Dmitry Zlokazov: evaluation

Transcript context

…That makes sense. Gokul had this really good piece of advice, I think it was on the podcast, if not he tweeted about it, where you look at there's successful companies, but then there's also what function in that company is the key to their success. And so you want to go like a company A for sales, company B for customer support, company C for design. And so it sounds like that's kind of the way you guys think about it a little bit. Yeah, very cool. Okay. I love how we're uncovering and we're uncovering this mystery. This entire episode is brought to you by Stripe. Every single one of the Forbes top 50 AI companies that has a product in the market today uses Stripe to monetize it. $1.4 trillion flows through Stripe annually, which is equivalent to over 1% of the entire global GDP. And Stripe isn't just a payments platform. They also have a product called Stripe Billing, which powers billing for companies that you may have heard of, OpenAI, Anthropic, Figma, Atlassian, and over 300,000 other companies. Stripe Billing lets you bill and manage customers no matter your pricing model from simple recurring billing to usage-based billing to sales negotiated contracts. Collect and retain more revenue, automate revenue management workflows, and accept payments globally. Use Stripe to handle all of your payment related needs, including billing, revenue operations, checkout flows, or simply launching or inventing new business models. Learn all the ways that Stripe can grow revenue for your business at stripe.com. Let me go in a different direction and see if there's more to learn here. When it comes to running your teams, is there something that is kind of fairly contrarian in how you approach running the product team that is maybe not how other companies operate that you think is key to your success? I've changed in how I operate after I joined Revolut probably because Revolut is a founder-led company and probably it's because it's self-led, and also because my role is quite spread across many things. So my role at Revolut is leading product function across company, but also leading retail, which is a core part of Revolut business. And 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, 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 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 how we did differently at Revolut is to go very deep into details. 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 and understanding, okay, how it's built exactly and what's the underlying issue. And you could think that, okay, but what about others? Let's say 50 or 60 items 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, there are formal and informal ways of communicating through meetups or just 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 on 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, 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, 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 thrive 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 next great company. As a result, they do everything to operate autonomously. And when you start diving deep into details, you see that everything is fine, you see their 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 as of focus. Okay. So what I'm hearing is you said there's 50 to 60 things kind of projects being built at once.…

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