people to build first version and then iterate and iterate. And the main thing here is to build first version very quickly to get feedback, but then not scale it before you polish the product. But then after we make sure that all metrics are fine, retention is great.

47:09We start scaling it and the good news is that it can be instantly multiplied by our 50 million customer base and get great traction. So, for example, one of the products that you mentioned during the accounts, essentially, an account that you could have with a significant other one, was one of the recently launched feature and it grew significantly and now it has over a million active users. I hear one of the ways you approach these early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good and not just like a scrappy MVP. Is that ring a bell? Is that resonating? Indeed. That's what I may be meant by, you know, keeping your first version narrowed down to a small user base.

47:55But even in this case, we still make sure that the product is well. So no one is excluded from this requirement of building a super polished product. It takes time, but it pays off. You know, the thing is that when you launch a scrappy version and it's not getting traction, how do you know? Is it because the underlying idea is wrong or maybe your product just sucks and you need to improve it? So by forcing everyone to build a product that people will love, we build in a wow product, we kind of cut out this part of uncertainty here. So bottom line, we can cut down the product in terms of functionality to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics.

48:55And interesting advantage you guys have that I'm realizing as you talk is like, most of the stuff you launch is stuff that is clearly something people will want because it's stuff, they get other places, but they get the advantages of it being integrated into all the other features and products you have. So it's like, you know, a cryptocurrency product. I get it's kind of like, okay, yeah, people would love a great cryptocurrency product built into this or joined accounts. So there's almost like a benefit of just like, okay, the people will want this now. Let's just make it work really well with everything else we got and not hurt.

49:28You almost don't need to be the best at every product. Although, it sounds like you still try to be the best. But we must be the best. But there's also, if you don't have the best joint account, but all the other stuff is awesome. People are like, all right, it's fine. It just makes my life easier. But tell me what I might be missing. So I think there are those kind of table stakes that we're building that anyone would expect from a bank. Like, for example, saving the count, right? It's just a basic thing that if a bank is not providing saving the count, you wouldn't even consider it. But then we make sure that our rates are very competitive, if not the best.

50:09Then we make sure that there is no bad UX, like, you know, some banks, they, for example, they don't allow you to withdraw instantly, and there are delays. or they don't pay interest on daily basis. We will never do that. We will allow you, if you want to move money out, you will be able to do it. You won't lose any interest. And interest has been paid daily, and this is a fully flexible product. And then on top of it, what I would call maybe some deliters is we will allow you to open the savings account in many currencies. So we want to add like different currencies so because now interest rates are going down so people might find it valuable to open a savings account and for example I know in Europe like Swedish corona interest rates are higher than Europe but it could be even something like Brazilian real or with what 12 % interest rate versus like two or three percent on yours and then at The cherry on top, there is this all that in an amazing you have very smooth, you can set custom wallpapers, you can set goals, you can automate a spare change towards your savings cut and all those features.

51:28So there is an underlying basic, like, fundamental layer, where you need to be just on par with competition, but then there are a lot of things on top that just make people love your product way more. And obviously there are a lot of synergies in between those things. So yeah, thinking of crypto, you can just receive crypto on your world and then you can just instantly convert it to cash on your account or just spend it with your card. How amazing can it be, right? Just buy a coffee with the theory. I love that. Okay. Let me take this opportunity to try to summarize what I've learned from you so far in terms of what you guys have figured out about creating incredible product leaders that go on to do wonderful things and basically one of the top three most successful companies at this.

52:25So there's kind of these two buckets as I talk to you and the volunteer guy. There's kind of like the hiring piece and then there's that what you do to help incubate this kind of forge for incredible product leaders. So in the what you do internally, kind of the four bullet points I've got here is give people a lot of ownership. They're essentially GMs of the product, the feature. There's a lot of focus on depth and complexity and getting really good at solving really gnarly problems. And then there's building a focus on building wow products, amazing, lovable products that have a very high bar.

52:59And then there's kind of like a a subtle point that I think is probably impactful here, is just working closely with detailed obsessed founders or product leaders like you and learning from you all, and just like seeing the value and impact of being super detail oriented. On that bucket, is there anything else that you think is super core that I missed before we get to hiring? Yeah, I would just maybe highlight the aspect of this like going deep into details, right? It's it's that there are two main streams first is let's say Being technical understanding how underlying systems work, but second is also You know building empathy towards customers understand the possible context And making sure that your product will satisfy each one of them.

