☄️ Revolut's "True Ownership" Playbook

50 countries.

A $45B valuation.

10,000 employees.

Yet Revolut ships faster than most 10-person startups.

They have built systems to instill extreme ownership within every team at the company.

Here's exactly how they do it.

Local “CEO” Model

Traditionally, PMs influence decisions through meetings and presentations.

Revolut hires product owners who have genuine hiring and firing authority over their cross-functional teams.

They’re true local CEOs because they have:

• Authority to hire/fire

• Budget control without approval layers

• Direct P&L responsibility

• Engineers and designers reporting to them rather than functional heads

Each of their 150 product owners runs their product like a mini-company.

The 99% Rule

At Revolut, a product at 99% completion is closer to 0% than 100%.

This is an extreme, but valuable, example of Pareto’s principle. The final 1% is usually where the highest output work exists.

That final 1% includes customer acquisition, sales enablement, and market-specific adaptations. It’s what moves revenue and is the difference between shipping and succeeding.

Product managers celebrate when a feature is shipped. Revolut’s product owners see it through to real business results.

Startup hiring, at scale

Revolut values an "unquenched hunger to build things" and raw intellectual horsepower over industry experience.

They screen for proof-of-building over credentialism:

• Side projects or businesses they've built

• Comfort with ambiguity and starting from zero

• Excitement about P&L ownership, not fear of it

The interview question that matters**:** "show me something you built end-to-end with no support."

It’s rare to see that for a company as big as Revolut. But the truth is that builders have examples while everyone else makes excuses.

Other Models

There’s a lot to learn from Revolut’s product owner model, but they aren’t the only company that’s found a way to ship quickly despite scaling up. Here are two more:

Posthog’s Small Teams

Posthog sticks to 2-6 person teams that each own an area of the product/company.

They run completely autonomously like their own startup.

Each of them has a Team Lead responsible for its performance. And each one must have a defined customer (internal or external) they’re building for.

This limits bureaucracy since teams decide their own roadmap, hiring, and technical choices. The result is a product competing with Google Analytics with 1/100th the headcount.

Linear’s No-PM Model

PM duties at Linear are distributed across engineering and design.

Engineers own customer relationships, prioritization, and business metrics.

Designers own the user experience end-to-end.

No coordinators needed.

This approach has helped Linear remain profitable, grow rapidly, and build one of the most beloved products in B2B software.

Bottom Line

150+ mini-CEOs at Revolut each driving their own P&L beats larger orgs with 1,500 product managers writing PRDs.

This works because it:

• Gives real authority (hiring, firing, budget)

• Demands real accountability (P&L, not features)

• Builds platform leverage (scale without chaos)

• Hires high-output builders who want to own outcomes

Stop coordinating. Start owning.

Until next week,

David Lobo

Head of Growth, Workmate

P.S. Which part of the ownership model would be hardest to implement at your company? Reply and let me know—I read every response.

P.P.S. Want to experience true ownership in action? Workmate is an AI Executive Assistant that owns your scheduling end-to-end. No back-and-forth, just results. Join the waitlist.