00:21:53 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:53] S1: So 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 at Palantir for a long time, and we talked about exactly all the same questions. And interestingly... So so far, we have kind of have these three bullet points in terms of what p... Product owners within Revolut 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 wow, lovable products. So interestingly, at Palantir, tons of ownership, also tons of depth and complexity. The other ingredient that I wanna ask you about is they also... They have this concept of a forward deployed 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, you know, empathy building, things like that. Is there anything you guys do or focus on around just, like, talking to customers, the way you approach having your product owners work with customers, understand problems, things like that that might be helpful for people to hear?
00:22:56 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:22:56] S0: For us, it's a bit easy to reach out to customers simply because the customer base is so big. It's more than 50,000,000 people. And, usually, we ourselves are power users of the product. We receive our salary into Revolut, and then we we spend with Revolut. Our friends, the same. So it's it's like a no brainer to to talk to people continuously. And even if you're not proactive into... In in, they will reach out. If you have a problem in the product, like, 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 via different tools so that they can just start an interviewing process or survey or a test of different designs in a few clicks. For me, it was very important to build this direct connection to customers. Because when you delegate such an important thing as as customer research and collecting their feedback to someone, you will get refined, the filtered 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 stuck. It's very easy to lose all those important bites of information in this process. So I'm a strong believer that it's very important to have direct communication channel to to to customers.
00:24:32 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:32] S1: And as you describe this, it's funny how you're... I think you guys are 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, like, the government and for, like, Airbus where employees would never use a product like that or need a product like that. You guys are getting paid in Revolut, using Revolut 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 deploy 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?
00:25:12 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:25:12] S0: I think everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people, and experienced people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience. So let let let me maybe, you know, like, bring an example. Imagine... We we all saw this. 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 their compensation is, by the way, quite high, and which adds up to these expectations. So... And I myself, after conducting maybe four or 500 interviews with product owners at Revolut, I 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, toil, tears, and sweat. And that's why what... Even if a candidate doesn't have a lot of years of experience, but 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 cofounder. So I think that's that's probably the best way to boost career is to, you know, to to go and to found something, work in a startup, build things yourself or with a very small team, work in all different areas. Because in a startup, you have to work in all different areas. And then these kind of people, they really thrive at Revolut. 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 solved some specific problem, and then they take another problem. They solve it, and then they take another.
00:28:28 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
And that's how they grow in the company. [00:28:33] S1: Essentially, what I'm hearing is you're... You hire kind of more junior or super high raw intellect driven, passionate, how do you describe, hungry people. And this explains why so many people have so... Get promoted so much more that leave Revolut 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 all makes a lot of sense. Is there anything you figured out 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. Where... What... Have you found anything about, like, where to source and find these folks? [00:29:14] S0: So the the way we work, we have weekly catch ups with the recruitment team. So essentially, they they are also a team that runs in sprints. So we... Every every sprint, we define what do we want to focus on, which areas, which companies. One of the great sources is actually looking into products and apps that we love ourselves. So if someone built a great product, then it's likely a high performer. So usually, like, we we provide some great products in specific areas that are more important for us to to the sourcing 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 sprint to sprint.
00:30:05 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:30:05] S1: That makes sense. There's a... Gokul had this really good piece of advice. I think it was on the podcast. If not, he tweeted about it. Where, 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 wanna go, like, a company a for sales, company b for customer support, cuss... Cuss... Company c for design. And so it sounds like that's kind of the way you guys think about a little bit. Yeah. Very cool. Okay. We're... 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. $1,400,000,000,000 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: OpenAI, 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. Use 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 now not how other companies operate that you think is key to your success?