00:54:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:54:12] S1: Like, what I get from that is just building patience. [00:54:17] S0: Would say I would say it's actually being able to to unblock your team, and that sometimes requires product owners to steamroll changes. Because it it also means that, you know, you could easily get stuck with a lot of people just looking into each other and think, okay, can they approve it? Can they not approve it? We try to innovate on it. We try to automate as many things as possible. We use even AI models for that. But it also requires a product owner to be able to to get things done, you know, to just just getting people down to to consensus and understanding who your stakeholders, how to get them to the necessary decision, and then blocking your team so that eventually, like, the value is shipped to to customers. [00:55:10] S1: Awesome. So essentially, it's just getting shit done, plowing through blockers, dealing with many stakeholders. [00:55:17] S0: Yeah. That's always the most important. [00:55:20] S1: Okay. That... 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, what you look for is raw intellect, drive, hunger, passion, essentially. Those are the first two. And then interestingly, non senior, non... Not people with a ton of experience in the problem space, more so focusing on intellect and hunger. Is there anything else in that bucket that you think is important that leads to people being really successful?
00:55:20 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:55:20] S1: Okay. That... 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, what you look for is raw intellect, drive, hunger, passion, essentially. Those are the first two. And then interestingly, non senior, non... Not people with a ton of experience in the problem space, more so focusing on intellect and hunger. Is there anything else in that bucket that you think is important that leads to people being really successful? [00:55:49] S0: Most importantly, it's, again, getting things done, getting your hands dirty. And, you know, like, great product owners are very hands on. They don't think of themselves as managers who just give tasks to people and wait them to to complete it. They they just go and get things done, and they understand that most important things they will likely have to do themselves. And they understand that there needs to be relentless focus on execution. And if something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%. [00:56:29] S1: Woah. Say more there. Is the... Kind of the insight there is just like things seem like they're 99% done, but they're actually very far from being done? [00:56:37] S0: Like, sometimes the product is built, but then product owners are the ones who also, you know, make sure that, for example, customer care team or sales and marketing team are using it to a full extent. Right? Because without it, it could be just another useless feature which no... And no one knows about it.
00:56:37 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:56:37] S0: Like, sometimes the product is built, but then product owners are the ones who also, you know, make sure that, for example, customer care team or sales and marketing team are using it to a full extent. Right? Because without it, it could be just another useless feature which no... And no one knows about it. [00:56:56] S1: That is super cool. I like that mentality. Let me ask you something completely different. What's kind of the story of you landing at Revolut? I know you had to move your family. It was a whole adventure.
00:56:56 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:56:56] S1: That is super cool. I like that mentality. Let me ask you something completely different. What's kind of the story of you landing at Revolut? I know you had to move your family. It was a whole adventure. [00:57:08] S0: My journey into Revolut 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 using the other side of the lane on the road in The UK, but also it's a lot of things, for example, 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 turnaround for 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 Revolut is, like, its top talent. He's a traveler. Like, all best product people are a traveler. And 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 some things that for me, because of this, like, lack of context, they were not intuitive, and I worked hard to... With the team to to to change that.
00:58:43 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:58:43] S1: Okay. Great. I'm gonna take us to a recurring segment of the podcast. I'm gonna take us to fail corner. So in 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 things went wrong in your career, where you failed with a product you're building or a moment in your career where things were looking really bad?
00:59:11 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:59:11] S0: 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, started building some teams, different startups. And one of them was actually a product that makes me proud even now because it was, like, what, fifteen years ago. So twenty twenty ten, meaning, like, still no no one really had even iPhones back then. And me and my friends, we started building a website that allows people to buy tickets to the city so that they can skip the line, so they they don't need to come in advance to select best seats, and they can just buy a ticket online and go to their seats directly. Something that today seems as a commodity back then, like, no one had it. Like, people were using pieces of paper. And we built, like, an end to end system because not only we needed to build a website, but we also needed to build hardware to scan those tickets, for example. And and to have these 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 which is like a heck of the of the standards in 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 these these beautiful, like, devices made from stainless steel, which looked really nice inside the cinema halls. And I remember how I was excited about it with with my friends. We were like, what an amazing thing. It's like, look. We're we're bringing future here, but we actually spent all our investment on this hardware. And we were expecting that everyone will just rush into 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. 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 is the right principle. But it also it also was a very painful lesson. You need to stay lean.