Never work at Revolut - Product Owner Revolut Employee Review

1.0
9 June 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Compensation is pretty in the market

Cons

To be honest, it's the worst company I've ever worked for. Never work here, you will have only regrets and stress. Company and founders don't understand product, technology and good culture at all. You won't be doing product. It's digital transformation company: - 100% top-down company, all design, roadmap, etc. decisions are made by Nikolay Storonsky. You will be only in charge of execution/project management. He is reviewing every new screen and epic every week with every team (Revolut has 50+ teams). All middle managers are just proxies, no decisions, no their own opinions and easily blow you in back. - Not product way of thinking at all, in a year I haven't seen any team made user research and A/B test. All development is done in an absolutely blind way, guided by the supervision of Nikolay. Moreover, all these instruments are prohibited and replace with "thinking deeper" value that means just sit and think a lot. Nikolay personally hates these methods and several times told me that it's for idiots. - The short-sighted, company mostly focused on small improvements that can be done in 1-2 week otherwise it's too much risk and should be cancelled. - Every two weeks you will have a review with your functional manager who will be checking Jira epics and Figmas to verify that you have enough words there, structure, etc. (no one really cares for product stuff) - Did you say strategy? These guys don't have any understanding of their client, such as personas, segments, key pain points, etc. - Never ever question Nik's opinions and decisions! He is always right, otherwise, you are fired immediately. Stronger together!!! That's super sad because there are so many good and shiny managers fooled and hired from cool companies that struggling with topics above and leaving. During interviews, people and recruiters will tell you and even test you on the product skills above but it will last time you will ever use it. From technology and quality perspective company is messy as well: - There are no QA engineers and that's could be ok if you have autotests but Revolut mostly doesn't have it. They do have it only for backend and no one care for web and apps. All QA work is on PO shoulders. Yes yes yes, you will be doing here QA and project management but not product work. And as you can imagine PO doesn't have time and nobody QA it at all. - CTO, Vlad is really obsessed about reviews, reports and can't handle any feedback, the same as Nikolay. Every two weeks you would be measured against 10-15 parameters (most of them are really stupid) and you can't question any decision and situation (such people usually immediately fired). All of this lead to fear of punishment, making mistake - developers producing a lot of small crappy improvements to minimise their risk. - Most of the codebase written in rush by students, so it's really buggy and re-inventing existing technologies and frameworks messily. As you can understand, it isn't a modern stack and very hard learning curve. Based on the information above it's pretty clear that you won't be trusted and company culture is very toxic. They call it A-players or champions. We should hire and retain only them. In practice, Revolut fires everyone who is average or below it - you should be excellent. Last mid review we were told that we doing just feedback sessions. All this information was used to fire people immediately, even with average feedback. Most of the senior managers are just kids, doing that they were told. It's their first job, their working here for 2-3 years and haven't ever seen how good job should look like. So, you will have a fun time.

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Revolut Response
5y
Thank you for your review, we’d like to address some of the points you’ve raised. There are channels for you to escalate some of your complaints, and we’d urge you to speak to management so that they can address some of your concerns, especially around ways of working. However, we do have robust A/B systems in place as well as research, and these are personalised according to each Product Owner’s approach. We’d ask that you to escalate this and ensure you’re getting the help you need to put these in place. Your functional manager is the expert in your field who should help you to develop your skills further. We’re sorry to hear that you don’t feel that you’re getting the support you need in your regular meetings. We’d ask that you speak to HR or your line manager if you feel that you’re not getting the support you need. We’re also working on various ways to improve feedback in performance reviews, announced recently in our town hall. Revolut’s performance review process includes time for informal and formal check ins on performance. Where people have been let go after a performance review, this follows formal review and discussion of their performance and where the company believes that the employee has not achieved the expected performance. We take any claims of unfair dismissal really seriously, and dispute that someone would be let go on the grounds of disagreeing with anyone. We do recognise that we’re a relatively new company, and we still have some growing to do in terms of culture and management. Please know that your feedback on this matter is being taken into account and will be sent on. Lastly, we’re proud of our leadership and their drive and determination to build a financial superApp that makes life easier for all our customers. Maybe, as in other startups, our enthusiasm sometimes runs away with us - so we’ll take your comments on board. Thank you.

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Pros

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Cons

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Pros

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