How Revolut trains world-class PMs: The "Local CEO" model, raw intellect & building wow products

Product owners are central to the company and its growth. They are end-to-end responsible for the product, for this part of the business, and for their customers to be happy.

We have these fully cross-functional teams, meaning they're staffed with all necessary functions, engineers data, analysts, designers, operational managers and so on. And product owner is always the line manager for everyone on the team.

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 toil, tears, and sweat.

If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%.

We take maybe 7 or 10 projects which are most impactful for customers right now. And we go super deep into them, really, really deep sitting with engineers like reading code level.

Most important things they will likely have to do themselves, and they understand that there needs to be relentless focus on execution.

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.

"This part of uncertainty" refers to not knowing whether poor product traction is due to a bad underlying idea versus poor product execution quality.

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 still have our founders, Nick and Vlad, very hands-on going down to details for every product and every part of the business. Every week they have product reviews with every team.