Revolut product owners act as direct line managers for their cross-functional teams
Dmitry Zlokazov · How Revolut trains world-class PMs: The “Local CEO” model, raw intellect & building wow products · May 15, 2025 · at 8:43
Dmitry Zlokazov, Head of Product at Revolut, explains the fintech giant's matrix management structure and why product managers operate with line-management authority as 'local CEOs.'
0:00 / 0:41exact quote · 41.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 product owner is always the line manager for everyone on the team. Meaning product only 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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dmitry Zlokazov
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.”
Zlokazov: Experienced corporate PMs lack the urge to challenge the status quo
“Professionals with a lot of years of experience from established companies, they don't have this strong urge to change status quo, which by the way will require, you know, toil, tears, and sweat.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”