BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we are going to talk about agile. And scrum that's right. This is the sixth part, the sixth instalment of my favorite tools for making better products. And today. The specific tool we're going to get into is this sprint plan.

And this is at the cornerstone of doing agile, scrum work, working in an agile way. And  the sprint plan is like the go-to place.  If you want to work in an agile way, it really starts with a sprint plan. And I'm going to explain what this is. It's a fundamental tool  for you to work in a really. New way it's pretty simple and straightforward and what I would propose to you, it's how [00:01:00] we can  you know, get our agile projects being  closer to deadline.

It's how we can be on time. But more importantly, my experience has been that I made a lot of executives who understand agile at a very kind of top level.  Maybe just some of the principles and so forth. However, what is fascinating to me is how once you get into all right, well, let's do agile. There's a number of things that  I see.

Real confusion around or people just haven't had the chance to really dig in. I can tell you I've been digging in to working in an agile way for, for quite a quite a while. And the spring plan is something that I'm really delighted to share with you today. So we're going to get right into it. Now I'm going to do a little bit of laying down some foundation here.

I'll do it super quick. And then we're gonna get [00:02:00] to this sprint plan. First of all, we need to get this underlying idea of agile re super-clear agile itself. Agile software development itself is a set of principles.  All guided to helping a product team be incredibly productive and work fast.  I often say it's the nimble  and much more iterative alternative to working in the traditional waterfall way, which was how we worked in software maybe 20 years ago.

Now the problem with that.  Is that it's new? The problem with agile is there's lots of different flavors. So that's why I want to kind of cut to the core of it. Get to the sprint plan, get to defining some of the flavors of agile. Now this is an, a really important build. So agile is a set of principles.

There is then a lot of different methodologies [00:03:00] and practices that come out of those principles. So the power. Of agile is that I think why it will be around for so long. Is there, there are these fundamental, almost like first principal  kind of notions that support this idea of agile and. Then you get, you know, it's commonly considered there's about 40 different  versions of agile.

And probably now that I've said this 40 there's probably 41 or 42. So  there's a set of values and principles that underline agile.  It's all about  Focusing on bringing people together and the quality of the individuals interacting.  It really prioritizes work our working product overall, the comprehensive documentation.

Whereas, you know, waterfall was all about a very strict process well-documented but often the product [00:04:00] sucked, the software didn't work well. So that's why agile came about. So those are some of the values of the principles.  You know, There's a lot of them.  I would say it's, there's a lot of thinking around sustainability  empowerment of small teams  taking big challenges, putting them into a small component parts that there's a lot there, a lot of good stuff that kind of sets you up for the different flavors.

That I was talking about. So you've got many different  flavors you could argue. Lean startup is a flavor of agile then.  There's a lot of the Japanese inspired flavors  continuous  just in time delivery, that kind of thing, Macado method, or you could string right across to like decentralized management and governance.

You've got like Holacracy.  You might've heard of that  beyond budgeting  begin with the end in mind, some of those [00:05:00] practices, but the one I'm going to focus on is scrum. Scrum is by far the biggest and most popular version method  of agile software development. You've seen companies like Atlassian who produced JIRA and confluence, you know?

Right. They're like it's a big nod towards the world of agile. Okay. So we've established number one, agile methodology is, you know, agile at its highest form it's principles and values. There's many different flavors that bring it to life. That's the stuff we do. And in terms of doing stuff, we're going to talk about a flavor of agile called scrum.

Scrum  is very different to  canvas. In one essential way. So Kanban's also a very, very popular  way of doing agile. The difference with scrum is it's time-bound so it really respects timelines. [00:06:00] This in some respects creates a tension, but I think it deals with that tension quite well. So I'm going to explain what your sprint plan should look like.

Some of the key parts of it. We're gonna describe some of the pieces.  Some of the, the key tools and practices and hope fully, what I can do for those of you who are a bit newer to agile, I can introduce you into the practical, real, tangible things that you'll actually do do with agile and scrum. And for those of you who are trained, tried and true, hopefully I'm giving you a little reminder, a little update  just to get you back into some of those foundational lines.

Okay. Sprint plan for agile scrum way of working. Now, the first construct is the sprint itself. Traditionally, I'm a big fan of two weeks sprints. So [00:07:00] in cross those two weeks, you will plan do and review the work. And then you'll start a new sprint after that I've traditionally found that most good first-generation products are a good six to 10 sprints.

And the big part of that to recognize is that it takes a team some time to. Storm and norm  and come together and get productive. So I, you know, big Baton I see at work is that the second half of  of a project. So if it was five sprints to start and five additional ones to getting us to 10, the second five are way more productive than the first five.

 So if you understand that that's natural, then you can be a bit more patient at the beginning. As people kind of come together and take ownership for, for their, for their work. Okay. So the sprint it's traditionally, it's two weeks. Some people do for  I [00:08:00] love a good two weeks sprint. You're going to expect five to 10 of these  particularly for a first-generation  project or product.

And there's nothing to say that you couldn't stay  keep working in sprints after your product goes live. In fact, I'd highly recommended. We do it at quality once all the time. And I find this idea of, to experience is just a really good way. Not only to organize your product, but it's a pretty damn good way to organize.

An organization. So more and more, I find myself trying to design more parts of our organization to get like our 250 people working on a, on a structured sprint basis, whether they're building product or whether they're in. Strategy where they're in the finance support, HR. It doesn't really matter if we can kind of create that rhythm.

