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)

**Dmitry Zlokazov** (0:00)
Everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people. Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
I hear one of the ways you approach early products differently is you guys invest a lot in actually making it good.

**Dmitry Zlokazov** (0:18)
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.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
Is there anything that you've figured out about just how to set up new products for success?

**Dmitry Zlokazov** (0:47)
If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:53)
Today my guest is Dmitry Zlokazov. Dmitry is Global Head of Product at Revolut. Revolut is a finance super app offering customer savings in 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 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 Lenny's newsletter.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. 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.
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Dmitry, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Dmitry Zlokazov** (3:46)
Hi Lenny, I'm happy to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:48)
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, become the first PM at a start up, also start their own companies. And when I triangulated across all these different data points, there's three companies that are kind of sat at the top. You guys, Revolut, Palantir and 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 want to 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?