Ep. 47 Act Like a CEO: the Product Owner mindset at Revolut

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Revolut Insider podcast where we take a look at all things Revolut one episode at a time. I'm here in this special edition of this fireside chat with global Head of Product Paolo Pereira.

Speaker B: So if the product owners spend their day, uh, driving the product, going to the details, understanding the pain points, etcetera, they are the ones better suited to make decisions so they have the full context. So we empower them, we give full ownership for them to drive the product the way they want, want and think it's the best for the company.

Speaker A: We're here to talk about what it's like to be a product owner at Revolut because it's almost like being a CEO of your own product, of your own feature, with the level of responsibility, the level of ownership that you really give to product owners here. So Paolo, I want to ask you, what's the difference between being a product owner at Revolut and a product manager at a typical tech company, but in one sentence.

Speaker B: Product managers, they deliver features, while product owners at Revolut, they own the business end to end.

Speaker A: I think I might need a little bit more than one sentence, so can you elaborate on that please?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's quite simple actually. Uh, so we treat every product team as a mini company, so we give full resources to those teams. And by this I mean engineers, Java, uh, iOS, Android, Python, designers, operations managers, data analysts, data scientists. So the full resources you need, you'll get it. And everyone reports to the product owner. And then these teams, everyone has the same goals, the same KPIs, and they drive together to achieve it. And this can be improving customer, uh, support chats, improving NPS, driving P& L or even like driving activity. And then these teams, they present on a weekly basis updates on their roadmap in business reviews, and they present designs in product reviews, uh, to Nick. To Nick, yes.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: Nick is actually normally present in these meetings and it doesn't matter the seniority, so it doesn't matter if you are junior senior director, you might be presenting to Nick on a weekly basis. And uh, this is something that's actually quite unique. So in some companies you don't have this proximity to the CEO. In some companies it takes years or it's even impossible. And uh, here at Revolut you can be on your first week probation period and eventually you will have the opportunity to present to Nick and be close to the decision making in the company.

Speaker A: I mean it's pretty unique I think, for a, uh, product owner at Revolut because, I mean, it's not just ownership over P and L, but it's also hiring authority. It's commercial accountability. Why? What made Revolut decide that that's the right bet?

Speaker B: It's like babies. So one knows babies better than anyone. The parents. Right. So if the product owners spend their day, uh, driving the product, going to the details, understanding the pain points, et cetera, they are the ones better suited to make decisions so they have the full context. So we empower them, we give full ownership for them to drive the product the way they want and think it's the best for the company. Another thing is we want to remove dependencies. So if we remove dependencies, product owners will be able to make decisions faster. And this way they will basically deliver outcomes better. Uh, and that will drive the business.

Speaker A: I mean, you know that firsthand because you kind of went through this process, going from an operations manager to global head of product. What did Revolut give you that made that possible?

Speaker B: My experience with Revolut actually started before joining the company. So I was traveling in Scotland. I was spending with my local card. And then when I went back home, I, uh, was looking at my account statement, and I noticed that I was paying a lot on FX fees. A lot. So on my next trip to Japan, a friend recommended Revolut and I started using, and the experience was fantastic. And eventually, when I came back home, I even started using Revolut as my primary bank for Day to Day. So I decided to apply for a job, and I got an offer to join as an operations manager. And I didn't know what I, uh, would be doing, but I accepted it immediately. And then on my first day, my line manager, uh, told me, welcome to Revolut. In three weeks, you are going to India alone, and you are going to launch the three FinCrime outsourcing operations that, that we want to have there.

Speaker A: No pressure, three weeks in. Okay.

