Each team has progress check ins with the CEO each week. You have a very short period of time to convince the CEO that your idea and designs are the best solution. Most of the time, he already has a solution in mind and if your solution does not match with his exactly, you will be publicly called an "idiot" or "stupid" and he will threaten to replace you with "someone who can do this right" without explaining what you did wrong. The CEO does not have time to fully understand the problem and yet he makes every decision for you, down to button colours in your design. This results in suboptimal decision making and then teams release features that customers do not like or use.
There is no customer problem focused decision making. Every decision is made based on how much money we can make as a company. Testing and customer research is actively discouraged and if you run an experiment such as an A/B test, you will be considered “stupid” for not being able to use your own brain to determine the optimal outcome. There is no testing to measure the result of each decision made so it is assumed that each decision made by the CEO was successful.
Product leaders in the company do not have adequate product and leadership experience at other companies prior to joining Revolut. They are promoted from within for being loyal and staying at the company for years. The result is that the product leaders do not know how to create company level roadmaps and do not know how to properly prioritise projects and resources. Each team is only aware of their own priorities and only have a limited idea for how it compares to the company goals. Product owners with limited or no product experience have no one to learn from and cannot grow their skills, especially with consistent crazy deadlines to hit.
Since there are no clear company roadmap and goals, priorities change on a weekly basis. Your own impactful ideas get moved down the backlog and you consistently have 5-10 people asking for different things from you. The "get it done" culture expects you to complete everything immediately. This is obviously impossible. The result is that you prioritise the tasks that belong to people who chase you the most. Other people expect you to drop everything you are working on to work on their problem. If you do not prioritise it, they will include you in slack messages with a senior leader from their team who does not understand your other priorities and will force you to complete their specific task. The chase culture here is intense. It is impossible to actually prioritise the most impactful items your team can work on. Every team becomes an execution team and no one has time or opportunity to come up with their own ideas.
Most people here believe in the product and want Revolut to succeed. The unfortunate reality is that the constant priority shifting, lack of product thinking and threats to replace everyone demoralises all the employees. Most people are not motivated to their best work and people are quitting every week. I understand the frustration that the CEO must be feeling. He expects each team to come up with creative ideas and innovate but each team is so busy with hitting their KPIs that they do not have time to think and do customer research. There are no leaders who are pushing for change since we have realised that questioning the CEO's decisions is not worth losing your job over. As a result, the CEO does not see innovative work from the teams and thinks they are not capable. The team then gets replaced and the whole cycle starts over again.
