20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson

0:28This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings. in annualized revenue. It is one of the fastest growing business banking products on the planet. What an incredible journey. And today we delve into their biggest product lessons. But before we dive into the show today, are you struggling to beat model benchmarks or implement Gen.ai in your product? If so, you need Turing. Turing is an AGI infrastructure company backed by incredible investors like Foundation Capital and Westbridge Capital. And they do two things. Number one, they help leading companies in AI labs like Salesforce, Anthropic, and Meta enhance their LLMs with advanced reasoning, coding, multilinguality, multimodality, and more.

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4:12I want to start there. Do you recommend this as an entry into the world of product? For me, starting as a consultant was fantastic. Two years and you learn a lot of hard skills in the role. You get exposed to a lot of people you learn to present. And I think for most careers, if you start like that and then go into something where you're a little bit more hands-on, it's a really good way to start. So yeah, for me, it was great. Now we hire people into product roles from a lot of other backgrounds. We've just taken in a big cohort of grads directly. We also hire from engineering and data as well.

4:46So there is a variety of different ways people can get into product. But for me, having those couple of years at the start of the career was a great start. When you then enter product for the first time after consulting, you have this very unique opportunity where you can go back to that younger James and say, James, you should know this about the next eight years. What would you say that you should know if you could tell yourself anything? What should I know back then that I wish I knew now? To be honest, when I was a consultant, I didn't even really know that product was a career. Certainly when I left university, I didn't.

5:19And when I joined Revolut, it became apparent to me that the real power, the thing that created all the value was this product team and the people working within it. And so actually learning that there was even this thing called product management, product ownership and moving into that for me was a complete game changer. And that's what then I focused on for the next six, seven years. When you see the grads coming into Revolut today that you have, as you just mentioned, that large cohort, it's a very tumultuous world. AI is changing everything. What advice do you have for them in terms of excelling at Revolut on the day one?

5:53That's a great question. I gave the presentation, the senior leadership, welcome to the grads yesterday, and I answered exactly the same question. So I'll tell you word for word what I told them. I said to them, firstly, ensure that you ask lots of stupid questions. Now's the time in your career when you can do that. You need to understand what's going on. Secondly, you need to focus on a small number of things and do them incredibly well. No one remembers if you've done 15 different things in your first three months. They'll remember the quality of what you did. So make sure that you focus on a small number of things and do them really well.

6:26And the final thing I would say is early in your career, you want to learn what good looks like. That's what will set you up well for the rest of your career. You want to surround yourselves with the best people. Fortunately at Revolut, we have a lot of good people, but choosing who you're going to spend time with and what functions of engineering or data that you're going to spend time with to really learn and absorb from them and learn what good looks like, that will set you up so well for the next five, 10 years of your career. In terms of focusing on a small number of things and doing them very well, the most interesting thing actually for me about Revolut is your culture of radical execution.

6:59when you look at your product velocity it's pretty insane there's teams behind that and so i do want to start on the teams themselves who build those products and hiring and building that team how do you at revolute approach the hiring process so the first thing to think about is we obviously want to go and find the absolute best people so you need to go and look for them so you need teams going out there and speaking to the best people often the best people aren't looking for roles so you need to be the ones going to approach them so we have amazing teams of recruiters who are spending a lot of time doing that explaining to people the roles that we have and trying to get them in at the kind of top of the funnel do you believe that educational institution signifies quality nick places quite a lot of emphasis on like oh oxford or cambridge i think well as somebody went to oxford i have to say yes but uh no i think i think it can be a useful signal it by no means definitely means that person is going to be fantastic okay so we have these recruiters they go out, they find high quality people.

7:56They then bring them in. What does the screening process look like from there? So we then have CV screening process and some initial evaluation. After that, we have a very structured interview process where there are maybe four or five steps. Each of the steps focuses on a different element of what we're looking for. So some might be on skills like just raw problem solving. Some might be on product skills. So solving is kind of problem solving in a product context. And then some will be on cultural alignment as well. And then finally on a team fit. Each of these interviews will be done and we'll have a very structured evaluation of what we're looking for in each of them.

