00:04:48 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:04:48] S0: Revolut challenges banks in 50 different countries. And it all started ten years ago in London. So maybe let me give you a bit of a context. Especially for someone based in The US, it's important to understand that European banking landscape is very diverse. In The US, if you travel from state to state, like, things are different. But for example, you always pay in US dollars. Right? In in The UK, you pay in British pound. If you travel to Mainland Europe, you will pay in euro. But if you go to Switzerland, you'll pay in Swiss francs. If you go to Sweden, you'll pay in Swedish krona, 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 Revolut launched as a multicurrency card. And people loved it. They they loved that Revolut was saving them 50 or €100, But even more so, they loved the transparency and simplicity of the product. And that's why when we started rolling rolling out more and more products based on those principles, they were quickly getting trust of people. They were quickly getting traction. So that's how p two p transfers appeared, and then frictionless crypto buying and withdrawal to a bank account appeared. And then more and more products, credit products, savings products, and so on.
00:06:27 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:06:27] S1: Awesome. And then just to give people a few... Like, kind of scale the company, how many employees are there roughly? I think the last valuation, something around 60,000,000,000. 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 of the company at this point? [00:06:40] S0: The head count is not something we're we're trying to increase, to be honest. Actually, Revolut tries to stay as lean as possible, but I think it's... Yeah. It's just the downward appetite for growth is so big that I think we're currently at maybe six or 7,000 employees. [00:06:58] S1: Wow. Okay. Cool. So let's get into the... 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 us not actually a product manager, but that's not at all how you work. So in this context, product owner is an actual owner. Talk about just the kind of the story behind why you call the... Your product managers product owners.
00:06:58 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:06:58] S1: Wow. Okay. Cool. So let's get into the... 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 us not actually a product manager, but that's not at all how you work. So in this context, product owner is an actual owner. Talk about just the kind of the story behind why you call the... Your product managers product owners. [00:07:28] S0: Yeah. It's not a scrum term for us. It's just our take on emphasizing how ownership is important, really. So product owners are central to company and its growth. They are 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 roadmap 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 ultimate responsible for for the product to be shipped and achieve results. [00:08:23] S1: There's always this term of mini CO. PM is a mini CO, and it feels like in your context, that's actually what you try to do with your product team is they're essentially mini COs. They have a lot of power. Like, think engineers, designers report to them. Is that right?
00:08:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:08:23] S1: There's always this term of mini CO. PM is a mini CO, and it feels like in your context, that's actually what you try to do with your product team is they're essentially mini COs. They have a lot of power. Like, think engineers, designers report to them. Is that right? [00:08:35] S0: Yeah. Correct. Well, I I prefer to say local CO. CO. Okay. [00:08:39] S1: Let's talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. [00:08:41] S0: Yeah. But that's true. So the way we operate, we have these fully cross functional teams, meaning they are staffed with all necessary functions, engineers, data analysts, designers, operation 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, meaning 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. [00:09:28] S1: 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, then there's a different... Like, a technical product owner.
00:09:40 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:09:40] S0: We actually have three. Three. And the third type becomes increasingly more important. So the first type is UX product owners. Then there are technical product owners, and then there are data science product owners. So UX product owners are the ones who who work on consumer facing part of the product. Usually, they 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 this expertise in the industry. Then tech product owners, they are the ones who delve deepest into details. Usually, those are former engineers who grew into making decisions and driving business. And the data science product owners are usually former data scientists who decided to grow into management positions. But they're still very hands on. And you know what? There are a lot... There are way more things that are common to each of these three specializations. So what we see sometimes is people just shifting them. Because I would say that, you know, what defines the specialization is probably five, 10, 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 nonlinear problems. Then building this context for customer and building empathy towards customer and translating it 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 to to understand, okay, what will work and what will not work. And that means that you also need to be quite technical. Even if you're UXPOR, you still need to often go as deep as sitting, you know, with engineers and reading code. And then I would also emphasize importance of business acumen, 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 metric and that target?
00:12:41 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:12:41] S1: So I love this idea of the product owners having to go really deep. I think a lot of people hearing this, they think they can go deep, go deep, really understand the 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,