I think it's kind of a nice  integrated way of working and it feels very responsive to the changing demands of business. [00:09:00] Okay. So what's inside of your, your two w...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. And I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. We are continuing to dive into my favorite frameworks and tools for product strategy and product design. And today we're talking about the user journey and at the heart of design thinking. Is the user journey. It's a challenging tool because it really is a forcing factor.

It makes you empathize with your user and it's not just at the start of their journey, but right through the middle and the end too. And this user journey is an essential tool for any designer, developer and entrepreneur. And the reason why it's so essential is after years and years of designing products and working on so many different projects, it is amazing to me how important literally projects I'm working on right now that often the key question [00:01:00] is what does the real end to end the aid is out of the user journey.

Look like, how does it start? How do we keep it going? And how do we wrap it up with a bow on the top? So this user journey is essential to understand, and the tool of creating a user journey is a true art form and it looks real neat.  But you know, there's a lot of work that goes into a good user journey.

And I think if you can make a great user journey. I mean, it's so powerful because it'll give you millions of ideas for what should be inside of your product. Inside of your product inside of your business, but it also gives you the chance to look at the full scope of what you need to bill. And it kind of comes at it totally from the user's point of view.

So it also is really making sure that you're in touch, how your user thinks, how they [00:02:00] feel and how they behave. So let's dive in to use a journalist. If you're interested in more about user journeys and design thinking, head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a free master class on design thinking and user journeys, dig into that.

It's all free and you'll get not only a lots on user journey, but way, way more too. So when we think about a user journey, I want you to imagine. A line that runs from the left to the right-hand side of your screen. It's like a align with an arrow at the end. And what we do is we mark at the start middle and end of that different moments that make up the user's journey.

This is  not just, oh, they're inside the app. And then they start doing this. What's interesting about a user journey is it really should start from the very, very first moment  of the journey when they think to themselves, huh? [00:03:00] I need a solution to this problem. Why should I go now? That is where you start and where you end is how they talk about it.

And share your product with others after a great experience. So that is the real scope of it. And sometimes those start to create loops and continuums of consistent return usage, which is really cool. But let's look at this as a linear process. Let's make it really simple. Let's start at a, and we're going to finish it Z, but what I really want to stress is it to really comprehend.

So you should be starting at that moment, which we might call awareness. So I will give some general best practice categories for each of the steps in a user journey. The one I'm going to give you is  like a path to purchase. Paths to [00:04:00] subscription, perhaps.  Obviously if it's an existing user  they already are aware of you, but let's pretend this customer doesn't even know us.

So it really does start with awareness. And so what this might bring up for you as a product, let's say you're a SAS service software as a, as a service, you have a website and you know, if people are thinking, how do I solve  Getting my car serviced. Okay. Let's say that's their problem. And they're thinking about ways to get their car service.

Well, then the first thing they're going to do is either ask a friend or they're going to ask Google, which would lead you to think about, okay, what is the awareness of my service? When people go to do that, have they given people a reason to talk about me? Do I show up? On the right search queries inside of Google.

So this is really an awareness thing sometimes  for bigger brands in highly competitive markets, like their [00:05:00] general baseline of unaided awareness requires them to be pumping out a lot of messages to remain what we call top of mind.  That's sort of. The world of big brands, but in this case, let's, let's focus on folks hit Google.

Do you show up? So let's say they come in through a blog post  through your website that was listed well on Google because you optimize it for SEO and then they get some great content on your website. Now what's key. Here is the content  is what they came for, but they might. Come for the content, but they might take some other things.

Maybe there's a free consultation. Maybe there is a download. Those things might have a reason to return to the website. In that point were really starting to shift from awareness into this very active form of consideration. Maybe you as a user in this journey, you're starting to create like a [00:06:00] shortlist of three different options for servicing.

Yeah. Now there'll be some really important things here at this moment of truth. As we transition from consideration into purchase  this is really, really important. So you've had the awareness, you've got them to your site for the first time you've introduced yourself. You've built the trust with the content you've made the barrier to the first transaction.

Very low boom in they come. Purchasing or at least some form of transaction registration, so on and so forth, then it really becomes  okay, you're now becoming maybe you're in a trial or maybe you've even booked your car for a service. So then it's all about all those magic touch points that you want your user to.

To map the confirmation. Oh, that's great. Yeah. They've confirmed me. They even confirmed via text, which is great, which makes me super confident. They sent me a reminder the day before they sent me the address. So I can just click it in Google maps. For example, these are all things that you want to capture in your user [00:07:00] journey and where you can start to see here is we've gone from awareness into consideration and you have to do that work to build the trust.

Then maybe they need to look at three articles before they moved towards purchase. So the user journey starts with awareness, goes into consideration and this path to purchase. This is the really essential bit. It's what we often call the moment of truth. This is where they buy something from you. And it's really critical.

This is really an emotional thing to making them feel confident, being super fast and transparent are all the characteristics of a great product experience. Okay, so you purchase your product.  Obviously knowing when you can take hold of your product or your, of your take out of your product or your service  sometimes it's instant or done online.

If you've got to take your car in for service, that's all part of it too, making that experience while you wait. Great. The delivery, the big moment that  the reveal, the big reveal of Wila  This [00:08:00] is also a great moment that you can map on your user journeys, but also for other sorts of experiences, like let's say I'm    I've bought a subscription to a service, an online service  maybe there's a community forum or an FAQ knowledge base where people share experiences.

...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast and Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're continuing. Our series on my favorite frameworks, my favorite tools for creating new products. And actually I have to say this one's all about rapid prototyping in this framework is actually by me.

Now I am a huge fan of rapid prototyping. It's so good in those early moments of creating something new, it can be so insightful to actually yeah. Create a prototype test that we'd use as get some very early stage feedback, so helpful. And this is kind of an emerging process and there's actually not a lot  on rapid prototyping.

In fact, the guy that taught me to actually do rapid prototyping is Tom cheek. And he's like a guru, but outside of. Tom's work. There's [00:01:00] not a lot of documentation on how to do rapid prototyping and how to innovate through this process of rapid prototyping. So today I thought like let's add a little bit more into the universe about rapid prototyping, and we're going to dive into this five-step guide that I have for when you actually are prototyping.

And this framework is so powerful because I often find that people. Get super lost when they're prototyping.  So I tried to create a little bit of a guide so that you can get the most out of what can be such a powerful process. So before we dive into this, a five step plan that I have, let's set the scene, let's define rapid prototyping, kind of get it into our minds a little bit.

And then we can look at this tool. So rapid prototyping is an amazingly good way to test and validate. Yeah. Idea a notion. It could be a product, a service, a business is a great way [00:02:00] to test it before you actually have to build it. And that's the big aha. Here. You don't have to build an entire product before you test.

You can test from day one and it's particularly good way to learn. That's using rapid prototyping. That is, it's a really good way to learn. And I would say the kind of foundation of rapid prototyping is to solve a problem that your user has. And it becomes a very clear almost binary black and white perspective.

You know, where are we able to relieve the pain for the user create gains for the user super clear it's sort of did we, or didn't we. You can argue a little bit in the middle there, but does the product, does the service get the job done? And here's the key thing I want to come back to. Rapid prototyping enables you to get really good feedback, really high quality, because you're not guessing.

You're not saying to people, Hey, I want you to imagine that you're using [00:03:00] a particular product or service. You go right to the moment. Say here's a product, here's a task. I want you to complete and see if they can get it. It's quick and it's easy. It's super straight forward. Now the, the art to rapid prototyping is making it feel like it's kind of close to a finished product, but it's actually not to put it in software terms.

How can you get good software feedback without writing code? That's like a really good way to think about it because as soon as you have to write code for it, As soon as you think about an analog product, as soon as you have to actually get the materials, get all the engineering, the bill of materials together.

Like once you have to get it all together, it starts to become slow, a lot of effort, time, money, resources. So here's the thing you only want to deploy time and resources into a software or an analog product. If you know, it's worth building. [00:04:00] And how do you know if it's in the earlier days? Like you're only guessing, right.

So how do we get out of this guessing how do we get into knowing? And that is by creating an experience that feels like it's sort of a model, a prototype  an example of a product and how it might work. And what you want to do is you want to test it super early on and actually. If you're bold enough, you should test all the time with your users because that means you'll be learning.

And the more you learn, the more you understand your users, it's like, it's like magnetism. You just can't help, but going towards the right path. And too often, people sit there and guess a product deploy all these resources only to work out. It kind of sucks. Nobody likes it. Well, you don't have to do it like that.

You can just prototype your way to a great product. And sometimes in fact, [00:05:00] all of the time you'll have to change your idea, but you're not changing because you feel like you're changing because you're learning something from your users. You're getting this feedback, you're getting this data, you're getting them to truly test something.

Complete a task and Hey, maybe they complete the task and you realize there's more tasks in the overall user journey. Great tests. Those maybe you realize you're trying to solve the wrong problem. Also. Good. I mean, think about it. If you realize your product is not right, which is guaranteed by the way, it's going to happen.

Wouldn't you rather work it out when it's just a lightweight prototype. Rather than like the full finished thing. I mean, think about the pain suffering of a year or two years of work to build a project only to realize, well, ain't nobody liking that we don't want to be there so we can use rapid prototyping to create these light models.

[00:06:00] And here's the critical thing. You must test it with users. Don't go guessing don't go guessing. Don't assume people will want it. You need to know that they want. Okay. Now, before we get to this five step plan, then I'm going to give you for rapid prototyping. I want to set the scene. I want you to imagine you've said yes to rapid prototyping and yes.

To doing it with your real users. Okay. Not just family and friends, but come on, let's get the real users, people who might pay for this product. Okay. So you've got them, you've got the users in a room. You got a cool bunch of smart people who want to build something. Really good. We're in a good place right now.

So what do we need to do? I'm going to take you through each of these five steps, and now if you're interested in them, you can head over to bottom-up dot IO, where we have a full master class  on rapid prototyping. We will even have this very five-step plan in that masterclass. It's all yours. You can [00:07:00] download it, use it, go for it.

So what I want you to imagine right now is you're in the room and you're like, okay. Wow. What happens now, we're a bunch of makers and creators, and we're a bunch of customers. What are we going to do? Well, you sit your customers over to the side. And as a group, you need to start by understanding what. Is the real pains that your customers experience when trying to get a particular job done that job might be to study effectively.

It could be to save money while shopping. These are all jobs that people are trying to get done and they experienced pains and gains along the way. And new products and services offered. Relieve pains and create new gains. And so what you need to find out is, Hey customer, what's on your mind. What are the pains that you're experiencing with a [00:08:00] particular job that you're trying to get done?

Now what's essential here is to make sure. That you actually go to your customer to understand their pains. You do not guess them now in a perfect world. If you're doing a rapid prototyping session, you may have done some pre-research before that day in order to understand the customer. However, that's...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are now in our second installment of this series where I highlight. My favorite product strategy tools. And this one we're going to use the full marketing funnel sometimes called the growth marketing funnel.

 It has all sorts of nicknames, but you get the gist is all about the marketing funnel done completely a to Z. Now, the reason that this matters so much is that traditional marketing is often obsessed with just the very top of the funnel, you know, sort of customer acquisition. So. The key thing that traditional marketing is all about is reach and frequency, blasting the message to as many people as many times as possible.

However, what we've seen the emergence of is a fully integrated  entire funnel approach, which has been really brought by this [00:01:00] kind of movement around growth hacking growth marketing. And what it does is it follows the whole user journey. Completely. And what it does is it focuses on the conversion between the steps.

So not only are you looking big picture, very broad, but then you also go deep, which is what's so great about for marketing funnel. As a tool is you get really into the nitty-gritty of conversion optimization, testing and validation. So. The reason this growth marketing funnel matters so much, is it really helps you go way beyond traditional marketing to ensure that marketing is contributing to a healthy business.

It really dives in and tackles. The question of is it cost effective the way we're acquiring customers right through to the viral coefficient. That is how many [00:02:00] times your existing customers. Refer to new customers. How many times they share the experience and become your greatest advocates. So what at the heart of this is going to happen at the very heart of a growth marketing funnel will mean that marketing people not only get the customers in the door, but they can make a dramatic contribution to the very product.

Itself. And I think this is enormously powerful because let's be honest, the marketing people and the product people haven't traditionally hung out  throughout the entire industrial age, it tends to be marketing, build the product and they knock on the marketing door and said, Hey, you better go launch this quickly.

Go find me a customer for this problem. This solution. So what I want you to do imagine that this growth marketing funnel really steps up the game for them marketing. This is how marketing can really contribute way beyond customers and [00:03:00] actually really be a central hub of a thriving product, service or business.

Okay. I've set the bar pretty high haven't I, well, let's go through the six main parts of the funnel, and then let's look at this as sort of the thinking behind each. So  the funnel starts with three A's and ends with three R's. This is when you put it all together, it sounds like are. And that's why it is sometimes called pirate metrics, which was a name famously given by David McCullough.

Let's have a look at these three A's and then these three RS at the very top of the funnel is awareness. How many people recall no are familiar with your name and brand, then there's acquisition. That's actually having some meaningful, inter direct interaction with them. Then you need to activate them, which is all about getting them activated in the door of your store.

Trialing [00:04:00] testing. Experiencing some product or service. And then there's a question of revenue and retention, pretty self-explanatory. And one of the key ones, one of the most neglected ones is referral. How often they go out into the world and say, you must try this product. Okay. So awareness acquisition activation, top half of the retention revenue referral, bottom half of the funnel, we're in a good place.

Okay. Let's look at it. Questions that fundamentally get to the essence of each of these. This is the question that leads to the source of improving your conversion rate. So again, what is the fundamental question here? How many people do we reach? Are we getting just is the top of the funnel wide enough?

How many people know us? How many times did we show up when we're indexed on Google, against our given practice? Yes. Acquisition. How many people actually let's use a website as an example? How many people actually come to [00:05:00] our website? So if it gives zillion, people know about us, but our website traffic's really low.

We got some improvement. In acquisition to do. There you go. That's the model starting to work here. Let's go to activation. How many people take the first important step in the relationship with us?  Providing an email address right through to a trial or a money back guarantee, starter package, whatever it is now, if you're hugely famous, getting a ton of people to the website, but very few people are activating.

There becomes your focus, elegantly simple, super clear, and really a great way to ask yourself, are we maximizing our opportunity? Then we kind of shift into the thinking the three R's about, are we taking full advantage of the customers that we're acquiring and the customers that we're activating. So, first of [00:06:00] all, it's like how many people are using our product as second or third time?

I mean, this is a key and a lot of startups might do a great job at that top of that funnel. A lot of enterprises could be the same here, but actually very few actually become very active, ongoing customers. You know, that you look at the classic  example of this is  you work really hard to get people to download your native mobile app from let's say the iOS app store.

You use it once. And then within a couple of months, it hasn't been using gets deleted. This is a very common paradigm in actually the native app universe that after 30 days, app usage decline  to essentially a dozen or so key apps. And beyond that, people are not using very much at all. So are you retaining your customers?

Are they staying active then? There's the big Chestnut. How many people stopped paying and how much did they pay? [00:07:00] There's all sorts of great acronyms items you can use here.  Cost per customer revenue per customer revenue per user. I mean, it there's a lot here. Key thing here is you could have a lot of customers using the free version of your product, but you're actually getting very few into revenue or you might have people locked in revenue, but the revenue is not growing.

 As a, as a gross amount. If you look at on a per individual amount, you might. Have delivered one valuable feature product or service to a customer, but it may have, let's say is 10  10 euros a month, but maybe it's been 10 years a month for weeks, months, maybe years. That's the point that you say, Hey, do we need to like, you know, increase our revenue per user?

Do we need to like, Try getting them to upsell, cross sell. And lastly, [00:08:00] this is the final ask. So the other two eyes retention and revenue, now we get to referral and referral is all about your viral coefficient, the best companies on the planet take Revolut. You're probably seen them close to every customer.

They acquire those customers, acquire refer an advocate to another customer. So. Six big concepts, awareness, acquisition, and activation at the top of the full marketing funnel, retention revenue and referral at the bottom half of the funnel. If you focus on maximizing your conversion rates between all of these...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we continue the journey into my favorite product strategy tools. Today we're getting into the five dysfunction. Other team pyramid, a bit of a mouthful, but this tool, I, I cannot tell you, I come back to this day after day, no matter whether I'm working with a big enterprise or a startup, the five dysfunctions of a team is some groundbreaking work from Patrick Lindsay.

Yeah. And it is the perfect guide on how your team should behave when they're going about creating an idea or whether they're building a product or anywhere in between. This tool is in dispensable. Now you might be thinking to your mind to yourself like Mike, you know, we've talked about growth, marketing funnel, great product to been talking about the lean hypothesis, the [00:01:00] value proposition, canvas, you know, that teamwork.

How is that so relevant to product? Well, what I would propose to you is that if you don't have a great team, if you don't have a tool that you can look at. That can provoke you and nudge you to think about the best design of your team. Not only on the work that they do, but how they do it, then it doesn't matter.

What other great design thinking or agile or lean frameworks they use. It doesn't matter if the team is no good. So this has been the huge breakthrough in the work that I've done over the last. Year or so is that you cannot really entertain product development, product discovery without looking at team design simultaneously the way in which we collaborate is a huge dependency of any good thinking.

You must have the right alignment connection.  Trust [00:02:00] you must be cohesive. You have to be like a dream team. If you want to tackle big problems in the world and create solutions to it. So this is why we're going to look at the pyramid of the five dysfunctions of a team. Now, this is groundbreaking work that you can jump over to bottom-up dot IO and get a free copy of this.

Have a look at our agility in the digital age course, it's totally free.  You can get a complete breakdown of the five dysfunctions of a team pyramid. I'm so. Delighted to share with you right now on the podcast, this tool, because I think it's informed not only how I build teams, but how I lead a company of over 250 people.

These themes come back time and time again. This is the key go-to tool that I use when I want to crack how to improve a team. When I want to support them to be the best versions of themselves and to do some great work. [00:03:00] All right. So let's do two things together today. We're going to talk about what the problems are and the good news is I've got solutions too.

So I'll give you the antidote as well, but we have to get a little dark here. We have to go into the valley of darkness. We have to look at some of the things that we've all seen throughout our career that happen on teams. All right. So teams that aren't doing well. Teams that are not producing the results.

They will have five common factors. Now this is built around the enterprise, this work  frankly, you could easily apply this to sports teams and far beyond, but let's kind of cast our minds to our experience in the office at work. What would be the five things we could commonly use as a checklist, as the likely culprits of an underperforming team?

Well, [00:04:00] the, the first and foremost thing I would say to you is you've probably got an absence of trust. This is when you know, the politics are ruling the business. When it becomes a little dog eat dog, when people feel that there are members of their team. That are being selfish that are looking for personal advancement and putting themselves before the team.

That's what happens when you have an absence of trust, because to use a sporting metaphor. You've got to, you've got to believe that your teammates are going to be there when you're going to make the pass. When you're going to make the tackle, you've got to really just instinctively know, think about Michael Jordan and the bulls.

When they're at their peak, they were so good that Jordan could just pass it off to his teammate. And these teammates would make the shot because he trusted in them. That was the difference. [00:05:00] Well, it's just the same at work. And if there's an absence of trust, if your direct manager. Doesn't have your back.

If your peers are not wholly and heartedly supporting you, if you cannot be open, if you cannot have all of the kind of right conversations, it's often the central problem. Two teams. The one that occurs the most is this app  absence of trust people, not being direct people, not being honest people. Not sharing what's really on their mind.

And as a result, they get a little defensive, you know, the ego kicks in. And so it's fight or flight. You see this classically in the tension between departments in companies, particularly large companies. So absence of trust, number one on this pyramid of five dysfunctions of a team. So what [00:06:00] happens if we've got this checklist teams underperforming, there's probably an absence of trust.

What else could there be? Well, for sure. Fear of conflict. That's right. People not saying  not people not being able to give constructive feedback.  People are not talking about the tough. Issues. So what happens is when there are not tough, but respectful competition conversations, when those conversations are not happening, it's what we call as a fear of conflict.

And the great problem with that is if you're not able to talk about biggest problems of the company, the biggest problems of your product or your team, then how on earth do you expect them to get solved? I mean, it's not magic, doesn't exist. So it's pretty wishful thinking if you're not going to have the conversation about the big problem, there's just [00:07:00] no way it's getting solved.

So that's the checklist. Number one, absence of trust. Number two, also very likely and very common, a fear of conflict, just not having the right conversations. Now let's get up into if those are the two big underlying ones, there's three other characteristics of the low performing teams. And I'll tell you what, they're probably, as a result of the first two, let's look at it.

Lack of commitment, number three. So let's say you've got a trusting team. That's having tough conversations, but they're not really aligned around a common go initiative. Desire outcome result, whatever it is, it's a lack of commitment. And if we don't know what's expected of us, if we don't know what we're trying to get done well, how, I mean, it would be a lottery to think that we're going to hit target if we're not even really committed to it.

Number [00:08:00] four avoidance of accountability. This one really comes if you're not committed to a target, if you're not having the, the, the, the really tough discussions, fear of conflict. If you're not trusting each other, I like, I don't know how anyone can be accountable with any of those underlying, so avoidance of accountability, if people are not prepared to say.

I dropped the ball. I missed that one. That's on me. Here's what I'm doing to fix it. Here's what  I need your help to fix it. That would be great accountability. But often we see the fourth part of this pyramid is underperforming teams have an avoidance of accountability. What happens in the sporting field?

Classic blame the referee for a bad call? Well, what a great coach will tell y...

Hello. Hi and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons. And I'm the CEO of Qualitance and we are starting a brand new series today. We are going to focus on my six favorite product strategy tools. And today we're going to talk about using lean hypothesis for better product strategies. Now the lean hypothesis is one of, many of the goodies that come from the lean up lean startup practice.

So  immortalized by Eric Reese. Now the hypothesis that comes with the lean practice is a concise product ideas statement that can actually be separated into individual parts. And those parts can be tested. I find this a great way. To be clear about a product idea. You know, when you're got that famous question from someone, Hey, what's, what's this idea you have for a product.

It's a great [00:01:00] way of being very disciplined and concise about the idea, because, you know, we can tend to rattle on a bit. But furthermore, what the hypothesis actually does is create these very discrete testable factors inside of the statement. So you can actually test each and every one of them. And a great way to kind of populate a lean hypothesis is to use another great tool from the lean startup practice, which is the value proposition canvas.

But because that one is so famous and yet I think the lean hypothesis is not used nearly enough. I would really like to focus on one of my favorite tools, which is this lean hypothesis. I really want to share with you how this is a great way of communicating your productivity, but furthermore, it is an insanely good way to tear it apart to test it, to validate it so that we can actually make a product.

Worth making. We can make a product that is not only desirable  to its [00:02:00] uses, but it's technically viable and financially feasible. This is what we can do. So let's break down the universe of the lean hypothesis. So a formal scientific hypothesis. Is a precise testable statement of what you, the entrepreneur, the designer, the researcher predict will be the outcome.

And, you know, it's your best guess. But the real point here is that it's testable. So what you will find is that your hypothesis changes over time and it's the perfect way to enter into product development when you've actually validated your lean hypothesis. But in these early stages, it's like, there are so many possibilities with our products.

They could go many different ways, but for many different things, the hypothesis is a great, simple, [00:03:00] relatable way for us to all, to come back to this underlying premise, to test it and to make sure that it is truly validated wholly completely and totally. So the benefit of having a lean hypothesis is that it minimizes the risk because if you've done it properly, you've not only written your hypothesis, but as you probably starting to realize you've tested it too.

So therefore, if your development and design team start from a validated hypothesis, you've effectively got. Product, well, not product market fit. I would say problem solution fit  on the way. So this means that the development can go faster. You can really hone towards product market fit because you've essentially defined problem solution fit, and you can get on with some of that fun stuff, building an MVP for the very first time.

Now, at this point, you're probably thinking.  [00:04:00]Mike, what exactly is the hypothesis? Can you give us an example? How's it structured? Well, here's the good news. What I'm going to do is I'm going to break it down for you. And if you are interested to learn more about the lean hypothesis, you can go to bottom-up dot IO and you'll find that we have a whole course on the lean hypothesis, so you can become a master at it too.

All right, let's break it down. Now there's essentially, you know, some variations of a lean hypothesis that different people use. I'm going to take you through what I consider to be my go-to structure of a lean hypothesis. Okay. So. Let's establish the starting point. You have the desire to create a product or service brand new business, and you have an idea, a hunch, a notion about what it's going to be.

Here's a really good way [00:05:00] to structure it. The first part of a venture hypothesis should be to define a persona who is the user, who is the customer. And what problem do they face? That's the second part. Now that's really important because many different types of customers, many different types of problems.

So define a particular type of customer, that particular problem that they experience. I don't worry. I will come back to these, give you examples and some nuances on how you should do this, but let's go through the complete structure first. So we have the persona and we have the problem that they face. I find it very instructive today.

Then on the third point of your hypothesis is to define the current alternative, the current solution that they have to trying to solve this problem. And then the fourth part will be what we are [00:06:00] going to propose. What is our value proposition to that customer who are currently doing it a way, hopefully that way sucks.

We've got a much better way of doing it while our opportunity. And the last part, the fifth part is defining what we'll observe in terms of success metrics. Again, it should be specific. It should be relevant to this type of product. Okay. So we define a persona, a problem that they face current alternative, our value proposition and then success metrics.

So let me hit you with an example of that and we'll break down how you actually validate some of those particular testable items. So I'm just going to come up with an idea of like a lemonade stand and I'll explain it through that metaphor. So here we go. I'll read it all to your first and then we'll break it down.

We believe families are [00:07:00] thirsty when they come to the beach on a summer weekend. Right now they can only get coffee from a cafe. We will offer our refreshing artismal lemonade from our drink track. We expect to sell 500 units per day. That's it? That's the lean hypothesis, but what you will notice is.

Episona is families. Okay. We've even qualified that they have a certain problem in particular on hot  weekend, summer days. And right now there's only a cafe offering hot coffee. Okay. Sounds like there's a big opportunity here. So we think that not only are we going to offer a refreshing drink, it's going to be specifically lemonade.

And I even threw in the autism. And will not only  go beyond that. We'll say that it's going to be from a big drink truck. We're not going to go for a fixed store. And lastly, we've nominated 500 units. Now, each of these are testable items. You [00:08:00] could do quantum call surveys and interviews to determine where the families are.

In fact, the best segment persona. Is it weekends? Is it summer or testable? Now we say that the current alternative is getting coffee from a cafe. Well, what you would do is you go onsite, do surveys, do some observation to make sure that is in fact, the case, because you would want to go down there on the weekend and just check that there's not an ice cream truck.

That also has refreshments. So now you're starting to see each of these needs to be validated. Okay. Artismal lemonade from a drink truck. Well, what you might do is you might go down there with just a hundred units. From the back of the van and try and sell those. Can you sell regular lemonade or does it have to be artisinal do you, can you use a drink...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance and we are coming to the fourth installment. Of our Revolut series here on the bottom-up skills podcast. And it is all about the brand Revolut. It's about how they promote and what is happening exactly in 2021.

So what's really fascinating is rivulets. Success in marketing really begins with the product itself. So together we're going to break that down and then they do great stuff throughout the journey. And it's really, uh, an invitation to participate in the Revolut experience. That's what all the customers receive.

It really does feel like a, uh, an invitation. So let's see what's next for the brand. And [00:01:00] let's see if they can conquer the good old us of a. So, as I said, it starts with product. When you think about marketing, when you think about this brand Revolut, it all begins in the product itself, and they have had this huge focus on transparency and speed.

And that's why customers love it. They get the basics right now. It is very hard. To kind of market your way out of the bad product, but if you have a good product, you'll be amazed at the share-ability the advocacy and the referral that you can get and Revolut have worked that out. So they definitely have this, um, Science, which is straddling both product and marketing thinking.

And what they do is every time you have an experience in app, they are using emails, real-time notifications and a whole assortment of [00:02:00] triggers to not only. Confirm what you've just done. So you know exactly your balance, the state of your transfer, but they're also triggering you to come back into the experience.

I mean, sometimes they're even offering you like, uh, games to play. I mean, whatever it takes, they're getting you in out and back into the product regularly and beyond just the digital app. When you go to the card. Particularly the metal card. It's beautiful. But when you go, even beyond that, the unboxing moment in the analog world is even a shareable moment too.

And I think this is the first cluster of ideas, great product. They've got some really good behavioral loops inside of the product and anything that is adjacent to the core digital product. They've really thought about cards, the packaging as being shareable moments. [00:03:00] And I would only challenge you to go, go back in life 10 years ago, and then, and still for many, the receipt of banking cards is a non event.

And Revolut simply challenged this idea and said, let's make it a shareable moment too, because it comes with status and delight and all those good things. What do we do? We get on the old Instagram, get on the Facebook, we share it. And that of course starts the marketing process. Now there's another thing that they've done brilliantly, which is they've created a lot of shared features in the product.

Think there volts split the bill, some of the travel experiences. These are. By default shared experiences. So what happens is you are not only inviting your friends that have the product into the Revolut experience, then naturally you're inviting those that are not customers to come. And [00:04:00] eventually they become customers too.

So once you're in and this is this big, um, sort of. Community experience that they drive for is they really involve the customer in many ways that traditional banks would not have even thought of. For example, you can participate in the naming of a feature. You can actually go to their offices and go to one of these things.

They call a rev rally. You can hear what they're doing. You can actually meet the people behind the company. Now, when was the last time you saw a traditional legacy bank behaving like that? Even better, they actually published their roadmap. So it's quite agile. So they've got like their, their agile roadmap and it's a Trello board.

You can go and view it, comment on it and make suggestions. And throughout your journey as a customer, you can participate in what they call their rev academy. So they are [00:05:00] delighting their customers, entertaining their customers. They're educating their customers. They're saying, come on, help us build this together.

And that's all off the back of a, of a great product. That's ruthlessly quick and transparent. They do this on the back of their great, a metal card on the back of their great packaging. So you can start to see how things compound and we'll talk in a little bit about, um, the kind of network effects that they enjoy.

The other interesting thing is the really recent news just in April. Is it, they launched a particular, uh, metal card with Anthony Joshua famous, uh, world champion heavyweight boxer. So this is a real step into big boy marketing. This is what you'd expect from global brands. This is what you would expect, maybe from some larger traditional banks.

So we'll return to that later in the show, but I want to get to this last. [00:06:00] Notion of how they do their marketing. They are definitely marketing throughout the funnel, because if you think of the top of the funnel is awareness at the bottom of the funnel is referral. And all of those steps in between, they are really optimizing conversion and particularly spending very few paid media dollars to get the job done.

That's what you can do when you have a great product. That's what you can do when your product by design puts the marketing inside. So customers go get more customers for you. So, if you look at one of their successful, um, starts, they actually said in the UK that they spent zero paid media dollars to get their first 1.5 million customers.

