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)

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/162913215/1613d556e9faef2a6a180942424cdf25.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 00:33:00

Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revalued, values way more raw intellect and this uncoached hunger to build things rather than experience. I hear one of the ways you approach early products, differently as you guys invest a lot in actually making it good. It's not getting traction, is it because the underlying idea is wrong, or maybe your product just sucks. By forcing everyone to build a product that people will love. We kind of cut out the spot of uncertainty. 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. Is there anything that you've figured out about just how to set up new products for success? If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%. Today my guest is the Metri's Lakaza. The Metri is global head of product at Revalued. Which is a finance, super app offering customer savings and checking accounts, crypto, investing, joint accounts, even mortgages. Not only was it last validated over $60 billion, but in the research that I've been doing into which companies hire and incubate the best product managers, Revalued was right at the top, alongside Palants here at Intercom. And so in our conversation, we dig into what Revalued has learned about producing and hiring great product leaders, including a focus on ownership, having people solve really painful and complex problems, while making the experience wow and lovable by users, also indexing towards hiring really smart and driven people early in their career, versus people with a ton of experience in the space, and so much more, if you're looking for a job that will accelerate your product career, or want to help your product team level up. This episode is for you. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you've become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear superhuman notion perplexity and granola. Check it out Lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Dimitri Zlokazen. This entire episode is brought to you by Stripe. There's a reason that I've had more guests on this podcast from Stripe than any other company. It's because they hire the best people, and they build incredible products. You probably know them for their payments platform, which powers my newsletter, and also companies like Nvidia and Salesforce and Zoom and DoorDash. What you may not know is that they have several other products that can help accelerate your revenue, such as Stripe Building, which powers billing for companies that you may have heard of, OpenAI, and Thropic, Figma, at Lassian, and over 300,000 other companies. Stripe Building lets you build and manage customers however you want, from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing to sales negotiated contracts. There's also Stripe's Optimized Checkout Suite, which is a plug-in play, super-optimized payments flow that natively supports over 100 global dynamic payment methods. There's also a protocol link, which is an accelerated check-out experience built specifically to increase your checkout conversion. Every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies that have a product in the market today, use Stripe to monetize it. Half a Fortune 100 companies use Stripe. $1.4 trillion flows through Stripe annually, which is equivalent over 1% of global GDP. You Stripe to handle all of your payment-related needs, billing, manage revenue operations, and launch, or invent new business models, learn more at Stripe.com. Demetri, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Lanyan. Happy to be here. As you know, I've been doing a bunch of research into which companies hire and create the best product managers, and I've been triangulating this across a bunch of different data points. I've been looking at which companies alumni product managers get promoted most when they leave the company, become chief product officers at the highest rate when they leave the company, become the first PM at a startup, also start their own companies. And when I triangulated across all these different data points, there's three companies that are kind of sat at the top. You guys are a pollute palentere in our company. Clearly, you guys are doing something really special. I don't think a lot of people, especially in the US, know a ton about revenue. And so I'm really excited to have you here. I'm really excited to basically extract as much wisdom as I can from you about what you guys have figured out in helping in hiring and training product managers. So I'm going to actually start with giving people a slight understanding of what is revenue. I think a lot of people in the US, especially don't know much about it. So what's the simplest way to understand what you guys do? Revalued challenges, banks in 50 different countries. And it all started 10 years ago in London. So maybe let me give you a bit of a context, especially for someone raising the US. It's important to understand that European banking landscape is very diverse. In the US, if you travel from state to state, things are different, but for example, you always pay in US dollars, right? In the UK, you pay in British pound. If you travel to mainland Europe, you will pay in Europe. But if you go to Switzerland, you'll pay in Swiss francs. If you go to Sweden, you'll pay in Swiss coins. And so on and so on and so on. So overall, there are 25 different currencies. And every time you were traveling and paying in a different currency, banks were charging you exorbitant fees on top of terrible foreign exchange rates. And that's when, Revalued launched as a multi-currency cart. And people loved it. They loved that travel route, was saving them 50 or 100 euros. But even more so, they loved the transparency and simplicity of the product. And that's why when we started rolling around more and more products based on those principles, they were quickly getting trust of people. They were quickly getting traction. So that's how P2P transfers appeared. And then frictionless, creep to buying and withdraw to bank account appeared, and then more and more products, created products, savings