8:33The people that we get to do these interviews, we spend a lot of time thinking about as well. So even within Revolut, we have people who obviously have different strengths and we are constantly evaluating your performance as an interviewer to understand whether or not you should continue to be an interviewer. Wow, that's so interesting. So how do you evaluate the performance of interviewers, given the feedback cycle being potentially nine months if they hire a shit batch of people? So firstly, we only get people doing the interviews to start with who have been in the company for a while and we trust to do it.

9:04And then once they start doing it, we gather these data points for the people that they do hire. So we know the performance reviews that those people go on to get, and then we can basically backtest the interviewer and give them scores and you see the distribution of outcomes of the people that they've hired and using that you can give them a score and then quite quickly you can start comparing their capability if you think about doing a few things very well and then the breadth of skills that one is looking for in an interview process i have never really had a job james and uh i'm probably world class at like one or two things and just suck at 99 so i would never get a job at revolute because when you look at like the skill requirements, I wouldn't have them.

9:43Is there a paradox between wanting people who are very good at one or two things and focusing, and then actually the requirements that are required in an interview process, do they combine? Firstly, it's not like we're just looking for people who went to Oxford and Cambridge to use the example you gave earlier. We're looking at a lot of different data points. One of them is people who've started their own company, for example they might have no other experience whatsoever maybe they even did it at university alongside their studies why is that a high indicator of success for you because it shows someone who has drive and hunger someone who is willing to sacrifice in order to try and create something and then someone who will have actually learned how to do something through the process of that do they have a high retention rate versus other employees oh that's a great question i don't off the top of my head, I've seen both succeed at Revolut.

10:37So we have these different types and then we're going through the interview process. When you look today specifically for you in product, you're interviewing me. What are the skills you want to see me have if I'm going to come into your product team today? I personally believe a lot more in raw skills than I do in people who've learned frameworks. There's a lot of things out there that you can learn about. And to be honest, I don't know a lot of them. And I don't think a lot of people who've done well and built great products know about all of these frameworks. What I think you really want is people with great raw skillset.

11:10And so that means people who are able to ask the right questions, who are able to structure problems, who are able to balance multiple solutions in their head and trade them off. These are just core problem solving skills. And I don't think you have to have come from any particular background to have them. You also need to have a hunger, particularly if you're going to come and work in a company like Revolut. There is no point coming if you kind of want to chill. And I think that you can see those things relatively quickly when you interview people. When you're interviewing them, what questions do you find most revealing of those skills?

11:43I like to ask people what their biggest mistakes were in their career. And people who I think are good tend to have a lot of mistakes and they can identify at various stages all sorts of things that they would have done differently. And that's because you want people who are self-critical another one is uh what do people find weird about you good people tend to have some slight idiosyncrasies people who are good tend to be aware of them and and i think it's again an interesting thing to talk about should we play a game

12:14what would you say your biggest mistake is i'll tell you mine i lost 25 million dollars in a day in pakistan wow how do you do that i'm it's not a shit story is it you're like okay i'll i'll buy yeah i invested in um the zap for pakistan and um the combination of regulatory changes and weather patterns meant that it went bust very very quickly wow when we burned 25 million dollars of my money in nine months it's not a one is it you're like if i came to your job interview you'd be like okay yeah someone once told me uh who came to our team that he tried to put on a music festival he'd spent hundreds of thousands of his own money i don't know why he thought this was necessarily thinking once he did and that had just crashed and burned lost all this money and i remember thinking like wow that's uh that's a play to you yeah i don't have anything i haven't done i just trumped his music festival yeah you did you did you you won and what would yours be well actually i think i would have probably tried to get into product a bit quicker that's not a massive mistake but now knowing what i know a couple of years in consulting was great but i'd love to have gone in a little bit earlier and then really put foot on the pedal a bit earlier in my career other ones uh a revolute is we we hired it's the classic one right you hired the wrong people early on the people with lots of experience who make you feel like you don't know anything because you don't have all the background in these again these frameworks etc and then you realize after probably slightly too long that actually that's not that relevant all those frameworks are and you've been wasting your time for a year trying to sort of understand it where actually you should sort of trust your gut.

