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, Global Head of Product at Revolut, the UK-based finance super app serving around 50 million customers across roughly 50 countries, explains how Revolut builds and hires its product owners. The conversation covers the "local CEO" ownership model, its preference for raw intellect and hunger over experience, a cultural focus on building lovable products, and how new products are launched.

01Key learnings

• Treat product managers as end-to-end owners of their area, closer to local CEOs, with authority over the roadmap, team direction, and business outcomes.
• Hire for raw intellect and an unquenched hunger to build things, rather than for years of experience, since experienced hires often ramp slowly and resist change.
• Look for people who have founded startups or worked as tech co-founders, since they tend to be hands-on across many areas and solve painful problems quickly.
• Go deep into details on a few high-impact projects, reading code and sitting with engineers, while zooming out to build scalable processes and platforms.
• Insist on a wow-quality experience even for early products; cut scope to critical features but never compromise on UX and aesthetics, so failures can be attributed to the idea rather than polish.
• Stay in direct contact with customers, since delegated research loses the nuance of how people describe problems and the emotions behind them.
• Remember that work is closer to zero than complete until customer care, sales, and marketing teams actually use and promote the feature.
• Pursue entrepreneurial, founder-like environments early in your career to accelerate your product learning curve.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.