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.