13:49What do you want to hear in the what makes someone weird? I love it when people understand that they have a certain intensity about themselves or a hunger about themselves, which they think sets them apart. A lot of great people that I've worked with have something which is driving them, and that can be lots of different things, which gives them a hunger, which has allowed them to push harder than other people. What's given you your hunger, James? You seem like a very level calm Englishman growing up my dad said to me when I said oh I'd love to my dad's an architect and to be honest I would love to have been an architect and he said to me you've got to go do something that makes money you can't be an architect and you can make money in architecture I'm now married to an architect so I get to live vicariously through her but there was certainly a drive to go and try and make some money that was instilled in me from a relatively early age Do you mind if people in an interview process are clearly financially driven, like they're after the money?

14:47No, not at all. That's absolutely fine. I mean, and if you want to work in a really hard job and you get paid well, then yeah. I totally agree. I think it's a very British thing that we demonize this kind of money chasing, which doesn't always mean it's bad or wrong. Completely agree. And the idea that you can't talk about it properly and openly during the interview process or towards the end of the interview process, at least, to me, doesn't make any sense at all. part of an interview process is also take-home assignments or tests so to speak where there is some tangible materiality to are you good at product what does that look like for Revolut we do some simple ones to just test basic problem solving but very high performing people tend to not want to dedicate two days of their life to solving a problem and so you have to make sure it's something reasonable so we do use them but I would say in a limited way what sort of things you do like here's a UI yeah here's a data set can you tell me what's going on with the data set keep it very open-ended and then let them kind of try and understand it and come back to you with some thoughts on it okay so then they progress and it looks great we're going to give them an offer any big lessons for you in that offer slash negotiation process of how good versus bad people handle it how good people tend to handle it they have a good idea from the outset what they want and what criteria need to be met and they make kind of decisions quite quickly They're also willing on some level to deal with ambiguity.

16:05When you join a company, there is no way you can know exactly who you're going to be working with, exactly what project you're going to be working on. You have to be able to deal with that. And normally that's a good indication of when they join, if they're going to be able to roll with the punches that obviously come with joining a fast growing company. When you reflect on your biggest hiring mistakes, what did you not see with the benefit of hindsight you think you should have seen? You need to, on some level, trust your gut that some of the ways you've been doing product up till then make sense and not try and bring in people who are going to say everything that's happened up till now has been ridiculous.

16:41We're going to completely change how you do this. And that's happened a few times. Nick's probably spoken to you about this a bit as well. And what you end up finding kind of six months, 12 months later is actually the way you were doing it before that got you all that growth before was a great way to do it. And you should probably just sort of double down on that and put more weight behind that rather than starting something completely new. What I like about Nick is also his mental plasticity, though. I remember talking to him about brand marketing, and he was always very against brand marketing in the earlier days, which I'm sure he was probably right to be in the earlier days.

17:10But his willingness to come around to it now, I think it's been really interesting. Yeah, Nick's able to form opinions on stuff and really sensible opinions. But then from everything that I've seen is able to change when new information comes to light. When we think about knowing whether it was the right decision to do it in the early days there, like you said, hey, throw out all things from the window or actually keep them, you need to have goals to understand what works and what doesn't. What is a good goal versus a bad goal at Revolut? We try and keep goals relatively simple to start with. So you need to be able to understand what it is.

17:42Actually, probably most critically, the goal has to be aligned with whatever the company goal is. So there's no point just having random goals for teams if it doesn't all sum up to something. How do you think about that when there's a Revolut core company, amazing bank for everyone, and then there's also Revolut business? The goals may not quite align. No, they do. So we set at the company level about five kind of macro goals that we're looking to achieve. And some of them are kind of financial goals, some of them are customer experience goals and the like. And then we cascade those down to the relevant products and departments to support them.

18:16I mean, to use a basic one, let's say one of our goals as a company was gross profit. we could cascade that down to business so we know what the KPI, the goal for the business side would be. Got it. So you will have a overarching set of goals and all of them will be horizontally applicable to every business line? Maybe not every single business line. It obviously depends of what stage it's at of launch, etc. But yeah, that's the rough idea. You can cascade it all down. So it all sums up to the overarching goals. How many goals do you think you can have at one time? I don't think you should have any more than five goals at once.