products and so on. Awesome. And then just to give people a few kind of scale, the company, how many employees are there roughly, I think, the last valuation, something around 60 billion. I don't know if you can even comment on that. But just what are some numbers real quick for people to understand the scale, the company at this point? The headcount is not something we're trying to increase to be honest to actually travel the tries to stay as clean as possible. But I think it's just that the way I pitied for growth is so big that I think we're currently maybe 60,000 employees. Wow. Okay, cool. So let's get into what you've learned about building an amazing product team. And also hiring an amazing product team. So first of all, you call your product managers product owners. And when we were chatting through initially, I was like, oh, I see it's just like a big scrum business, and they just have all these product owners who, you know, many times on this podcast, people have talked about this, not actually product manager. But that's not at all how you work. So in this context, product owners, an actual owner, talk about just the kind of the story behind why you call your product managers product owners. Yeah, it's not the scrum firm for us. It's just how we take on emphasizing how ownership is important, really. So product owners are central to the company and its growth. They end to end responsible for the product for this part of the business. And for their customers to be happy. And for that, they do really everything. They run the teams. They define which rod map. We need to build to improve certain business metrics. And they also contribute to high-level company strategy. But then most importantly, they execute on it relentlessly. And they are ultimately responsible for the product to be shipped and achieve results. There's always this term of mini-COPM as a mini-CL. And it feels like in your context, that's actually what you try to do with your product team, as there are essentially mini-CLs. They have a lot of power. I think engineers, designers, reports to them, is that right? Yeah, correct. Well, I'd prefer to say local CEO and the local CEO. Local CEO, OK, talk about that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but that's true. So the way we operate, we have these fully cross-functional teams. Me and their stuff, with all necessary functions, engineers, data, and all these designers, operational managers, and so on. And we also operate in metrics. So everyone has a line manager and a functional manager. So product owner is always the line manager for everyone on the team. Minion, product owner defines what they need to do. But then functional managers, they define how these things need to be built, and essentially with the right level of quality and so on. I love this because it's so fun just to learn about such different ways of operating. Another fact that I saw is that there's two types of product owners. There's kind of like a UX product owner. And then there's a different, like a technical product owner. We actually have three and the third type becomes increasingly more important. So the first type is UX products owners. Then there are technical products owners and then there are data science products owners. So UX product owners are the ones who work on consumer facing part of the product. Usually they have a great taste for things and they understand what constitutes UX that will work and which things will not work. So they also have these expertise in the industry. Then tech product owners, they are the ones who delve deep as into details. Usually those are former engineers who grew into making decisions and driving business. And data science product owners, usually former data scientists who decided to grow into management positions, but they steal very hands-on. And you know what, there are way more things that are common to each of these three specializations. So what we see sometimes these people just shift in them because I would say that what defines the specialization is probably 5% and 15%, while 85% to 90% is common to each one of them. And those things are, so first of all, being a great problem solver and have a great linear thinking, but also you know, have a creative approach towards non-linear problems. Then building this context of a customer and building an empathy towards customer and translated into the team, then going down to details very, very deep. Because in our domain, there are no obvious things. And you need to get to the root cause of the problem, really, really deep to understand what will work and what will not work. And that means that you also need to be quite technical, even if your UX people, you still need to often go as deep as sitting, you know, with engineers and a region code. And then I would also emphasize importance of business equipment because we tend to measure and quantify product performance a lot. And you need to understand, okay, what things will we build? That will drive eventually that business magic and that target. So I love this idea of the product owners having to get really deep. I think a lot of people here in this, they think they can go deep, go deep, really understand the details of what they're working on. I'm curious if there's an example that's illustrative of just what you actually mean here. For example, to provide the best possible product in every country of presence, we need to have necessary licenses. In Europe, it means that we need to launch local branches of our European Bank, for example, a branch for France, a branch for Germany, or a branch for Italy. To launch a branch, you need to fully comply with all necessary regulation. You need to report necessary data on customers to various regulators and authorities. You need to register with local payment systems. And each of these things, they have a lot of projects nested within. We have a very little team with just a few people who need to scope everything and do it at a scale of 50 countries, right? So the way we do it is we go very deep on example of each of this project. For example, we launched a branch in Ireland. We launched a branch in Netherlands. Then we reverse engineered what was the best process to do it. And then