Speaker B: And, uh, you are going alone? Like, yeah, but I have never worked in fincrime or outsourcing. I was like, don't worry, you'll figure it out. I'm like, okay. So I went there, and I still remember the vendors asking me, oh, so when did you join Revolut? I was like, yeah, three weeks ago. And, um, eventually we managed to launch the operations, and that was critical at the time. We had a huge backlog on fincrime services, and we managed to get it down. But then when I came back, uh, to London, I told my manager, look, this was a great experience, but I want to be close to product and Revolut has a incredible internal mobility policy. So I joined the uh, payments department and uh, after launching my first product I became a technical product owner there. And then after that I joined retail which basically owns all the user facing products. And I work in several different things, cards, payments, analytics, top ups, uh accounts, et cetera. And eventually I became the head of product there. I also work in expansion so launching new countries. We launched Mexico this year for example, also working in trading. And then beginning of this year I became the global head of product overseeing all the products across the company.

Speaker A: And what did it demand from you to get to this point?

Speaker B: So it demanded constant learning because I didn't know anything about product, I had never worked in product before. So all my experience was in Revolut. And then I was forced and I forced myself as well to learn quite fast and uh, to adapt quite fast and eventually all the growth is a consequence of those learnings.

Speaker A: Tell me about these learnings. What was key throughout these years for you?

Speaker B: So complexity is what slows down companies. Um, so it doesn't matter, uh if you have a complex process you are going to be slow delivering. If you have a complex product no one is going to use it. So you really need to focus on complexity and then focus on having simple elegant processes, products et cetera. And that is going to be what drives and scales the product.

Speaker A: Talking about scaling. We've recently became a fully licensed bank in the uk, we're launching in Mexico, we are scoping out the US and India. I mean and you also kind of went to India when you just started, you came back from Colombia. What's the opportunity for someone who might be joining now that wasn't available maybe 12 months ago.

Speaker B: So the opportunity has never been bigger than right now. We are no longer a small startup in London. We have global presence. I was in Colombia three weeks ago as we are about to launch there and the product looks super good by the way. We are also expanding to Peru, Argentina, South Africa, UAE and also applying for a banking license in the us, Australia and New Zealand. And what we want to do is actually quite impressive. So we don't want to launch in this market just to be another player. We want to launch with a ah, full product and be the number one in the market. And by full product I mean full localized products. So we want to launch with local payments integrations, local savings, access to local credit, uh, on loyalty rate breakpoints, have access to local airlines and we want basically to be the number one. And what we are doing in UK and Europe, fixing banking, driving the experience to another level we want to do in all of these countries as well.

Speaker A: It's a tough job I think, uh, since you're obviously part of the hiring process, I mean what do the first 90 days, what would that look like for someone joining as a product owner?

Speaker B: So the first 90 days are intense. I'm not going to lie. It's like joining a football team that is already mid season and you are in preseason. So you need really to get into shape. But eventually what we look for is sense of ownership. Like you join, you understand your product in details, all the pain points, how to drive the roadmap, M move them metrics for me, like the best one, the ones with product owners is they joined, they tell me, Paul, these are the pain points. This is the roadmap to fix it. It's going to be done in this week. Like fantastic. I'm useless on these calls. I love it like they have the full ownership of the product. Then the second thing is adaptation. So the product is changing, the world is changing. Some things you are going to develop are not going to work out. So you need to pivot fast, you need to, you don't need to be stubborn. So you need to learn and adapt and then resilience. So it's like running a marathon. It's going to be a bit painful so you will need to have a lot of energy to finish and cross the line. Also super important is smart decisioning. So you need to make smart decisions in order to drive the product to the best outcome possible.

Speaker A: I mean you mentioned earlier that they also might have an opportunity to sit in front of Nick. I mean the fact that Nick reviews every UI before it goes live is something I think quite unique that maybe a lot of people don't know, but some people think foundry view, they think bottleneck, they think micromanagement. What's the truth behind that? And what about this process makes product owners better?

