YouSaid · the spoken record

Dmitry Zlokazov

lines on the record: 67
first: 2025-05-15
most recent: 2025-05-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think the best way is to find me on LinkedIn. And I would be happy to receive a note from anyone on how we can improve the product, any feedback on the product. And also, if you know someone who can be a great fit to revolution you've listened to what I've told, then I would be grateful for that as well.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We call a wealth protection. So, if you go to settings, you can enable a limit for any transfers outside the Frevloot. And if you want to do a transfer above this limit, you will have to do a selfie check, which is our proprietary technology. We do a video self, and it allows us to make sure that it's you, no one else is doing the transfer. And it's actually... It's almost as smooth as Face ID and the WA team built it is really great. I'm really proud of those cases.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love this phrase. I think Eisenhower said it. Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. It's like, you know, we often say how important it is to be flexible and agile and adjust to changing circumstances. But it doesn't allow us to actually not have a plan at all. It's important for us to remember that we always need to think many steps ahead. And while being flexible, we also need to think things thoroughly.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. It's just like I was super impressed how I was mesmerized. It's so autonomous and smooth. And I just spent like a few hours. Wipe code in and I created this JavaScript app that sends me a rare English word every day to learn and remember. And it worked. I was just amazed.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the last movie I watched was Oppenheimer and I really liked it. I always love watching biopics. I think they give you kind of a perspective and let you think about things in perspective.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then second book is, I read it more recently, built by Tony Fidel. I was really inspired by this one, especially given how I appreciate how it's not easy to build hardware and what Tony was describing there. It just is just super exciting and inspiring. And also, I think that there are different archetypes of product managers. There are people who tend to disrupt things more. Personally, I think about myself as of a builder. So Tony is... Principles that he highlighted in the book resonate with me a lot.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz actually read it quite some time ago, but I found myself recommending it to other product managers most often. It's actually illustrative that To be a great product manager, someone needs to strive to be in a great CEO. And besides this book emphasizes the importance of building systematic solutions and scalable solutions, which is critical for scaling the company, also being honest on how important it is to grind stuff.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think that it was an amazing chat, and thanks, Lenia. We covered a lot of different topics. I would just maybe summarize that if you're excited to build certain things, never hesitate to do it. The best way to do it is probably your own startup. And also what will give you the steepest possible learning curve. But then if you want to join the company, try to choose the one that That has the highest entrepreneurial spirit and that will allow you to work as closer to a mode of a founder as you possibly can.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like an obvious mistake. Back then, we were just enjoying building a product that we would love to use ourselves, which I think is the right principle. But it also was a very painful lesson. You need to stay lean, you need to validate things before you scale them. You need to think way more about the run rate of your business. So there were a lot of painful lessons for me. Since then, I also try to avoid working with hardware.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A beautiful devices made from stainless steel, which looked really nice inside cinema holes. And I remember how I was excited about it. With my friends, we were like, what an amazing thing is like, look, we're bringing future here, but we actually spent all our investment on this hardware and we were expecting that everyone will just rush into using our system. But it was a very low share of customers who started buying tickets online because people were not ready for it, which was growing quite slowly. And eventually we had to close it because we simply ran out of money because we spent all of it on this hardware without any proven business model. So something that currently looks”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buy a ticket online and go to the CIS directory. Something that today seems as a commodity back then, like no one had it. Like people were using pieces of paper. And we built a end-to-end system because not only we needed to build a website, but we also needed to build hardware to scan those tickets. And to have these tickets in digital format, we needed to hack SMS standard because, again, people didn't have smartphones. They had this Nokia's. And we were sending images, QR codes inside an SMS, which is like a hack of the standard in a way. And then we were scanning those things with our own devices. And we built our own devices with scanners. And we actually created this.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the most spectacular failures probably were on the earliest stage of my career, which I Back at university Maybe in my second year of university, I started building some things. Different startups. And one of them was actually a product that makes me proud even now because it was like what 15 years ago, so 2010, meaning still no one really had even iPhones back then. And me and my friends, we started building a website that allows people to buy tickets to the CNMR so that they can skip the line so that they don't need to come in advance to select best seats and they can just”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best product people ever travel with, and I really wanted to be part of this great team. Eventually, it actually appeared to be advantageous for me because I also had this fresh view on things. And even in the Revolut app, which is actually way, way better than other banks' products, right? But even there, I found some things that for me, because of this lack of context, they were not intuitive and I worked hard to With the team to change that”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My journey into revel it actually coincided with me moving to the UK, so it was a completely new environment for myself. It's a huge stress lot for the brain as well. And it's not only about using the other side of the lane on the road in the UK, but also it's a lot of things, for example, in the industry, like some concepts that I've never heard about. And actually, I've never worked at fintech before, so I also changed the industry. So it was like a complete turnaround for me and for my career. But I was very determined and excited about it because everyone who I've been talking to, they were saying Revelat is like top talent, he's a travelud, like all.