we went back up on top level, and we said, OK, but what's the ideal framework of doing it as scale? And then we formalized it into a process, really like an algorithmic process with the steps and quality gates, and as I need, and like what people do we need to hire and how soon do we need to start doing that before we want to launch a new country? And then so it's not only going deep, but also being flexible. And like doing this switch between zooming in very deep and then raising on the level of helicopter view and then understanding it, OK. So this seemed very, very complex in details. But then when you zoom out, like how can we simplify it and build a robust process around it, which is scalable? And that's something that we have to do a lot. As you're talking, and we go through this chat, I'm keeping track of what I think is most contributing to your alumni product owners, product managers, becoming so successful. So a couple things so far that I think are probably contributing to this as one is just having a lot of ownership over with their building, which leads to building skills to start companies and become leaders at other companies. So these product owners, they have are just like, oh, and a lot. And essentially, GMs of whatever product they're working on. And then there's this depth and complexity, where you have to really get good at understanding a problem really deeply. I imagine many of these people go on to work on something like that layer, somewhere else, because they've spent all this time, or they just get really good at dealing with complex, many layered problems. So is there anything else just kind of along those lines as I say that that you think is important? I would probably add an obsession with building wow product. Wow, w, w, w, w, and you know, I think, in FinTech overall, this is probably the most neglected part, usually, but it's also a part that we travel with, we pay enormous attention to. So it's not only, you know, when you do a trade in the app, or when you send money, it's very important for it to be very fast and cheap process for you, so that you don't pay a lot of fees. But we also pay a lot of attention to look and feel of the app and how smooth it is, and how frictionless the process, not only we invest in reducing clicks and optimizing the finals, but we also want people to feel that we really cared about them, we also want people to feel that we, we love our customers, and we played extra effort for the product to look great and feel great. And I hear this a lot from our customers, like the app is something they really love, and it felt them so the problems. It's at least one of the ingredients of the company success. And I think people that work at travel, they built a habit of paying attention to these small nuances, small details that make the product lovable. And then second is handling this context, because you know, like, it's a lot of details where you need to dive, but there are also a lot of dimensions where you need to dive into different details, right? And I think this ability to keep this large context in your mind and consider second or their effects and view subjects from multiple angles, I think this is also a very important skill that people usually train in the travel. Okay, cool. So if three bullet points on the ingredients of great product managers, slash owners that you guys incubate, on this wow piece, which I love, how do you operationalize this sort of thing? I imagine a big part of it's hiring people that are really good at this and value building lovable products. Is there any way you kind of have a process around making sure the things you ship are wow and lovable? Two things that you need to understand about how revenue operates is that we operate in a small, lean teams that are tasked to build products, and as I mentioned, like, and have an intervention responsibility for products. And usually they are the ones who build it from zero and then they grow and develop in this part. And then another thing is that company is very flat, and hierarchy is very flat. We still have our founders, Nick and Vlad, very hands-on, going down to details for every product and every part of the business. And every week, they have a product reviews with every team, given an opportunity to every product owner present directly to CEO and CEO and show what increment has team achieved in the last week, but also get steering from founders, which is super valuable. So essentially, founders of the company, they still review 100% of screens that have been shipped. And everything that you will see in the app, this past this review, and there are a lot of eyeballs that were scrutinizing this and thinking of all possible edge cases, and nuances that we need to consider to make sure that every single customer will be happy in this product in this flow. That seems to be a consistent theme in products that are incredible as the founders are deeply involved in the experience and review everything. How many product owners are there ever of a loot just to give people a sense, by the way? Or I'm afraid to say it's already more than 150 people, maybe 170. Cool, that's what I would expect. And then you said that there's kind of these three types. There's kind of like the edge type, the PM traditional type, and there's the data product owner. When you hired the UX type of product owner, did they, is their previous role usually a product manager at another company? Yes, but I would say that not necessarily, it's a very experienced product manager. Well, maybe even it's way more important to have these hunger for building things, and having raw intellect. And we always try to find people with these intrinsic traits rather than hiring people who are very experienced, but maybe I'm not super excited about building things. Well, percentage of your product owners come from internal transfers from other functions. It's a quite substantial part of products owners who eventually become very successful, by the way. So it's like a positive self-select. So it means that someone already succeeded in another role. So it's a guaranteed culture, it's a guaranteed domain knowledge. And then they simply grow. Usually it could be operations managers or engineers. They