Local CEOs and Wow Products: Inside Revolut's Forge for Product Leaders

Lenny Rachitsky opens by explaining why he invited Zlokazov: in his research on which companies produce the strongest product managers, measured by promotions, chief product officer roles, first-PM hires and founders, Revolut sits at the top alongside Palantir and Intercom. Zlokazov introduces Revolut as a challenger to banks in 50 countries that began in London a decade ago as a multi-currency card. It saved Europeans from steep fees and poor exchange rates across roughly 25 currencies, and customers also valued its transparency and simplicity.

The title "product owner" is not a Scrum term here, he says, but an emphasis on ownership. Product owners are end-to-end responsible for a part of the business and for customer happiness, run the team, define the roadmap that moves business metrics and contribute to company strategy. Zlokazov prefers the phrase "local CEO" to mini-CEO.

Teams are fully cross-functional, with engineers, data analysts, designers and operations managers. Everyone has two managers: the product owner is the line manager who decides what the team does, and a functional manager decides how it is built and to what quality level. There are three flavors of owner, UX, technical (often former engineers) and data science, but he says 85 to 90 percent of the job is shared across them.

Zlokazov lists the common traits as strong linear problem solving plus a creative approach to nonlinear problems, customer empathy translated to the team, business acumen and technical depth. In a domain with no obvious answers, he says, owners often sit with engineers and read code to reach the root cause.

His example is opening a local branch of Revolut's European bank in each country, which requires licenses, regulatory reporting and registration with local payment systems. A lean team had to do this across 50 countries, so they launched branches in places such as Ireland and the Netherlands, reverse-engineered the best process, and then formalized an algorithmic one with steps, quality gates and a hiring plan for each new country.

Lenny summarizes the pattern as ownership plus depth and complexity, and Zlokazov adds a third ingredient: an obsession with building products that make users say wow. He also stresses the ability to hold a large context in mind and consider second-order effects from several angles.

Zlokazov says fintech neglects delight, but Revolut pays enormous attention to look, feel and smoothness. Beyond fast, cheap transactions and fewer clicks, the aim is for people to feel the company loves its customers. Employees build a habit of attending to small nuances.

Operationally, small lean teams own products from zero, the hierarchy is flat, and the founders, Nik and Vlad, stay hands-on. Every week each team presents its increment to the CEO and CTO and gets steering, and the founders review a hundred percent of the screens shipped. There are now roughly 150 to 170 product owners, and he says this scrutiny scales rather than limits innovation.

Customer contact is easy because the base exceeds 50 million people and employees are themselves power users who receive their salary in the app. Problems surface fast, and the company built tools that give product owners and designers quick access to user panels for interviews, surveys and design tests. Zlokazov insists on direct contact, since delegating research gives you a filtered version that loses nuance and emotion.

Product owners usually come from product roles, but Zlokazov says experience matters less than the hunger to build things and raw intellect. A substantial share are internal transfers, often operations managers or engineers, who arrive with a guaranteed culture match and domain knowledge.

He explains his skepticism of veteran hires from his own 400 to 500 interviews. Product ramp-up is already long, experienced people can take longer to adapt or rest on their laurels, expectations and compensation are high, and many lack the urge to change the status quo, which takes "toil, tears and sweat". Candidates who built things in their own startup, and especially tech co-founders, thrive by tackling one concrete customer pain after another.

Lenny notes that hiring earlier-career talent explains why alumni get promoted so fast elsewhere. For sourcing, Revolut's recruiters work in sprints, targeting companies behind apps the team loves and sometimes particular schools. Lenny relates this to advice about looking at which function drives a company's success, such as sales at one firm and design at another.

Zlokazov leads the product function and also retail, with 50 to maybe 100 projects running at once. Rather than spend the week catching up on statuses, he picks the 7 to 10 most impactful for customers and digs in at code level with engineers. He says this contrarian choice works because teams hear what is being scrutinized, which signals company priorities.

It also builds discipline, because teams not being reviewed know they could be next if their quality slips. Ambitious people want to prove they can deliver, so they operate autonomously, and when he dives in he usually finds things are fine. Lenny contrasts this with Brian Chesky's approach of cutting the number of things Airbnb does, but Zlokazov says Revolut will never cut down because the appetite for growth is too high.