Speaker B: It's true. Nick still reveals all the designs, the world maps, it tests the product and he does this on a weekly basis. But if you think like product is the core of Revolut, so it makes sense for the CEO to be on top of it and drive it. I strongly disagree when say that the founder mode is a bottleneck. Actually I think it's the opposite. So being on top of things, Nick allows the product owners to have clarity of thinking and clear focus of what they should do. So eventually they deliver faster and with better outcomes. And Nick's mindset is quite simple to understand. So Revolut started with a very simple and elegant product. When we started it was a simple card that you could tap anywhere in the world and you didn't need to wor about the effects phase. Looks very simple. Right. But if you think like all the complexities behind the scenes. So what we Nick did at the time was, okay, I'm going to translate something that is super complex, I'm going to hide it from the users. The product is going to be very simple and behind the scenes we have all the complexity and this is the mindset that we also have in the company right now. And we try to push down to all the product owners M I mean

Speaker A: things have changed a lot since we first launched and I think that now obviously we can't ignore the impact of AI in the product world. We're opening new like AI focused roles in fraud and automation, customer experience. How do you think the product owner role will evolve over the next few years because of AI.

Speaker B: So AI is a tool for product owners? M We have the same business direction. We are not going to change that. But uh, what we thought it was possible only in the next five years. Now we are going to do it way faster, maybe in one year. And we have several examples of it. So starting with customer support, now we are using AI everywhere and we managed to provide the best user experience as well as reducing massively the support cost on our site. And now we are doing the same on FinCrime with fraud, automation and so on. So business direction is the same. We are just going to do it way faster now with AI.

Speaker A: Do you think it'll ever get to a point where AI makes the product owner role obsolete?

Speaker B: Well, I uh, hope not because I still need a job. But uh, product owners are mini CEOs and that's very difficult to replace. So what I think is happening right now is product owners are going or are leveraging AI way more on their day to day. So like things that they are doing every single day, like listening to users feedback on customer support, chats, uh, social media. Now they can leverage AI and do it faster. They can also automate more of the tasks that they were doing, like Sprint planning, product requirements, et cetera. And this will allow them to focus less on this or spend less time and focus more on product thinking which is the core of their day to

Speaker A: day kind of to develop these new simple, elegant solutions.

Speaker B: Exactly, yeah.

Speaker A: If you were to speak directly to these product managers that are in our audience that might feel maybe underutilized or even bored in their current role. What would you tell them about how the kids shake things up?

Speaker B: Have ambition, and, um, really try to understand your product into the details, like all the pain points, what is not working, what the user wants, and be obsessed with, as I mentioned before, like designing the simple solution and elegant solution, and then propose these into your organization. Uh, eventually, like, people will realize that this is the right direction and you will have the opportunity to show the impact in terms of metrics.

Speaker A: How about for you? Is there any advice that you would have given yourself when you were just starting out in your career?

Speaker B: Don't overcomplicate, make things simple, and, um, above all, treat everything as a fake wall.

Speaker A: A fake wall, exactly.

Speaker B: So something you can knock it down and, uh, something that looks impossible at the beginning, something like, okay, I will never solve this, Push for it, go super hard, go into the details, and then eventually you'll be able to find a solution and you'll be super happy with the final outcome.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting, this concept of a fake wall, because I think sometimes we think there's a wall or sometimes like we create it ourselves.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Yeah. So it's interesting about the idea that it is a fake wall, that we can just kind of push it down and overcome it. Yeah. Well, uh, at this point, I want to open up to any audience members who might have a question for Paolo. Yes, I'll take your question here. Okay. So, sorry. The difference between a, uh, product owner and a strategy and operations manager within the team.

Speaker B: So, I mean, as I mentioned, I start as an operations manager, and, uh, a lot of the product owners that we have in the company start as an operations manager. This is a more like generic role. And, uh, something that basically at the end of the day, you are responsible for solving problems. So you can drive and push for the quality of the product, or you can just be simply interviewing users, gather feedback, and et cetera. So product or operations managers are the support of the product owners. And since they are so deep into the details, eventually some of them then turn into product owners.

Speaker A: Great question. Yeah. How does Revolut approach failures?

Speaker B: I mean, we are going to have failures. So the way we operate is you need to iterate super fast. So every time that you launch a product, you need to monitor, you need to see the impact. If it doesn't work, you need to understand why. Once you understand why, you need to come up with a different solution. And then you keep doing this until you start moving the metrics. And if the business outcome achieved and

Speaker A: what if you hear a no from Nick on one of these meetings?