18:45I think if you do, it starts to become too confusing. You're trying to optimize in too many different directions. So we try and keep it three to five per team. Should your goals be super achievable? How do you think about the Google style? Oh, you should only achieve 70 to 80 percent. Yeah, I think it's natural, right? When you set goals, if you're always hitting 100 percent of your goal, then you're probably not setting the right goals. If you're only ever hitting 5 percent of your goals, you either got a terrible team or you're not setting the right goals. So rule of them 70-80 % on average should be a good outcome.

19:15What's the hardest goal that Nick has set for you? Nick has set for me and for us to continue the level of growth that we've had over the last eight years I've been there. We're trying to continue to grow at the same rate despite being at a much larger scale and with all the complexities that comes with that and that's tough. It's fun but it's tough. Yeah it's incredibly tough given the scale. How do you structure product teams at Revolut Business? The way we structure product teams at Revolut Business and across all of Revolut is we have product owners who report into me. And note, we have product owners, not product managers.

19:51So the key difference is that product owner really owns the team and owns the outcome of the team. They're not trying to influence people around the company. They are a team owner and they stay working on that team for months and years at a time. I mean, take me for example, I'm kind of the ultimate product owner of Revolut Business and I've been working on it now for seven and a half years and those teams then are cross-functional teams of engineers designers operations and they all report into that product owner so the product owner really kind of is the control for the control of the team how many cross-functional employees is in a team on a given basis is this like 10 40 yeah no no no we're talking about 10 to 12 per team you don't want it too big keeping it small and lean is definitely the way to do it in my opinion okay Okay, so we've got 10 in product design and you name it.

20:39And they report up to the product owner who's like the kind of CEO, I guess, of that product. And then they report up to you. How many product owners report to you? We have about 15 reporting to me, something like that. 15 reporting to you. Yeah. So one of the key characteristics of Revolut, you'll have probably spoken to Nick about, is that we have a very flat hierarchy. And because we try and hire very, very good people, we shouldn't need as managers to be spending hours and hours a week telling them exactly what to do. We want people who can be relatively autonomous. What does the reporting look like for you?

21:10Is this like one-on-ones every week, every fortnight? Yeah, the way we structure our kind of workflow is I think different from other companies. So, we tend to have weekly one-on-ones. That's for personal stuff or you need to align quickly on some topics. And so, that's you and the product owner? Yes, that's right. And then we have weekly product reviews and that's where we have product engineering or senior engineering design for that particular team or potentially a couple of teams together. And we look at metrics, we look at roadmap and we look at designs. And that can be a fairly intense meeting.

21:42I mean, we want to make it to some extent creative, but we expect people to come with a pretty solid update on a pretty solid idea of what they're going to then be doing. By having this cadence every week, it means we don't waste a lot of time preparing for the meeting. We're really doing most of the time. And then you get a good glimpse once a week of what's happening. How do you do one-on-ones? Having done them for seven and a half years, I don't do one-on-ones. I'm actually reducing them at the moment where we're pushing more into product reviews. So we have more of a, okay, the right people are in the team.

22:12Let's make some decisions. Why are you making that decision to move away from one-on-ones a little bit and do more product reviews? Because I find that a lot of the decisions that you end up making in one-on-ones are actually ones that impact more than just one person. And it's useful to have a few other people in the room to discuss it. So if you could keep one meeting, it's that product review is the meeting I would keep. How do you do great product review sessions? Who's invited? We said it's weekly. How is the agenda set? What does that good look like? So the way I do it, and this is true across a lot of Revolut, is we will have the product owner along with the designer, the ops manager who are involved in certain projects, and then some of the engineering team.

22:51And then we'll potentially have a kind of a head of design who's more of a horizontal role who oversees some of the design aspects same on product then it will be a review of metrics so the goals that we talked about how are we doing are we going the right way or not review of the roadmap are we on track to deliver what we said we deliver at the start of the quarter and then what we spend most of the time doing is looking at designs so the designer will literally present figma and say okay we've got a new problem we're looking to solve this is how we're going to solve it and we go through screen by screen we do that on a kind of team level once a week and then once we're really confident in them they get bubbled up to we do a overall business one once a week which is this is the final output this is going to be built and that's the one then that nick or vlad occasionally join and they'll then have their views at that point in a world today of ai and vibe coding people are suggesting that we're going to move away from this kind of design phase first in figma and move straight to prototyping.