grow into someone who now manages the team. And that's why it's a very successful path. So the other company on the list of top three companies that produce and hire the best PMs, according to the research I've done, Palantir. I just had someone that was a Palantir for a long time, but we talked about exactly all the same questions. And interestingly, so far, we have kind of these three bullet points in terms of what the product owners would then verbally get to do. There's a lot of ownership. There's a lot of depth and complexity. And there's a lot of focus on why I'll level up products. So interestingly, Palantir also tons of ownership. Also tons of depth and complexity. The other ingredient that I want to ask you about is they also, they have this concept of a forward-to-played engineer, where they put an engineer in the office of the company. They're building the product from. They sit there building it for them with them. And so there's a lot of skills built in terms of understanding customer problems, talking to customers, getting empathy building things like that. Is there anything you guys do or focus on around just like talking to customers away your approach, having your product owners work with customers, understand problems, things like that. That might be helpful for people to hear. For us, it's a bit easy to reach out to customers simply because the customer base is so big. It's more than 50 million people. And usually, we ourselves are power users of the product. We receive our salary into our development. And then we spend with our friends the same. So it's like a no-brainer to talk to people continuously and even if you're not practical in it, they will reach out. If you have a problem in the product, I guarantee that we know about it very, very soon. We've also built tools for product owners and designers to have an easy access to a panel of users by different tools so that they can just start an intervening process or a test of different designs and if you click, for me, it was very important to build this direct connection to customers. Because when you delegate such an important thing as a customer research and collecting their feedback to someone, you will get refined the filter version. You won't get this, you know, like these nuances of how people describe things which emotions they feel like and so on and where they think it's very easy to lose all those important bytes of information in this process. So I'm a strong believer that it's very important to have direct communication channel to customers. As you described this, it's funny how you guys at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Palantir in terms of how easy it is for you to get feedback. They build stuff for the government and for airbus where employees would never use a product like that or need a product like that. You guys are getting paid in revenue, using revenue to pay for things and constantly in the product. And so I could see why there's less of a need for something like a forward to play engineer. Okay, amazing. Let's talk about hiring then. Is there is there anything unique about how you approach hiring, sourcing, looking for people, what you look for in people that you think might be contributing to your alumni being so successful down the road? I think everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people and experienced people. Revalued values way more raw intellect and this uncoached hunger to build things rather than experience. So let me maybe bring an example. Imagine we also thought it's like you hire a great experienced professional with amazing regalia of achieving a lot of things. But then what I see in product, the adoption curve is usually longer than in other functions. Because product owners by definition are the ones who are the experts in that domain and they know those intricacies of how product is built and how it's used. So what we see from these professionals is they still take a lot of time to ramp up and sometimes they also take time to adapt to new culture or worse they just rest on their laurels. But you already have like super inflated expectations and usually the computation is by the way quite high and we chat up to these expectations. So and I myself after conducting maybe a four or five hundred interviews with product owners that I also see this. Unfortunately professionals with a lot of years of experience from established companies, they don't have this this strong urge to change status quo which by the way will require you know total years and sweat and and that's why what even if a candidate doesn't have a lot of years of experience. But they they love building things, they've done it, they worked with engineers, maybe by the way maybe in their own startup or one of the best profiles that I've seen is a tech co-founder. So I think that's that's probably the best way to boost career is to you know to go and found something working and start up build things yourself with a very small team working all different areas because instead of you have to work in all different areas and then these kind of people they really thrive at revolute and even if they don't have a lot of years of experience, they actually attack a specific problem. They they have a sense of what can cause customer pain and they are very fast moving to solve it quickly and then that's how they get appreciation from everyone around team starts respecting these people because they solve some specific problem and that they take another problem, they solve it and then they take another and that's how they grow into company. Essentially what I'm hearing is you hire kind of more junior or super high raw intellect driven passionate how to just grow hungry people and this explains why so many people have so get promoted so much more that leave revolute because they start they're earlier in their career and you help them learn all these skills ownership, depth, understanding, working complex environments, building amazing products so this will all makes a lot of sense. Is there anything you figured about where to find these people because this is the dream hire amazingly smart people that are super driven that nobody knows about yet and then make them awesome. Have you found anything