Speaker B: So if you hear a no from Nick and if you truly believe in what you are saying, you need to challenge that. And uh, normally we actually push for that kind of friction in a good way. That you have your opinion, I have my opinion. So now let's decide. Uh, and then at the end of the day you need to be super rational. Once that is clear, you will have your solution defined and you can push for it.

Speaker A: So about founders, do we value founders? How do you encourage them to innovate?

Speaker B: So we have a lot of product owners that were also founders before and here at the company we have a new bets department that uh, basically the goal is to listen to product owners who have ideas and they can go there and pitch their own ideas. If the idea is successful, then they will have a dedicated team. So they will have engineers, operations managers, whatever they, they need and they have a period of like 1, 2 years to prove that the idea works. So we as a company, we really push for new bets coming from either ex founders or people that are just joining.

Speaker A: And we have a new role, a fairly new role called entrepreneur in residence as well. They're kind of driving these products forward, correct?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. How do you bring product owners together to work together in one common product?

Speaker B: So what we do is we do quarterly planning. So every quarter we kind of plan the next one. And then there is like uh, what we call a public presentation where you need to present your roadmap. So this allows for everyone in the company to have visibility of what's going on so you have like full accountability, etc. Um, and then what we do is you are responsible for designing your product and then if you have dependencies, we put everyone in the same room and you work together to basically incorporate those ideas.

Speaker A: How do you balance the high quality with the speed to bring things to market in new expansion territories?

Speaker B: So what we are doing is we now try to treat every product as a platform. So let's take the example of credit or the example of onboarding. And every time that we have a new market, what we do is we go to the platform and we activate that product for that market. And then we identify what needs to be different and what needs to be different. We kind of localize for that market. In short, we are trying to have a platform to have the minimal deviations.

Speaker A: Good question. What's the next big revolution that you see in Fintech?

Speaker B: That one I need to think a bit more. Um, look, eventually Fintech is converging to have less players but with more product offering. So everything that you can think of like a financial product is eventually the direction that we want to go. So we want to have one single app that you can use to do everything related with finance. And I think that's the next big thing that probably Revolut is the best one place to do it.

Speaker A: Uh, kind of this idea of banking and beyond. So what is that beyond? What does that look like exactly? How do you balance risk management within the global strategy?

Speaker B: So what we really focus is like what the user needs. So if we launch in Brazil, the user needs pics. If we launch in Poland, the users need blick. And at the end of the day that's what we care, what are the local needs? And then risk compliance is just a way to achieve that. So if we want to launch pics, we of course need to be compliant, we need to consider risk and we need to have the tools in order to adapt and be able to launch that. And, uh, one thing that actually is very important is we have a big focus on being local. But at the end of the day what we want is the concept of local. So imagine you have pix in Brazil, but why can't me living in the UK have also access to pix? So whenever I go to Brazil on holidays, whatever, I can use pix. And that's actually one of the big things that we want to do. So bring all of these local features at a global scale that everyone can use.

Speaker A: Eventually, uh, do you think AI will replace completely a few roles?

Speaker B: So I don't think it's going to replace fully. It's just going to be a natural evolution that we had in the past with Industrial revolution, et cetera. So what you do is going to change because now you are going to have a tool that is going to change the nature of your job and some roles that were behaving in a certain way, they may need to adapt to AI.

Speaker A: How do we decide which new markets we want to enter?

Speaker B: So we have an entire process for that. So we have a team dedicated at looking at the new markets and we have a scorecard. So we look at demographics, like big population, we also look at competition, we look at local regulation and et cetera. Then basically we have a scorecard. The ones scoring high, we basically prioritize. Then the process after this is to hire a local team. So local CEO, local risk officer, compliance operations, et cetera. And then we start scoping the product with the product teams and then we have Three, four quarters in order to develop the product and getting the license at the same time. And then these things normally actually run in parallel. So you try to get a license, you develop the product and then they converge ideally at the same time. Once you are ready, you start testing the product and then you scale into the market. I'm oversimplifying but overall this is the approach.

