00:15:54 · Dmitry Zlokazov
[00:15:54] S0: I would probably add an obsession with building Wow product. Wow. W o w. W o w. Cool. And, you know, I think in fintech overall, this is probably the most neglected part usually. But it's also a part that we at Revolut we pay enormous attention to. So it's not only... You know, when you when you do a trade in the app or when you send money, it's very important for it to be very fast and cheap process for you so that you don't pay a lot of fees. But we also pay a lot of attention to look and feel of the app, and how smooth it is, and how frictionless the process. Not only we invest into reducing clicks and optimizing funnels, but we also want people to feel that we really cared about them. We also want people to feel that we love our customers and we applied extra effort to... For the product to look great and feel great. And I hear this a lot from our customers. Like, the the the app is something they really love, and it helps them solve their problems. It's at least one of the ingredients of of the company's success. And I think people that work at Revolut, they built habit of, you know, paying attention to these small nuances, small details that make the product lovable. And then second is handling this context because, you know, like, it's a lot of details where you need to dive, but there are also a lot of dimensions where you need to dive into different details. Right? And I think this ability to keep this large context in your mind and consider second order effects and view subjects from multiple angles, I think that this is also a very important skill that people usually train at Revolut.
00:18:04 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:04] S1: Okay. Cool. So we have three three bullet points on the on the ingredients of great product managers slash owners that you guys incubate. On this Wow piece, which I love, how do you operationalize this sort of thing? I imagine a big part of it is hiring people that are really good at this and value building lovable products. Is there any way you kind of have a process around making sure the things you ship are wow and lovable?
00:18:27 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:27] S0: Two things that you need to understand about how Revolut operates is that we operate in small lean teams that are tasked to build products. And as I mentioned, like, and having end to end responsibility for products. And usually, they're the ones who build it from zero, and then they they they grow in and develop in this product. And then another thing is that company is very flat, and hierarchy is very flat. We still have our founders, Nik and Vlad, very hands on, going down to details for every product and every part of the business. And every week, they have product reviews with every team, giving an opportunity to every product owner present directly to CEO and CTO and show what team... What what increment has team achieved in the last week, but also get steering from founders, which is super valuable. So essentially, founders of the company, they still review 100% of screens that have been shipped. And everything that you will see in the app, this this past this review, and there are a lot of eyeballs that were, you know, scrutinizing this and thinking of all possible edge cases and nuances that we need to consider to make sure that every single customer will be happy in this product, in this flow. [00:20:02] S1: That seems to be a consistent theme in products that are incredible, as the founders are deeply involved in in the experience and review everything. How many how many product owners are there at Revolut? Just to give people a sense, by the way. [00:20:15] S0: Oh, I'm afraid to say it's already more than 150 people, maybe 170.
00:20:15 · Dmitry Zlokazov, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:15] S0: Oh, I'm afraid to say it's already more than 150 people, maybe 170. [00:20:20] S1: Cool. That's that's what I would expect. And then you said that there's kind of these three types. There's kind of like the eng type, the PM traditional type, and there's the data product owner. When you hire the UX type of product owner, do they... Is their previous role usually a product manager at another company? Yes. [00:20:38] S0: But I would say that not necessarily it's a very experienced product manager. Well, maybe even it's way more important to have this hunger for building things, you know, and having a raw intellect. And we always try to find people with these intrinsic traits rather than hiring people who are very experienced, but maybe are not super excited about building things. [00:21:13] S1: What percentage of your product owners come from internal transfers from other functions? [00:21:18] S0: It's a quite substantial part of product owners who eventually become very successful, by the way. So it's like a positive self select. So it means that someone already succeeded in another role. So it's a guaranteed culture match. It's guaranteed domain knowledge. And then they simply grow. Usually, it could be operations managers or engineers. They grow into someone who now manages the team. And that's why it's a very successful path.
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.