about like where to source and find these folks? So the way we work we have a weekly catch-ups with a recruitment team so essentially they are also a team that runs in spring so we every spring we define what do we want to focus on which areas which companies. One of the great sources is actually looking into products and depths that we love ourselves so if someone built a great product then it's likely a hyperfomer so usually like we we provide some great products in specific areas that are more important for us to to the source in team and they just try to source targeting those companies. It could be also different areas it could be even schools like good schools and so it varies from spring to spring. That makes sense there's a go-call had this really good piece of advice I think it was on the podcast if not he tweeted about it where you know you look at like there's like successful companies but then there's also like what function in that company is the is the key to their success and so you want to go like a company A for sales company B for customer support because company C for design and so it sounds like that's kind of the way you guys think about it a little bit. Very cool okay where I love how we're uncovering and we're uncovering this mystery. This entire episode is brought to you by Stripe every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies that has a product in the market today uses Stripe to monetize it. $1.4 trillion flows through Stripe annually which is equivalent to over 1% of the entire global GDP and Stripe isn't just a payments platform they also have a product called Stripe billing which powers billing for companies that you may have heard of open AI, anthropic, figma, Atlassian and over 300,000 other companies Stripe billing lets you bill and manage customers no matter your pricing model from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing to sales negotiated contracts collect and retain more revenue, automate revenue management workflows and accept payments globally. You Stripe to handle all of your payment related needs including billing, revenue operations, checkout flows, or simply launching or inventing new business models. Learn 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 kind of fairly contrarian in how you approach running the product team that is maybe not how other companies operate that you think is key to your success? I've changed in how I operate after a joint revolution. Probably because revolution is a founder-led company and probably it's because so-flat and also because my role is quite spread across many things so my role of travel is a leading product function across company but also leading retail which is a core part of travel business and it's very easy to be spread thinly across all those domains and catching up with 50 or 70 projects that have been executed simultaneously. Which would mean that you know you will just spend your entire week just catching up on statuses not really adding value to anyone but it's also you know it's also scary to not do it because what if there are some things going wrong or you and you won't be able to to stop it or steer in a better direction so I think that's why also a lot of managers especially in senior positions they they they kind of stay for level and they don't go very deep into details but so how we did differently at travel load is to go very deep into details how we take maybe 7 or 10 projects which are most impactful for customers right now and we go super deep into them like really deep seating with engineers like like reading cold level and understanding okay how how it's built exactly what's what's the underlying issue and you could think that okay but what if what about others like let's say 50 or 60 items right that that that'd be an 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 they're a 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 which team is being scrutinized and it also gives informational what are the current priorities in the company but in addition it's signal to other teams that if they are not practically executing things on the expected level paying attention to all the details and being meticulous you know those data especially in quality they will be the ones that you know will will be reviewed to a such deep level next next phase next cycle so as a result it also builds a great discipline and since like revolution is such a high concentration of very ambitious people who thrive for being you know best versions of themselves and and grow and it's very important for them to prove that you know they can they can deliver great teams 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 that everything is fine you see they'll model super 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 okay so what I'm hearing is there's is that there's 50 to 60 things kind of projects being built to be it's also to a hundred actually okay okay so there's like a hundred things happening at any point like features being built products being launched and you and this is you and the founders to seven to ten to focus on or is it just you no just it just me just you okay and then and by the way do you have like 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 will also have a head of design function it's also part of my team but 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 seven to ten things I'm going to go deep on these are the things that matter most of the business that if they don't go well metal have the the most down downside and then you just you're you basically said you sit next to the engineers you you get really involved in every detail yeah okay that is definitely counterintuitive we had Brian Cheskin the podcast on 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 and so I think it's cool to hear a different approach where 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 never cut down since it's just the appetite for 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 this approach is way more scalable so while leadership and obviously founders themselves keep everyone accountable go deep into details it doesn't mean that they micromanage everyone that's actually that's actually a very important thing so