Speaker A: Would you say this is like the standard across the industry or do you think it's true that it's a lot faster here?

Speaker B: I don't think it's the standard because there is no standard in the industry. Like we are creating the standard here.

Speaker A: How do you balance commercial impact with user experience?

Speaker B: We truly believe like the best user experience is going to have the best outcome for the company. So we are super obsessed with the user experience. Sometimes we go to a level of detail that can be a bit insane.

Speaker A: What are the priority markets and what are the reasons behind them?

Speaker B: So I mentioned like I went to Colombia, so that's one of the markets, ah, that is coming. India is also coming and then US with the banking license, Australia and New Zealand as well. And then after this Argentina, uh, Peru, South Africa, UAE will follow.

Speaker A: How do you decide what to build yourself or what to buy from another vendor?

Speaker B: That's actually a good question. So at the beginning Revolut didn't have like the scale we have right now. So we were using vendors way more because things were already built, it was way easier to integrate with them and we didn't have the knowledge. So we used actually a lot of vendors uh, before. Now we are moving or we have moved more to like, like try to build everything in house and you only use a vendor like whenever you don't have the knowledge or it's too expensive to build in house. So we are shifting more to build in house. And one of the examples is like our people product, uh, that is something that started in house because there was nothing in the market to meet our needs and eventually it's scale. And now we are selling to other companies as well. And this is just one example of like products that we build more for internal usage that now we are opening the door.

Speaker A: Any learnings from localization in particular markets?

Speaker B: So we started betting heavily on localization like two years ago, uh, starting with Europe and all the markets that we've decided to localize, they are the ones growing uh, the fastest. And uh, one of the things we learned is we take the example of payments, uh, we have our peer to peer proposition but some of the markets people are just used to pay with the local payment methods. Like in Spain, you have Bizum port home, Divanc in Poland and et cetera. And we could try to change that with our peer to peer proposition. But people are so used to it that it's part of like their nature, it's part of their core. And these are like in countries, uh, products built that actually people are super proud, like pigs. So we were like, okay, we will just integrate and then we'll just be part of the network and we actually see like a lot or when I say a lot, like millions of people using these products every day now. So we'll actually learn like, okay, we need to integrate with these local products and it doesn't matter if you want to compete with us or not.

Speaker A: Indirectly, how do you decide if the customer is being overloaded with too many features or products?

Speaker B: It's all about results. So you launch something, you then need to present what were the results of that. If the results were not good, you iterate. You iterate. And if they are still not good, eventually we decide to send set uh those products. Um, this has happened before, it will happen. So it's like just part of the process right now. But what is most important is we don't want to block innovation. So give it a try yourself and then come back with the results. And if there are no results, that's fine, we move to the next one and we sunset that product.

Speaker A: Yeah. How do you know what the customer wants? When you build a new feature or enter a new market, we always start

Speaker B: with a problem like what's the problem that you want to solve? And uh, then it's like, is that the big problem that needs to be solved? If the answer is yes, then you start designing the solution. And then you ask again yourself, is the solution solving the problem that I defined before? And that's it. In simple terms, that's normally what we do. Um, there's something that you really push product owners to have like product sense. So you need to have a very strong intuition that this is a problem that you want to solve. Once that is not clear, what you can also do is you can interview users yourself. You can learn a bit more. You can ask like, okay, what are the pain points that you are facing? And most of the times users don't even know. So you have to realize like, okay, actually he didn't tell me, but I found out like he was having problems like having, I don't know, access to their credit card. So you learn that by seeing how they use the product. And then that's the problem that you need to solve. How to have access to the credit card. And then you focus on the solution, and then you go back to the users and see if they actually managed to have access to their credit card.

Speaker A: Paolo, thank you so much for joining us and explaining, uh, a little bit about what it means to be a product owner here at Revolut and how it kind of relates to being a CEO of your own product or feature. And thank you to everyone who's joined us today. Thank you so much for your questions. We really appreciate it. And for those tuning in, you can check us out and see what we're up to on Instagram, on Revolut Insider, and subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Thank you.