Dmitry Zlokazov is the Head of Product at Revolut. He reflects on patterns observed across hundreds of interviews with product manager candidates.
Disclosure
Revolut product owners act as direct line managers for their cross-functional teams
“We have these fully cross-functional teams meaning they are stuffed 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 the functional manager. So p…”
Insight
Zlokazov: Revolut product owners must be technical enough to read code
“And that means that you also need to be quite technical, even if you're expert, you still need to often go as deep as sitting, you know, with engineers and reading code.”
Disclosure
Zlokazov: Revolut leadership deep-dives code-level into 7 to 10 core projects
“How we did differently at Revolut is to go very deep into details we take maybe seven or 10 projects which are most impactful for customers right now, and we go super deep into them, like really, really deep, Sitting with engineers, like check, like reading co…”
Insight
Zlokazov: Deeply reviewing select projects enforces discipline across all teams
“It's counterintuitive, but it works really well because first of all, teams, they talk to each other. There are formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just, you know, meeting in the office and they know which areas are being scrutinized r…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Revolut's 300-person credit team outpaces legacy banks' 3,000-person teams
“Take our credit team. They ship new products like loans or credit cards in the country literally every month. And it's just maybe 300 people. And I think that You know, a credit division in a incumbent bank is maybe like two or 3000 people building just credit…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Zlokazov: Revolut can easily become a trillion-dollar company
“And so we can easily do another, I don't know, two, three X Four X in customer based growth, but we can also do another 10 X growth in how actively these people are using the product. So it's, let's say what, 30, 40 X to current forty five billion valuation, r…”