the ideal position for any product tone 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 made behind the road map and even if metrics are not yet there like you you will still like let's say have this creative trust to keep building in the way you want to build them eventually yeah you will you will be presenting the outputs of your activity on this weekly product reviews but again it's not a micro management either it's more like let's say a last line of control to make sure that what we're building is all whole make sense and that's value and this thoroughly sought in all details and 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 exactly they have like pull over you over everything but also it actually it allows us to build so many things because there is actually little micro management like if that was if founders had to be like involved in everything they had to they had to to cut the scenes down right but by even 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 been shipped and how fast they shipped and another thing here is what I've mentioned previously is also 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 shipped new products like loans or credit cards in a country literally every month and it's just maybe 300 people and I think that you know a credit division in a incumbent bank is maybe like two or three thousand people building just credit products for a single country and our team is building it for 50 countries so and yeah it's enabled through the 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 and the flat hierarchy with everyone being accountable and founders have indirect view of everyone and inter intervening if you've necessary I'm going to get people a list of the things you guys do we 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 like a list here that it made it's fairly incomplete but just to give people a sense so you guys have credit cards debit cards savings accounts multi currency accounts domestic international transfers joined accounts miners accounts for like less than people you're less than 18 years old stock trading cryptocurrency purchasing loans is there anything big I missed I mean it's some of those things a huge by itself let's say stock trading it's it's not just stocks it's also ETFs bonds and we were working on tax efficient accounts in different countries and crypto it's we also allow stake in crypto for example we have on ramp or from product we have a query product on credit we have loans we have a by now palator product we have we even launched mortgages we launched first mortgages in the in the weekend recently and this is 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 polygram 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 yeah that's one of the things that excites me maybe the most to revolution 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 will soon be so when I joined we had maybe just slightly north to 20 million customers now we are 50 million customers soon will be at a hundred million customers the degree of you know surrounding each customer with the ecosystem of our products extends a lot so they become more and more people start using revolution the main bank account they start receiving the salary into revolution holding their savings into revolution because they love the product more and so we can easily do another I did not two three acts for acts in customer base growth but we can also do another ten acts growth in how actively these people I use in the product so it's let's say what thirty forty acts to current forty five billion valuation right so it's it's like a trillion dollar company easily and on that note what I'm hearing is that's still a great time to join there's a massive upside so any guys are hiring we'll just note that real quick there's a you're hiring product owners in a bunch of other roles I imagine yeah yeah yeah well as as someone who owns a product function I'm especially interested in product law and so but we yeah yeah we hire a lot of roles I think we have maybe a three or four hundred open positions currently how am I dead 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 product 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 site in which creeper that was insanely successful but also non-financial services like book in a hotel through revelative our loyalty program ref points which which is sort of disrupting European market where people don't get great benefits from spending with cart in the years you can easily get like what 2% cashback 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 carts and rewarding people with really meaningful monetary rewards in the in the manner that I described like we we understood okay what's the recipe of this success to then scale it and reproduce so we built a new best framework and essentially everyone can come up with a new idea it could be a product on a but it could be anyone like and they need to show some important things we usually can expect from a startup like market is there business case is there we 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 to heaven founder and so on we can easily get a green light on anything start launching it quickly what we do is assemble the same wind 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 you know all metrics of fine retention is great we start scaling it and the good news is that it can be instantly multiplied by our 50 million customer base and get a great reaction so for example one of the products that you mentioned during the counts 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 and here one of the ways you kind of approach these early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good and not just like a scrap MVP is that ring about is that resonate indeed that that's what I may be meant by you know keeping your first version narrow down to a small user base but even in this case we still make sure that the product is well so no one is excluded from this requirement of you know building a super polished product it takes time but it pays off you know the thing is that when you launch a scrap 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 to improve it so by you know by by forcing everyone to build a