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes the product is built, but then product owners are the ones who also make sure that, for example, customer care team or sales and marketing team are using it to a full extent. Because without it, it could be just another useless feature and no one knows about it.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most importantly, it's again getting things done, getting your hands dirty, and great product owners are very hands-on. They don't think of themselves as. Managers who just give talks to people and wait them to complete it. They just go and get things done and they understand that most important things, they will likely have to do themselves. And they understand that there needs to be relentless focus on execution. And if something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it's actually being able to unblock your team. And that sometimes requires product owners to steamroll changes. Because it also means that, you know, you could easily get stuck with a lot of people just looking into each other and thinking, okay, can they approve it? Can they not approve it? We try to innovate on it. We try to automate as many things as possible. We use even AI models for that. It also requires a product owner to be able to get things done, just getting people down to consensus and understanding who your stakeholders, how to get them to the necessary decision and then blocking your team so that eventually the value is shipped to customers.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is also a third aspect, but it's a boring one and it's complying with all possible regulations and making sure that your product will satisfy the regulator. But it's also an important part of the job.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would just maybe highlight the aspect of this, like going deep into details, right? There are two main streams. First is, let's say, Being technical, understanding how underlying systems work. But second is also building empathy towards customers, understand the possible context, and making sure that your product will satisfy each one of them.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basic fundamental layer where you need to be just on par with competition. But then there are a lot of things on top that just make people love your product way more. And obviously there are a lot of synergies in between those things. So, yeah, thinking of crypto, you can just receive crypto on your wallet and then you can just instantly convert it to cash on your account or just spend it with your card. How amazing can it be, right? Just buy a coffee with Ethereum.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on top of it, what I would call maybe some delighters is we will allow you to open the savings account in many currencies. So we want to add different currencies because now interest rates are going down. So people might find it valuable to open a savings account in, for example, I know. In Europe, like Swedish corona, interest rates are higher than Europe, but it could be even something like Brazilian real with 12% interest rate versus like 2 or 3% on euros. And then at the cherry on top, there is this all that in an amazing UAP, very smooth. You can set custom wallpapers, you can set goals, you can automate spare change toward your savings content and all those features. So there is an underlying”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think there are those kind of table stakes that we're building that anyone would expect from a bank. For example, savings account, right? It's just a basic thing that if a bank is not providing savings account, you wouldn't even consider it. But then we make sure that our rates are very competitive, if not the best. Then we make sure that there is no bad UX, like some banks, they, for example, they don't allow you to withdraw instantly and there are delays or they don't pay interest on daily basis. We will never do that. We will allow you, if you want to move money out, you will be able to do it. You won't lose any interest. And interest is being paid daily. And this is a fully flexible product.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, that's what I maybe meant by keeping your first version narrowed down to a small user base. But even in this case, we still make sure that the product is well. No one is excluded from this requirement of building a super polished product. It takes time, but it pays off. You know, the thing is that when you launch a scrappy version and it's not getting traction, how do you know? Is it because the underlying idea is wrong or maybe your product just sucks and you need to improve it? by forcing everyone to build a product that people will love by building a wow product, we kind of cut out this part of uncertainty. So bottom line, 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 aesthetics.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With a significant other one was one of the recently launched features and it grew significantly and now it has over a million active users.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then what customer problem we're solving, and so on. And there is very little bureaucracy, again, thanks to having founder hands-on, we can easily get a green light on anything, start launching it quickly. What we do is assemble same lean team with just a few people to build first version and then iterate and iterate. The main thing here is to build first version very quickly to get feedback but then not scale it before you polish the product. But then after we make sure that all metrics are fine, retention is great, we start scaling it and the good news is that it can be instantly multiplied by our 50 million customer base and get great traction. So for example one of the products that you mentioned joint accounts essentially an account that you could have”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or in some sort of point. In Europe, they don't have it. And we are actually the first to build a program on card spend rewarding people with really meaningful monetary rewards. In the manner that I described, we understood, okay, what's the recipe of this success to then scale it and reproduce? So we built a new BETS framework. And essentially everyone can come up with a new idea. It could be a product owner, but it could be anyone. And they need to show some key important things which usually can expect from a startup like market is there, business case is there. We know that we can do it way better than competitors leverage and, for example, some things that we have obviously some concepts of product.