Founders keep people accountable without micromanaging, he says, and the ideal owner is fully autonomous and able to explain the logic of their roadmap, earning a credit of trust even before metrics move. Weekly reviews are a last line of control. Combined with heavy investment in platforms so nothing is custom, this lets a credit team of about 300 people launch new loans or credit cards in a country every month, work he says takes 2,000 to 3,000 people at an incumbent bank for a single country.

Lenny reads out the product list: credit and debit cards, savings, multi-currency and joint accounts, accounts for minors, transfers, trading, crypto and loans. Zlokazov adds that trading includes ETFs and bonds, crypto includes staking and on- and off-ramps, and the company also has acquiring, buy now pay later and mortgages, with the first mortgages launched recently in Albania. All of it spans around 50 jurisdictions with different rules.

Lenny connects this to Paul Graham's idea of schlep blindness, where big opportunities hide in hard, painful problems. Zlokazov says the market is large and incumbents inefficient. Revolut has grown from slightly over 20 million customers when he joined to 50 million, and he expects to reach 100 million, with additional upside from customers moving salary and savings into the app.

He also notes that the company is hiring heavily, with a few hundred open roles, including product owners.

Revolut has launched products banks rarely build, such as crypto, hotel booking and a loyalty program called Rev Points that rewards card spend in Europe. To reproduce those wins it built a "new bets" framework. Anyone can pitch an idea if they show a real market, a business case and a reason Revolut can beat competitors, and bureaucracy is minimal because founders are hands-on.

A small lean team builds a first version quickly for a narrow user base, polishes it, and scales only after metrics and retention look good, at which point the 50 million customer base can multiply traction. Joint accounts are an example, now with over a million active users. Zlokazov argues that forcing a polished product removes a key uncertainty: if a scrappy version flops, you cannot tell whether the idea or the execution was at fault.

He describes the layers with a savings account. Table stakes are a competitive rate, instant withdrawals and daily interest with no penalty. Delighters include savings in many currencies, such as Swedish krona or Brazilian real, and the cherry on top is smooth design with custom wallpapers, goals and spare-change automation. Lenny notes that many launches are features users already want, so integration with everything else is part of the advantage.

Summing up, Lenny lists what Revolut gives its owners: ownership, depth, a high bar for lovable products and proximity to detail-obsessed leaders. Zlokazov adds two aspects of depth, technical understanding and customer empathy, and a third, regulatory compliance. He says owners must unblock their teams, sometimes by steamrolling approvals, getting stakeholders to consensus and automating what they can, even with AI models.

On hiring, his most important trait is a hands-on, execution-focused mindset. Great owners do not see themselves as managers who hand out tasks and wait. They do the important things themselves, and they know that a feature isn't done until, for example, customer care, sales and marketing use it to the full extent, or it is just another useless feature.

Zlokazov also tells his own story: he moved to the UK for Revolut with no prior fintech experience. The fresh perspective helped him spot unintuitive parts of the app and push the team to fix them. In the failure corner, he recounts a cinema-ticket startup from around 2010 that built stainless-steel scanners and sent QR codes inside SMS but ran out of money before customers adopted online tickets, teaching him to stay lean and validate before scaling.

Zlokazov's closing advice is that if you are excited to build, do not hesitate. A startup of your own gives the steepest learning curve, and if you join a company, choose the one with the highest entrepreneurial spirit that lets you operate as close to a founder as possible. Lenny says this is a recurring theme among companies that produce fast-rising PMs.

In the lightning round, he recommends Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things and Tony Fadell's Build, and says he sees himself as a builder. His recent favorite movie is Oppenheimer, and he loves the AI agent Manus, with which he vibe-coded a small app that emails him a rare English word daily. His motto is the Eisenhower line "plans are worthless, but planning is everything".

His most underrated Revolut feature is wealth protection: in settings you can cap transfers out of Revolut, and anything above the cap requires a video selfie check that he says is almost as smooth as Face ID. He asks listeners to reach him on LinkedIn with product feedback or referrals for strong candidates.