53:46That's a great point So it's like actually understanding the bare metal of what is happening in how it's possible and then making experience as Simple and wowable as possible There is also a third aspect, but it's a boring one. It's like a compliant with all possible regulations and making sure that your product will satisfy the regulator. But it's also an important part of the job. What I get from that is just building patients. I would say it's actually being able to unblock your team. And that sometimes require product owners to steamroll change it. It also means that you know you could easily get stuck with a lot of people just looking into each other and thinking, okay, can they approve it?

54:36Can they not approve it? We try to innovate on it. We try to automate as many things as possible. We use even AI models for that. But it also requires a product owner to be able to get things done. you know, just just getting people down to to consensus and understanding who you stakeholders, how to get them to the necessary decision and then blocking you to them so that eventually like the value is shipped to customers. Awesome. So essentially it's just getting shit done, plowing through blockers, dealing with many stakeholders. that's always the most important. Okay, that's a great addition.

55:21I could see why that would be really helpful for folks that are trying to get ahead in their career. Okay, and then on the hiring piece, which you look for is raw intellect, drive hunger, passion, essentially, those are the first two. And then interestingly, non -senior, non, not people with a ton of experience in the problem space, more so focusing on intellect than hunger. Is there anything else in that bucket that you think is important and that leads to people being really successful. Most importantly, it's again, getting things done, getting your hands dirty, and you know, like great product owners are very hands on.

55:59They don't think of themselves as managers who just give toss to people and weigh them to complete it. They just go and get things done, and they understand that most important things, they will likely have to do themselves. And they understand that they need to be relentless focus on execution. And if something is 99 % done, it's closer to 0 % rather than 100%. Wow. Same where there is the kind of the insight there is just like things seem like they're 99 % done, but they're actually very far from being done. Like sometimes the product is built, But then product owners are the ones who also make sure that, for example, a customer care team or sales and marketing team are using it to a full extent.

56:51Because without it, it could be just another useless feature which no one knows about it. That is super cool. I like the mentality. Let me ask you something completely different. What's kind of the story of you landing at Revolution? I know you had to move your family. It was a whole adventure. my journey into Ravod actually coincided with me moving to the UK. So it was a completely new environment for myself. It's a huge stress load for the brain as well. And it's not only about using the other side of the way in the road in the UK, but also it's a lot of things, for example, in the industry, like some concepts that I never heard about.

57:39And actually, I've never worked at Fintech before, so I also changed the industry. So it was like a complete turn around for me and for my career. But I was very determined and excited about it, because everyone who I've been talking to, they were saying, Ravallod is like top talent, he's a travel look like all the best product people or I travel it and I really wanted to be part of this great team. Eventually, it actually appeared to be advantageous for me because I also had this fresh view on things and even in the Revolute app which is actually way, way better than other banks' products, right?

58:28But even there, I found some things that for me because of this lack of context, they were not intuitive and I worked hard with the team to change that. Okay, great. I'm going to take us to recurring segment of the podcast and we'll take us to fail corner. So in fail corner, the idea here is people come on spot cast, they share all these stories of success, everything's always going great. But in reality, things don't often go great and there's a lot of things that don't go right. Is there a story you could share where things went wrong in your career, where you failed with a product you were building or a moment in your career where things were looking really bad?

59:11I think the most spectacular failures probably were on the earliest stage of my career, which I studied back at university and maybe in my second year of university I started building some things. different startups and one of them was actually a product that makes me proud even now because it was like what 15 years ago so 2010 meaning like still no one really had even iPhones back then and me and my friends we started building a a website that allows people to buy tickets to the cinema, so that they can skip the line, so that they don't need to come in advance to select best seats. And they can just buy tickets online and go to the seats director.

1:00:09Something that today seems as a commodity, back then, like no one had it, like people were using pieces of paper. And we build like an end -to -end system, because not only we needed to build a website, but we also needed to build hardware to scan those tickets, for example. And to have these tickets in digital format, we needed to hack SMS standard because, again, like people didn't have smartphones. They had these Nokia's and we were sending images, QR codes inside an SMS, which is like a hack of the standard. in a way. And then we were scanning those things with our own devices and we built our own devices with scanners and we actually created this beautiful devices made from stainless steel which looked really nice inside the cinemas holes.

1:01:12And I remember how I was excited about it. with my friends, we were like, what an amazing thing is, like, look, we're bringing the future here, but we actually, we spent all our investment on this hardware, and we were expecting that, you know, like everyone would just rush into using our system. But it was a very low share of customers who started by antickets in line because people were not ready for it, which was growing quite slowly. And eventually we had to close it because we simply ran out of money, because we spent all of it on this hardware without any proven business model. So something that currently looks like an obvious mistake.