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we launched quite a few Products that you actually maybe wouldn't expect from a bank starting with crypto that was insanely successful. But also non-financial services like booking a hotel through RevelutEpp, our loyalty program, Rev Points, which Which is sort of disrupting European market where people don't get great benefits from spending with card. In the US, you can easily get like what 2%.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It. Well, As someone who owns the product function, I'm especially interested in product owners, obviously. But we hire a lot of roles, I think. We have maybe three or four hundred open positions currently”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer base growth, but we can also do another 10x growth in how actively these people are using the product. So it's, let's say, what, 30, 40x to current 45 billion valuation, right? It's like a trillion dollar company easily.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one of the things that excites me maybe the most to revelat. The market is so big and there are still a lot of very inefficient players. And as a result, customers have a lot of problems that are unsolved. While we grow insanely, and I think we'll soon be, so when I joined, we had maybe just slightly north to 20 million customers. Now we are 50 million customers. Soon we'll be at 100 million customers. The degree of surrounding each customer with the ecosystem of our products extends a lot. So they become more and more people start using their main bank account. They start receiving their salary into Revelt holding their savings into Revelt because they love the product more. And so we can easily do another, I don't know, two, three X, 4x in...”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of those things are huge by itself. Let's say stock trading, right? It's not just stocks, it's also ETFs, bonds, and we were working on tax efficient accounts in different countries. And crypto, we also allow staking crypto, for example. We have on-ramp of ramp products. We have acquiring product. On credit, we have loans. We have by now palator product. We even launched mortgages. We launched first mortgages in Lithuania recently.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that, you know, a credit division in a Incumbent bank is maybe like two or three thousand people building just credit products for a single country. And our team is building it for 50 countries. And yeah, it's enabled through this approach with platforms, which we build on top of small teams which are fully equipped with necessary functions and also have autonomy in defining what they're building. And the flat hierarchy with everyone being accountable and founders have in direct view over everyone and intervening if necessary”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, exactly. They have like full overview over everything. But also it actually, it allows us to build so many things because There is actually little micromanagement. If founders had to be involved into everything, they had to cut the things down, right? By giving people autonomy, they actually boost company growth. And as a result, I think Revolut is a strong outlier in the industry in terms of how many products being shipped and how fast they shipped. Another thing here is what I mentioned previously is us investing heavily into platform so that every solution is scalable from the get-go so that we don't have any custom solutions. And I don't, for example, 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.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's say a last line of control to make sure that what we're building all makes sense and that's value and is thoroughly thought in all details.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Also, this approach is way more scalable. So while leadership and obviously founders themselves, keep everyone accountable, go deep into details, it doesn't mean that they micromanage everyone. That's actually a very important thing. So the ideal position for any product owner is to be fully autonomous. And again, it doesn't mean that you will never be challenged. But if when you're challenged, you can show all the logic behind decisions you've made behind the roadmap. And even if metrics are not yet there, you will still have this credit of trust to keep building things the way you want to build them. Eventually, yeah, you will be presenting the outputs of your activity on this weekly product reviews. But again, it's not a micromanagement either. It's more like...”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we will never cut down things. It's just the appetite for growth and also. Entrepreneurial approach in the company is so high that we will never allow ourselves to give up on some great opportunities.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way it's structured, my responsibility as a product function, we also have a head of design function. It's also part of my team. But then all the other functions, they are separate, like engineering and data function. And all of them report directly into CEO.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paying attention to all the details and being meticulous in all those details, especially in quality, they will be the ones that will be reviewed to a such deep level, like next phase, next cycle. So as a result, it also builds a great discipline. And since Revolut is such a high concentration of Very ambitious people who For being best versions of themselves and grow. And it's very important for them to prove that they can deliver great things and build a great company. As a result, they do everything. Operate autonomously, and when you start diving deep into details, you see that everything is fine, you see the modus operandi, and you can understand, okay, if this team is on good track or not on good track. And if it's not on good track, it means that it probably will be one of your next areas of focus.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could think that, okay, but what about others like, let's say, 50 or 60 items, right, that are being executed? But the thing is that it actually It's counterintuitive, but it works really well because, first of all, teams, they talk to each other. They're a formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just, you know, meeting in the office. And they know which areas are being scrutinized right now and which team is being scrutinized. And it also gives information what are the current priorities in the company. But in addition, it's signaled to other teams that If they are not Proactively executing things on the expected level”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which would mean that you will just spend your entire week just catching up on statuses, not really adding value to anyone. But it's also scary to not do it. Because what if there are some things going wrong, right, and you won't be able to stop it or steer in a better direction? So I think that's why also a lot of managers, especially in senior positions, they kind of stay high level and they don't go very deep into details. But so we did differently at Travel Loot is Go very deep into details Take maybe seven or ten projects, which are most impactful for customers right now. And we go super deep into them, like really, really deep. Sitting with engineers reading code level and understanding, okay, how it's built exactly and what's the underlying issue.