product that people will love but building a wow product we kind of cut out this part of uncertainty 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 and 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 know 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 could 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 people will want this now let's just make it work really well with everything else we got and not hurt like you 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 there but there's also like you know like if you don't have the best joined accounts 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 because so I think there are those kind of table stakes that were built in that anyone would expect from a bank like for example saving the account right it's it's just a basic thing that if if a bank is not providing saving the account you wouldn't even consider it but then we make sure that our rates very competitive if not the best then 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 they're a delays or they don't pay interest on daily basis we will never do that we will allow you if you if you want to move my out you will be able to do it you won't lose any interest and interest is been paid a daily and this is a fully flexible product and then on top of it what I would call like maybe some delayters 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 the savings account in 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 rates versus like 23% 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 content and all those features so there is an underlying basic like fundamental layer the way you need to be just you know 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 wallet and then you can just instantly convert it to to cash on your account or just spend it with your card how amazing can it be right just by a coffee with with the theorem 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 they go on to do wonderful things and basically one of the one of the top three most successful companies at this so there's kind of these two buckets as I talked to you and the Palantir 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 future 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 are very that have a very high bar and then there's kind of like a sublip 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 in impact of being super detailed oriented on that bucket is there anything else do 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 that's a great point so it's like actually understanding the bare metal of what is happening and 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 and it's like a compliant with all possible regulations and making sure that your product you know will say just fly the regulator but it's also an important part of the job like what I get from that is just building patience I would say I would say it's actually being able to to unblock your team and that sometimes require product owners to steam roll change because it also means that you know you could easily get stuck with a lot of people just looking into each other and thinking like okay can they approve it can they not approve it we try to innovate and 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 to get things done you know you're just just getting people down to to consensus and understanding who you stay holders how to get them to the necessary decision and then blocking you team so that eventually like the value is shipped to customers awesome so essentially it's just getting shit done plowing through blockers that dealing with many stakeholders yeah that's always the most important okay that's a great addition I 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 cashin essentially those are the first two and then interestingly non senior non not people with the ton of experience in the problem space more so focusing on intellect than hunger is there anything else in that but get that you think is important 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 fun zone they don't think of themselves as managers who just give us the people on the way them to completely they just go and get his 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 percent done it's closer to 0 percent rather than 100 percent wow say more there is the kind of it's like there is just like things seem like they're 99 percent 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 you know make sure that for example a customer care team or sales and marketing team I using it to full extent right because without it it could be just another useless feature which no and no one knows about it that is super cool 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 as a whole adventure my journey into revolution actually coincided with me moving to the UK so it was a completely new environment for for myself it's it's it's a huge stress lot for the brain as well and it's not only about you know using the the other side of the way in on the road in the UK but also it's a lot of things for example in in the industry like some concepts that I've never heard about and actually I've never worked at FinTech before so I also changed the industry so it was like a complete complete turn around for me and for my career but I was I was very determined and excited about it because everyone who I've been talking to they were saying revolution is like it's top talent is a travel look like all best product people and I travel it and I I 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 Revolut app which is actually way way better than other banks products right but even there I found something that for me because of this like lack of context they were not intuitive and I worked hard to with a team to to to change that okay great I'm going to take us to recurring segment of the podcast I'm going to take us to fail corner some fail corner the idea here is people come on this podcast 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 where things went wrong in your career where you failed with a product you're building or among your career where things were looking really bad I think the most spectacular failures probably were on the earlier stage of my career which I