1:01:59Back then we were just, you know, enjoying building a product that we would love to use ourselves. Which I think is the right principle. But it also was a very painful lesson. You need to stay lean. You need to validate things before you scale them. You need to think way more about the run rate of your business. So there were a lot of painful lessons for me. Since then, I also tried to avoid working with hardware. I'm just going to say that. Common, common challenge for startups trying to get right into hardware. Although I wouldn't be surprised now if Revolut launched something. Another product, and this is a new product line of Revolut.

1:02:40Now that you've had that experience. Yeah, I launched the POS terminals for a quiet. All right, there we go. The feature before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that we haven't touched on? You think might be really helpful for listeners to hear maybe less wisdom nugget that you haven't already shared or even just something to kind of double down on that you've already shared? No, I think that it was an amazing chat and thanks to any, you would cover a lot of different topics. I would just maybe summarize that, you know, if you're excited to build certain things, never hesitate to do it.

1:03:20The best way to do it is probably your own startup, and it also what will give you the steepest possible learning curve. But then if you want to join a company, try to choose the one that has this highest entrepreneurial spirit, and that that will allow you to work as closer to a mode of a founder as you possibly can. That's a recurring theme in these conversations I'm having with companies that produce the opiums that have the steepest career trajectory. And so that advice is exactly what I'm taking away from this too. Assuming you want your career to accelerate really quickly after you go work at this company.

1:04:02Okay. Demetri, with that, we reached a very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Yes, let's go. Here we go. Okay, first question, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? The hard thing about hard things by Ben Harovitz. Actually read it quite some time ago, but I found myself recommending it to other product managers most often.

1:04:34It's actually strive to be in a great CEO. And besides this book emphasizes the importance of building systematic solutions and scalable solutions, which is critical for scale and company, also being honest on how important it is to grind stuff. And then second book is I read it more recently, built by Tony Fadel. I was really inspired by this one, especially given how I appreciate how it's not easy to build hardware and what Tony was describing there is just super exciting and inspiring. And also I think that there are different archetypes of project managers. There are people who tend to disrupt things more.

1:05:32Personally, I think about myself as a for builder. So Tony is a principle that he highlighted in the book that they resonate with me a lot. I'm trying to get Tony on the podcast. If anyone listening knows Tony Fidel and can not jump. Hey, say yes to Lenny. That'd be great. I've been in touch with this team. He's not doing podcasts right now, but I'm trying to get him on. Okay, move it on. You have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you've really enjoyed. I think the last movie I watched was Openheimer and I really liked it. I always love watching biopics. I think they give you kind of a perspective and let you think about things in perspective.

1:06:16Is there a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love? Manus is a great thing. The AI agent. And yeah, yeah, it's just like I was super impressed how I was mesmerized. It's so autonomous and smooth. And I just spent a few hours vibe coding and I created this JavaScript app that sends me a rare English word every day to learn and remember. And it worked. I was just amazed. What's a learned? What's a word you learned? Ineffable. It was the yes or no. I love that it's still going. That's great. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to you find useful and worker in life?

1:07:07I love this phrase. I think Eisenhower said it. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. And it's like, you know, we often say how important it is to be flexible on the job and just to change in circumstances. But it doesn't allow us to actually not have a plan at all. It's important for us to remember that, you know, we always need to think many steps ahead. And while being flexible, we also need to think things thoroughly. Final question for folks that are maybe checking out revenue for the first time. They want to play with it already users. What's the most underrated feature? What's something that you think people should check out?

1:07:51Maybe they're not aware of or even just like a UX. I don't know animation. Something fun that people may not know about. The thing that is not yet widely used, but I really loved it is what we call a wealth protection. So if you go to settings, you can enable a limit for any transfer site that's the frevelled. And if you want to do a transfer above this limit, you will have to do a selfie check, which is our proprietary technology. We do a video selfie, and it allows us to make sure that it's you, no one else is doing the transfer. And it's actually almost as smooth as a face ID. And the way team built it is really great.

1:08:36I'm really proud of those guys. And to meet you guys are doing something very special. I really appreciate you spending so much time with me chatting through all the things you guys have figured out. I think that's going to help a lot of different companies level up the way they think about product. And for people to join Revolute, I want to experience this and accelerate their career. So thank you for being here. Two final questions. Working folks find you if they want to reach out. And how can listeners be useful to you? I think the best way is to find me on LinkedIn. and yeah, I would be happy to receive a note from anyone on how we can improve the product and if it back on the product.

1:09:11And also, if you know someone who can be a great fit to replicate after you've listened to what I've told, then yeah, I would be grateful for that as well. Awesome, you're about to get a flood of applications, get prepared. Let me show you a photo. Yeah, Ren and thanks a lot. It was amazing to be here. Thank you very much. Same. Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast.

1:09:51You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode!