YouSaid · the spoken record

James Gibson

lines on the record: 85
first: 2025-09-26
most recent: 2025-09-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Because I find that a lot of the decisions that you end up making one ones are actually ones that impact more than just one person and it's useful to have a few other people in the room to discuss it. So if you could keep one meeting, it's that product review is the meeting I would keep.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, reducing them at the moment, we're pushing more into product reviews. So we have more of a, okay, the right people are in the team, let's make some decisions.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's right. And then we have weekly product reviews, and that's where we have product engineering or senior engineering design for that particular team, or potentially a couple of teams together. And we look at metrics, we look at roadmap, and we look at designs. And that can be a fairly intense meeting. I mean, we want to make it to some extent creative, but we expect people to come with a pretty solid update on a pretty solid idea of what they're going to then be doing. By having this cadence every week, it means we don't waste a lot of time preparing for the meeting. We're really doing most of the time. And then you get a good glimpse once a week of what's happening.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we structure our kind of workflow is, I think, different from other companies. So we tend to have weekly one on ones. That's for personal stuff, or you need to align quickly on some topics.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So one of the key characteristics of Revolute, you'll have probably spoken to Nick about is that we have a very flat hierarchy. And because we try and hire very, very good people, we shouldn't need as managers to be spending hours and hours a week telling them exactly what to do. We want people who can be relatively autonomous.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, no, no. We're talking about 10 to 12 per team. You don't want it too big, keeping it small and lean is definitely the way to do it, in my opinion.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way we structure product teams at Revolute Business and across all of Revolut is we have product owners who report into me. And note we have product owners, not product managers. So the key difference is that product owner really owns the team and owns the outcome of the team. They're not trying to influence people around the company. They are a team owner and they stay working on that team for months and years at a time. I mean, take me, for example, I'm kind of the ultimate product owner of Revolute business and I've been working on it now for seven and a half years. And those teams then are cross-functional teams of engineers, designers, operations, and they all report into that product owner. So the product owner really kind of is the control for the control of the team.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nick has set for me and for us to continue the level of growth that we've had over the last eight years I've been there. We're trying to continue to grow at the same rate despite being at a much larger scale and with all the complexities that comes with that. And that's tough.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's natural, right? When you set goals, if you're always hitting 100% of your goal, then you're probably not setting the right goals if you're only ever hitting 5% of your goals. You either got a terrible team or you're not saying the right goals. So rule of thumb, 70, 80% on average should be a good outcome”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think you should have any more than five goals at once. I think if you do, it starts to become too confusing. You're trying to optimize in too many different directions. So we try and keep it three to five per team.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not every single business line, it obviously depends at what stage it's out of launch, etc. But yeah, that's the rough idea. You can cascade it all down. So it all sums up to the overarching goals.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, they do. So we set at the company level about five kind of macro goals that we're looking to achieve. And some of them are kind of financial goals, some of them are customer experience goals and the like. And then we cascade those down to the relevant products and departments to support them. I mean, to use a basic one, let's say one of our goals as a company was gross profit. We could cascade that down to business so we know what the KPI, the goal for the business side would be.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We try and keep goals relatively simple to start with, so you need to be able to understand what it is. Actually, probably most critically, the goal has to be aligned with whatever the company goal is. So there's no point just having random goals for teams if it doesn't all sum up to something.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nick's able to form opinions on stuff and really sensible opinions, but then from everything that I've seen is able to change when new information comes to light.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Need to on some level trust your gut that some of the ways you've been doing product up till then make sense and not try and bring in people who are going to say everything that's happened up till now has been ridiculous. We're going to completely change how you do this. And that's happened a few times. Nick's probably spoken to you about this a bit as well and what you end up finding kind of six months, 12 months later is actually the way you were doing it before that got you all that growth before was a great way to do it and you should probably just sort of double down on that and put more weight behind that rather than starting something completely new.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How good people tend to handle it, they have a good idea from the outset what they want and what criteria need to be met and they make kind of decisions quite quickly. They're also willing on some level to deal with ambiguity. When you join a company, there is no way you can know exactly who you're going to be working with, exactly what project you're going to be working on. You have to be able to deal with that. And normally that's a good indication of when they join, if they're going to be able to roll with the punches that obviously come with joining a fast growing company.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, here's a date set. Can you tell me what's going on with the data set? Keep it very open ended and then let them kind of try and understand it and come back to you with some thoughts on it”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do some simple ones to just test basic problem solving, but very high performing people tend to not want to dedicate two days of their life to solving a problem. And so you have to make sure it's something reasonable. So we do use”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely agree. And the idea that you can't talk about it properly and openly during the interview process or towards the end of the interview process at least to me doesn't make any sense to all.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, not at all. That's absolutely fine. I mean, and if you want to work in a really hard job and you get paid well, then of course.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Growing up, my dad said to me when I said, Oh, I'd love to, my dad's an architect. And to be honest, I would love to have been an architect. And he said to me, you've got to go do something that makes money. You can't be an architect. And you can make money an architecture. I'm now married to an architect. So I get to live vicariously through her. But there was certainly a drive to go and try and make some money that was instilled in me from a relatively early age.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it when people understand that they have a certain intensity about themselves or a hunger about themselves, which they think sets them apart. A lot of great people that I've worked with have something which is driving them and that can be lots of different things, which gives them a hunger, which has allowed them to push harder than other people.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you did. You did. You won. Well, actually, I think I would have probably tried to get into product a bit quicker as not a massive mistake, but now knowing what I know a couple of years in consulting was great, but I'd love to have gone in a little bit earlier and then really put foot on the pedal a bit earlier in my career. Other ones are revolute is we hired is the classic one, right? You hire the wrong people early on, the people with lots of experience who make you feel like you don't know anything because you don't have all the background in these, again, these frameworks, et cetera. And then you realize after probably slightly too long that actually that's not that relevant, all those frameworks are, and you've been wasting your time for a year trying to sort of understand it, where actually you should sort of trust your gut.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Someone once told me who came to our team that he tried to put on a music festival, he'd spent hundreds of thousands of his own money. I don't know why he thought this was necessarily a thing he wanted to do, but he did. And that had just crashed and burned, lost all this money. And I remember thinking like, wow, that's a play to you, yeah. I don't have anything. I don't have any.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like to ask people what their biggest mistakes were in their career. And people who I think are good tend to have a lot of mistakes and they can identify various stages all sorts of things that they would have done differently. And that's because you want people who are self-critical. Another one is what do people find weird about you? Good people tend to have some slight idiosyncrasies. People who are a good tend to be aware of them. And I think it's, again, an interesting thing to talk about.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I personally believe a lot more in raw skills than I do in people who've learnt frameworks. There's a lot of things out there that you can learn about. And to be honest, I don't know a lot of them and I don't think a lot of people who've done well and built great products know about all of these frameworks. What I think you really want is people with great raw skill set. And so that means people who are able to ask the right questions, who are able to structure problems, who are able to balance multiple solutions in their head and trade them off. These are just core problem solving skills and I don't think you have to have come from any particular background to have them. You also need to have a hunger, particularly if you're going to come and work in a company like Revolute. There is no point coming if you kind of want to chill. And I think that you can see those things relatively quickly when you interview people.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It shows someone who has drive and hunger, someone who is willing to sacrifice in order to try and create something, and then someone who will have actually learned how to do something through the process of that.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Firstly, it's not like we're just looking for people who went to Oxford and Cambridge to use the example you gave earlier. We're looking at a lot of different data points. One of them is people who've started their own company, for example. They might have no other experience whatsoever. Maybe they even did it at a university alongside their studies.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, firstly, we only get people doing the interviews to start with who have been in the company for a while, and we trust to do it. And then once they start doing it, we gather these data points for the people that they do hire. So we know the performance reviews that those people go on to get, and then we can basically backtest the interviewer and give them scores. And you see the distribution of outcomes of the people that they've hired and using that, you can give them a score and then quite quickly you can start comparing their capability”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we then have CV screening process and some initial evaluation. After that, we have a very structured interview process where there are maybe four or five steps. Each of the steps focuses on a different element of what we're looking for. So some might be on skills, like just raw problem solving. Some might be on product skills. So solving kind of problem solving in a product context. And then some will be on cultural alignment as well. And then finally on a team fit. Each of these interviews will be done and we'll have a very structured evaluation of what we're looking for in each of them. The people that we get to do these interviews, we spend a lot of time thinking about as well. So even within Revolute, we have people who obviously have different strengths and we are constantly evaluating your performance as an interviewer to understand whether or not you should continue to be an interviewer.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As somebody went to Oxford, I have to say yes, but no, I think it can be a useful signal, it by no means definitely means that person is going to be fantastic.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first thing to think about is you obviously want to go and find the absolute best people, so you need to go and look for them. So you need teams going out there and speaking to the best people. Often the best people aren't looking for roles. So you need to be the ones going to approach them. So we have amazing teams of recruiters who are spending a lot of time doing that, explaining to people the roles that we have and trying to get them in at the kind of top of the funnel.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a great question, and I gave the presentation the Senior Leadership Welcome to the grads yesterday, and I answered exactly the same question. So I'll tell you word for word what I told them. I said to them, firstly, ensure that you ask lots of stupid questions. Now's the time in your career when you can do that. You need to understand what's going on. Secondly, you need to focus on a small number of things and do them incredibly well. No one remembers if you've done 15 different things in your first three months. They'll remember the quality of what you did. So make sure that you focus on a small number of things and did them really well. And the final thing I would say is early in your career you want to learn what good looks like. That's what will set you up well for the rest of your career. You want to surround yourselves with the best people. Fortunately at Revolute, we have a lot of good people. But choosing who you're going to spend time with and what functions of engineering or data you're going to spend time with to really learn and absorb from them and learn what good looks like, that will set you up so well for the next.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What should I know back then that I wish I knew now? To be honest, when I was a consultant, I didn't even really know that product was a career. Certainly when I left university, I didn't. And when I joined Revolute, it became apparent to me that the real power, the thing that created all the value was this product team and the people working within it. And so actually learning that there was even this thing called product management, product ownership. And moving into that for me was a complete game changer. And that's what then I focused on for the next six, seven years.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, starting as a consultant was fantastic two years, and you learn a lot of hard skills in the role. You get exposed to a lot of people you learn to present. And I think for most careers, if you start like that and then go into something where you're a little bit more hands-on, it's a really good way to start. So yeah, for me, it was great. Now we hire people into product roles from a lot of other backgrounds. We've just taken in a big cohort of grads directly. We also hire from engineering and data as well. There is a variety of different ways people can get into product, but for me, having those couple of years at the start of the career was the great start.”
2025-09-26 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Product: Revolut Business $1BN Revenue: Five of the Biggest Product Lessons | How Revolut Structures Product and Design Teams | How Revolut Experiments and Invests in New Product Bets | How Revolut Ships Product So Fast with James Gibson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source