Connect Podcast
00:00:00 · Vlad Yatsenko
[00:00:00] S0: Maybe I'm against rituals. If there's a ritual, you think... Have to think about it. Why do I have a ritual? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, more like natural. Yeah. Right? Because the rituals to
00:00:10 · Adam
[00:00:10] S1: me is like more this kind of mindless exercises. Right. Right. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Connect, where we spend time with the operators who are rewriting the rules of financial services. Today, we have a very special edition and a very special guest who's on an ambitious quest to change the way that we think about what a bank can do for us. We're sitting down with Vlad, the CTO of Global Challenger Bank Revolut in their London offices, with myself, Adam from the Flinks product team, and Fred, one of the Flinks cofounders. This conversation was so extensive that we've decided to break it down into two parts. In the first episode, we talked with Vlad about market expansion and the principles that he uses to lead a global team. In the second part, we're looking at his approach to building a winning culture and how he instills a focus on customer centricity. We're starting off with Vlad's ideas on building teams. One of the other things we were sort of chatting about earlier too is, like, making sure that the people who are solving the problem really understand the problem well. It's a disconnect that you often see in a lot of organizations. We're guilty of it, too, is that the engineers and the people that are actually working on the problem are two steps removed from the problem. So how do you when you're leading, especially on a technical team side, how do you make sure that you can instill a sense of customer centricity and focus on the customer and the problem in your teams that are working on solving that problem. I think you have an answer in your question.
00:01:48 · Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:01:48] S0: Yeah. Focus on the problem. Yeah. It's the thing that mindset I've been trying to create from the very beginning in Revolut. Tech side is just tools. It's secondary. And that's how we sell the engineering roles to potential candidates. Like why an engineer would join Revolut is because you actually can come and have impact, solve real life problem of real customers versus just [00:02:15] S2: going through [00:02:16] S0: tasks and just focusing on how beautiful your code is, etcetera. Those things are important, but they're secondary. They're more like means to the goal, right? It's very important in our culture. That's why we kind of try not to separate because of this. And this is true for every role, not engineering. We focus on have teams, we call them all product teams. They may be solving not directly customer problems, but maybe so their customers may be people in the company, internal products. What they focus into is understanding cross functional teams, mostly engineers of different types, whoever is, what kind of skills are needed to solve a specific domain problem. And then they're headed by product owner. They try to figure out how to solve aligning with company global goals and direction, trying to figure out how they can contribute and solve problems within specific space.
00:03:12 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:03:12] S1: Yeah. One of the things that we were looking at before online about Revolut, plane ride over here. A lot of people were complaining, not a lot of people, but there's enough vocal people complaining about like in the interview process, they ask every role to actually acquire users. So finance, like engineers. I don't know how much that's actually true. But the concept, I think, it's so clear and brilliant is that it's everyone's responsibility to acquire customers and service customers and find them better. It's not like a marketing team's job to get these things. Is that a fair way to characterize the company? Is that this is not the responsibility of one team over here to acquire customers and then one team over here to build product to [00:03:50] S0: the customer? No. Absolutely. I mean, we have teams focused on Yeah. Acquiring customers on growth specifically. But because it's one of the top objectives of the company, everyone else is a one to the... But we try to look at it in a way that growing doesn't depend on only acquiring customers. Yeah. It's it's also how well you retain them. Especially if you consider that most of our growth came from just word-of-mouth. [00:04:15] S2: Mhmm. We
00:04:15 · Fred, Vlad Yatsenko, Adam
[00:04:15] S2: Mhmm. We [00:04:16] S0: want to keep leveraging that. Where it comes from, it's from the product itself. If we're able to solve the problem Yeah. We still need to focus on quality of the service that people get once they are on board, etcetera. Now all these challenges there. There's always work to do, but it's like... It's it's more complex than this one. It's just acquiring customers. It's... The problem can be somewhere later down the line. Yeah. Right? Yeah. We may be acquiring customers, but then not all of them are using the product. Okay. Why they're not using? Why maybe... And because that could be a reason as well why they're not bringing new customers for us. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of complex thinking about it, but complex at the same time. It's quite [00:04:58] S1: Very simple. [00:04:58] S0: Yeah. Very simple and common sense. [00:05:00] S1: Right? The concept makes sense too of, like, if if you're asking someone who's applying for, like, a controller role or a finance role, something that's, like, one step removed from the product. And they can't acquire customers. Like, they should also be able to kind of explain to you why they're having a hard time doing that. If they say, okay. I went to my 15 friends. I said, okay, guys. Sign up for a Revolut card. And they all told me, no. I already have this or I already have that. That... That's also valuable feedback to people to [00:05:24] S0: bring in. [00:05:24] S1: And it forces you to, like, think about the context of your users when you're
00:05:24 · Adam, Vlad Yatsenko, Fred
[00:05:24] S1: And it forces you to, like, think about the context of your users when you're [00:05:29] S0: To just from culture, we we don't Yeah. Kind of... All candidates to acquire users, basically. But generally, it's more it's more like thinking about what you're doing and what's the impact of it. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the things that we have for all roles is home task as a first stage [00:05:46] S2: Mhmm. [00:05:46] S0: Which maybe some companies do this kind of screening task where you just go through a list of simple questions, just to use usually in the hiring process just to eliminate random applicants. Here's the home task. It always has this open ended element where we try to see how they kind of actually looks at the problem itself. And there's never one answer to that. [00:06:13] S2: Yeah, that's another piece, maybe the biggest piece in terms of like how unique hyper successful companies have to be in terms of their culture to be able to sustain growth through the different stages. When we look at like leadership functions there's like three main core things that we have to do. We have to hire, we have to reward properly and then we have to fire properly. So there's like these three things I am personally super interested in. If we start back from day zero, did your thinking about building a team evolve a lot? And if so like how did it evolve or were you already pretty clear on like the guiding principles and you already had that figured out and just build it from there?