23:51Do you think we will skip that phase and move straight to the kind of vibe coding instantiation? We were talking about this this week and trying it out in some areas. I haven't seen it done yet. I will be really interested. I think in principle it could work. I mean, I could see how it could be quite cool, but I'd be interested to see it. So I haven't formed a firm opinion. But so far it hasn't internally. So far we have not, no. How long do you give a project when the numbers aren't going up and to the right as planned? It depends on the size of the project. But if one of our kind of new bets is not hitting its goals that we set, we give those a good year or potentially even longer.

24:29But these are big new product areas. And sometimes we need to pivot, you know, once we built it, we don't want to just stop it instantly. For some of the smaller stuff, it might be a little bit quicker. But I think we tend to give stuff a good amount have time to run what new project started off with poor numbers and has turned into a monster so a product which has started off slowly and is gaining really good traction is revpay for us so revpay is our merchants who use revolute business are able to offer on their checkout pay with revolute there's a button you push and you put in your phone number as a retail customer and then get pushed to your retail app as we grow more and more on the retail side and get more penetration there as that product improves as we get better known on the business side that's just growing and growing and now we're signing up big airlines like we've just gone live with whaling for example who are starting to put this on their checkout pages because we're so synonymous with travel now but having a pay with revolute is a very natural extension for them what's your lesson with that sometimes it just adoption is slow and you need to be persistent that the messaging was wrong yeah i think in that particular case sometimes adoption takes time we need to perfect the product first.

25:37We need to be able to prove that this is something that they should have on their checkout. We need numbers to do that. So I think it's just a bit of a game to get there. What new project had banging numbers and actually then fizzled out? We did payroll. To start with, we got a few of our customers on board with you that really liked it. We did it well as a product, but trying to scale that, trying to build a growth engine for a payroll product when the going price is about£5 per seat in the UK and trying to do that scale, we found it very hard we didn't manage to make it work it's interesting nick said the same one to me payroll is one that really sticks on the mind huh well it just seems so obvious it's like yeah fucking it seems like it should work because we also have the overlap on the retail side so you know the customer experience could be really great you get your payslip in your retail app there's a lot of like nice synergies that are there but we so far haven't been able to make it work but we'll never say never oh no there's always a second chance so we're going back to the product review.

26:34Product review is also a great place for new ideas. How do you think about new ideas to adopt and run with versus it's a distraction? One of our calls that we said at the beginning is do few things very well. How do you balance that prioritization? One thing that people do when they join a company is sometimes they try and rely too much on I'm going to bring completely new ideas rather than executing on what the team really need them to get done. I would say a lot of our time goes into we just need to execute on what we already know will work it might not always be the most exciting thing but that's what our customers want and that's what we need to do that is our number one priority and then we encourage people to come with ideas around you know particularly the longer term vision and then when we have gaps of how we can add in additional stuff so it's a bit of a mixture we also have a new bets process which is allowing people to come with new ideas for completely new products.

27:28Talk to me about that. We as a company over the years had tried out various different things. Some had worked, some hadn't, but there was never a very structured way of evaluating, should we do this? And then once we've said we'll do it, should we keep doing it? The new bets process, there's a standardized pitch, a relatively standardized model, which then results in some targets. And then you get evaluated in a framework. There's a kind of single dashboard, a single way of seeing, has the product performed as we expected to? And that gives you a much more objective decision-making framework than how people feel about stuff across the company.

28:02Because we're doing quite a lot at once, it allows you to standardize things and compare different business lines that you're launching rather than everything kind of being super siloed. When I spoke to Nick, he said there were 26 new bets running at a time. That sounds about right. How do you equip them? What does the resource allocation look like for those bets? So part of the pitch process is that those people ask for resources. And so we typically, you know, maybe one team, maybe two teams based on the business case, and then you get your funding, then you can hire a team. We typically bring people from existing teams and put them into these teams, then maybe with one or two new people.