started back at university and maybe in my second year of university I started building some things different setups and one of them was actually a product that makes me proud even now because it was like what 15 years ago so 2010, I still know no one really had even iPhones back then and my friends we started building a website that allows people to buy tickets to the cinema or so that they can keep the light so they don't need to come in advance to select past seats and they can just buy ticket online and go to the assist director something 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 a system because not only we needed to build a website but we also needed to build hardware to scan those tickets for and to have this tickets in digital format we needed to hack SMS standard because again like the people didn't have smartphones they had this Nokia's and we were sending images QR codes inside an SMS which is like a hack of the 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 like we created this this beautiful device is made from stainless steel which looked really nice inside the cinema halls and I remember how I was excited about it with my friends we were like what an amazing thing is I look we we've bringing future here but we actually we spent all our investment on on this hardware and we were expecting that you know like everyone will just rushing to using our system but it was a very low share of customers who started buying tickets online 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 that currently looks like an obvious mistake back 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 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 just gonna say that comment comment challenge for start of starting to get ready into hardware although I wouldn't be surprised now if Revolution launches something another product and this is a new product line of Revolution now that you had that experience yeah it launched a POS terminals for quite a while right there we go the meteor before we get it's 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 with them 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 like we would cover the lots of different topics I would just maybe summarize that you know if you if you're excited to build certain things never hesitate to do it the best way to do it is probably your own startup and it also the what will give you the steepest possible learning curve but then if you want to join a company try to choose the one that that has this highest entrepreneurial spirit and that will allow you to work as closer to a mode of a founder as you possibly can let's our current theme in these conversations I'm having with companies that produce the a pms that have the steepest career trajectory and so that 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 okay to meet with that we reached a very exciting lightning round are you ready yes let's go okay first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most other people the hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz actually read it quite some time ago but I found myself recommended it to other product managers most often it's actually illustrative that to be a great product manager someone needs to 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 in the company also be 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 described in the it's just just super exciting and it's part and also I you know I think that there are different archetypes of product managers there are people who tend to disrupt things more personally I think about myself as a for builder so Tony is a principle that he highlighted in the book they they resonate with me a lot I'm trying to get Tony on the podcast if anyone listening knows Tony Fadel and can not shame hey say you're still any 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 you know scenes in perspective there's a favorite product you recently discovered that you really love monos is a great scene the AI agent yeah yeah it's just like I was super impressed how I was mesmerized like it's it's so autonomous and smooth and I just spent like a few hours the vibe coding that I created is JavaScript app that sends me a rare English word every day to learn and remember and it's it's worth it I was I was just amazed what's what's the learned what's the word you learned in infobo it was the yes I love that it's still coming that's great do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to find useful and worker in life I love this phrase I think Eisenhower said it plans a worthless but planning is everything it's like you know we we often say how important it is to be flexible on the trial 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 we always need to think many steps ahead and while being flexible we also need to to think things thoroughly final question for folks that are maybe checking out Revolution for the first time I want to play with it already users what's the most underrated feature what something that you think people should check out maybe they're not aware of or even just like a UX I don't know animation something that people may not know about the thing that is not yet widely used but I really love it is what we call a wealth protection so if you go to settings you can enable a limit for any transfer cells either for a vote 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 self here it allows us to make sure that it's you know when else is the end of the transfer and it's actually it's almost as smooth as a face idea and the weight team built it is really great and I'm really proud of those guys the meat for 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 this is going to help a lot of different companies level up the way they think about product and for people to join revolution that 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 you fit back on the product and also if you don't sound wonderful can be a great feat to revolute after I'll tell you listen 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 take you yeah yeah then thanks a lot it was amazing 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 leaving review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode