How Revolut trains world-class product managers: The “local CEO” model, raw intellect over experience, and a cultural obsession with building wow products | Dmitry Zlokazov (Head of Product)
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Who is Dmitry Zlokazov and what is Revolut’s mission?
Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revolute values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience.
I hear one of the ways you approach early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good.
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 just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX.
And the aesthetics. Is there anything that you've figured out about just how to set up new products for success?
If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.
Today my guest is Dmitris Lakazov. Dimitri is global head of product at Revolute, which is a finance super app offering customers savings and checking accounts, crypto, investing, joint accounts, even mortgages. Not only was it last valued at over $60 billion, 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 Revolute 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 excel.
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's Newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you Dimitri Zlocazo. 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 Payments flow that natively supports over 100 global dynamic payment methods. 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 uses Stripe to monetize it.
How does Revolut’s “local CEO” model give product owners end‑to‑end ownership?
Half of Fortune 100 companies use Stripe. $1.4 trillion flows through Stripe. 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. Dimitri, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Hi, Lenny, and happy to be here. 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 companies, alumni product managers, get promoted most when they leave the company, become chief product officers at the highest rate when they leave the company.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Dmitry Zlokazov and what is Revolut’s mission?
0:00–3:17
2
How does Revolut’s “local CEO” model give product owners end‑to‑end ownership?
3:17–6:03
3
Why does Revolut prioritize raw intellect and hunger over years of experience?
6:03–9:41
4
What are the three types of product owners at Revolut and how do they differ?
9:41–15:33
5
How does Revolut ensure product quality while shipping hundreds of features across 50+ countries?
15:33–22:56
6
What is the process for turning a new idea into a scalable product at Revolut?
22:56–33:44
7
What lessons did Dmitry share from his biggest product failure and how did it shape his approach?
33:44–40:09
8
How can listeners apply Revolut’s hiring and ownership principles to accelerate their product careers?
40:09–1:09:58
Speakers
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