00:00:00 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:00] S0: Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience. [00:00:12] S1: I hear one of the ways you approach early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good. [00:00:18] S0: 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 this part of uncertainty. We can cut down the product in terms of functionality to to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics. [00:00:42] S1: Is there anything that you've figured out about just how to set up new products for success? [00:00:47] S0: If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.
00:00:53 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:00:53] S1: Today, my guest is Dmitry Zlokazov. Dmitry is global head of product at Revolut, which is a finance super app offering customers savings in checking accounts, crypto, investing, joint accounts, even mortgages. Not only was it last valued at over $60,000,000,000, but in the research that I've been doing into which companies hire and incubate the best product managers, Revolut was right at the top alongside Palantir and Intercom. And so in our conversation, we dig into what Revolut 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 enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. Also, if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of linear superhuman notion, perplexity, and granola. Check it out at lenny'snewsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Dmitry Zlokazov. 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 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 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 and play super optimized payment flow that natively supports over 100 global dynamic payment methods.
00:03:08 · Lenny Rachitsky, Dmitry Zlokazov
There's also a product called Link, which is an accelerated checkout 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 of Fortune 100 companies use Stripe. $1,400,000,000,000 flows through Stripe annually, which is equivalent to over 1% of global GDP. Use 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. Dmitry, thank you so much for being here, welcome to the podcast. [00:03:46] S0: Hi, Lenny. I'm happy to be here.
00:03:46 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:03:46] S0: Hi, Lenny. I'm happy to be here. [00:03:48] S1: 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 company's 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 triangulate it across all the different... All these different data points, there's three companies that are kind of sat at the top. You guys, Revolut, Palantir, Intercom. Clearly, you guys are doing something really special. I don't think a lot of people, especially in The US, know a ton about Revolut. 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 wanna actually start with giving people a slight understanding of what is Revolut. 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?
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.