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have changed in how I operate after I joined Revolut, probably because Revolut is a founder-led company, and probably it's because SoFled, and also because my role is... Quite spread across many things. So, my role at Traveler is leading product function across company, but also leading. Which is a core part of Revolution's business. It's very easy to be spread thinly across all those domains and catching up with 50 or 70 projects that are being executed simultaneously.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we work, we have weekly catch ups with the recruitment team. So essentially they are also a team that runs in sprints. So every sprint, we define what do we want to focus on, which areas, which companies. One of the great sources is actually looking into products and apps that we love ourselves. If someone built a great product, then it's likely a high performer. So usually like we provide some great products in specific areas that are more important for us to the sourcing team and they just try to source targeting those companies. It could be also different areas. It could be even schools like good schools. So it varies from sprint to sprint.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's probably the best way to boost career is to go and find something work in a startup, build things yourself or with a very small team, working all different areas. Because in startup, you have to work in all different areas. And then these kind of people, they really thrive at Revolut. And even if they don't have a lot of years of experience, they actually Attack a specific problem. They have a sense of Cause customer pain and they are very fast moving to solve it quickly. And then that's how they get appreciation from everyone around. Team starts respecting these people because they solve some specific problem and then they take another problem, they solve it, and then they take another. And that's how they grow in the company.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You already have super inflated expectations, and usually the computation is, by the way, quite high, and which adds up to these expectations. And I myself, after conducting maybe four or five hundred interviews with product owners at Travolut, I also see this. Unfortunately, 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, Soil tears and sweat That's why even if a candidate doesn't have a lot of years of experience. They love building things. They've done it. They worked with engineers. Maybe, by the way, maybe in their own startup or one of the best profiles. I've seen a tech co founder so.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everyone is striving for talented, skillful, smart people and experienced people. Values way more raw intellect This unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience. So let me maybe bring an example. Imagine we all saw this. You hire a great experienced professional with amazing regalia of achieving a lot of things. But then what I see in product, The adoption curve is usually longer than in other functions because product owners by definition are the ones who are the experts in the domain and in all those intricacies of how product is built and how it's used. So what we see from these professionals is they still take a lot of time to ramp up and sometimes they also take time to adapt to new culture or worse they just rest on their laurels.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guarantee that we know about it very, very soon. We've also built tools for product owners and designers to have an easy access to a panel of users via different tools so that they can just start an interviewing process or a survey or a test of different designs in a few clicks. For me, it was very important to build this direct connection to customers because when you delegate such an important thing as customer research and collecting their feedback to someone, you will get refined the filtered version. You won't get this, you know, like these nuances of how people describe things which emotions they feel like and so on and where they think suck it. It's very easy to lose all those important bites of information in this process. So I'm a strong believer that It's very important to have direct communication channel to customers.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For us, it's a bit easy to reach out to customers. Usually, Ourselves are power users of the product. We receive our salary into Revolut and then we spend with Revolut our friends the same. So it's like a no-brainer to talk to people continuously. And even if you're not practicing in that, they will reach out. If you have a problem in the product.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A quite substantial part of product owners who eventually become very successful, by the way. So it's like a positive self-select. So it means that someone already succeeded in another role. So it's a guaranteed culture mesh. It's a guaranteed domain knowledge. And then they simply grow. Usually it could be operations managers or engineers, they grow into someone who now manages the team. And that's why it's a very successful path.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, but I would say that Not necessarily, it's a very experienced product manager. Well, maybe even it's way more important to. Have this hunger for building things, you know, and having raw intellect. And we always try to find people with these intrinsic traits rather than hiring people who are very experienced but maybe are not super excited about building things.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And every week they have product reviews with every team given an opportunity to every product owner, present directly to CEO and CTO, and show what increment has team achieved in the last week, but also get steering from founders, which is super valuable. So essentially founders of the company still review 100% of screens that are being shipped and everything that you will see in these past this review, and there are a lot of eyeballs that were scrutinizing this and thinking of all possible edge cases and nuances that we need to consider to make sure that every single customer will be Happy in this product, in this flow.”
2025-05-15 · Lenny's Podcast · 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) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source