I mean, this has got to have anyone in the marketing world drooling and it's because they invite you into the product. And it's because that product is in fact great. That gives them the permission to do this. Now, if you were to use some more formal thinking around this, this [00:07:00] is what we call their viral coefficient.

This means how many customers does your existing customer recruit on your behalf? Now, many customers, um, Would think, man, I won't do this, but what Revolut does is it incentivizes you? So if you want to get a metal card, you can actually get a year for free. If you get five of your friends to sign up, it's a great example of how they incentivize that.

So if you look right now from 2017 to today, we're looking at a company that has generated 15 million customers. And that's a lot. And if you think about how little they pay for paid media, in fact, they've definitely had some times where growth hasn't been that quick. Like if you look from 2017 through to 2019, it's not particularly quick, but after a little bit of a plateau in 2019, things really took [00:08:00] off, then COVID hit and they had a few flat months, but actually this is really interesting.

As per sort of mid to late, uh, 20, 20 things got going and actually coming into 2021, here we are in May, 2021. And their growth is accelerating too. I think it might be the fastest growth they've ever experienced. Naturally big part of that is the fact that they are expanding globally, but this is, um, But they commonly refer to as their viral loops.

This is how they do it. I use all of these, uh, tactics that I mentioned from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and it compounds. And I think you're going to find that net net, this could be a global company that can say their viral coefficient is one for one, every customer, they win brings a [00:09:00] new cus...

Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're continuing with Revolut. Yes, the FinTech giant, the neobank nemesis. We're you going to discuss Revolut people and culture approach here in 2021. Now the people and culture area for Revolut is probably the most significant area.

Of improvement. I'm afraid to say that the key executives keep on leaving and employee satisfaction is not tracking upwards. It's kind of down. So let's see if some of the new hybrid working and remote working and working abroad programs will give that employee culture that much needed [00:01:00] boost. Okay. So the very recent news from Revolut is that they're going to allow its employees to work abroad for up to 60 days.

And they've totally embraced, uh, hybrid working. Um, think about this, uh, over 50% of their staff would like to work in a hybrid way. 36% actually want to work entirely remote and wait for this only 2% want to come into the office every day. And this is getting to be a big deal cause it's over 2000 people worldwide.

And, uh, there's some big things, uh, at stake here for Revolut. I think the working abroad really fits the product and where the company comes from. So I actually love this idea, I think is really, really powerful. Um, they are famous for making travel and international money transfers easy. So it seems only natural that the company would be kind of borderless in how it thinks [00:02:00] about where and how the team can work from.

Not only working from home, but perhaps even working abroad. So I think this is a really interesting thing that could be great for the culture and as well, when you bundle in that hybrid working way, I think there's a chance that this could start to contribute to a higher employee satisfaction, but there's work to do.

Um, so what we have done is. As always, when we do our case studies, we actually dig into glass door and we have a look at seat. Well, what's really happening behind the scenes. Now it's not going to be the. Um, world's best way of reading the pulse and the culture of an organization you'd have to be working inside to truly know, but it's a pretty good indicator.

And I think we can get some directional ideas from this. So I want to take you through the [00:03:00] basic numbers. For Revolut on Glassdoor. This is where all their employees give feedback and to do so I'm actually going to refer to the stats as they are right now. And I'm going to compare them with what they were a year ago.

So we went to glassdoor.com and we had a look at what employees. Past and present. I was saying about the organization and actually it was a pretty decent school. So we got 3.9 out of five stars overall for the company. And 71% would recommend and 81% approved of the CEO Nikolai . Well, let's fast forward to today.

Okay. So those numbers were from a year ago. Let's have a look at today and ouch. It's like all of the numbers are down. So, um, the overall rating of the company is down from 3.9 to 3.3. So that's a 15% drop. [00:04:00] That's pretty big movement. Um, but the movement just gets. Bigger and to the downside recommendations down from 71 to 52%, that's a pretty big decline.

The biggest one is the approval of the CEO has plummeted down to 54% from what was 81% a year ago. This is really, um, surprising and pretty dramatic. Actually, when you think about a company, this size 2000 employees, um, of which there are five, almost 500 reviews. So this is a quarter of the entire sample.

So I think there's some big you're flashing lights here. There's flags, there's smoke signals coming out of here. Um, But let's look at what is it about this culture? That seems so tough. And look, I'm the first to [00:05:00] admit, you know, culture it's really about, um, leadership and vision and how you behave the symbols inside of the company and how you design the systems to serve and empower your people.

That's for sure. I think there's a lot of patterns inside of the data on Glassdoor that reveal what it's like at Revolut super fast paced. This came up in 22 of the reviews and look, lots of smart people, lots of learning. In fact, the reference to smart people came up 18 times in different reviews, but the negative signals are much stronger.

Work-life balance looks really, really. Poor. A lot of people are complaining of working 12 to 15 hour workdays and doing some work on the weekend and these long hours. Um, I think it's starting to create some real doubt in the eyes of the [00:06:00] employees. 20%, sorry, 20 of their reviews in the, um, the current Gusto talk about no one really caring.

And, um, this, this is just. Obviously, um, a call for help. Now you have to think to yourself, well, there were some signals of the pros and cons this time, last year. So nothing really has changed there. The signals are just getting stronger, so that shows a lack of change. So whatever changes have happened thus far I haven't worked.

And what I would offer you is that my deduction is that. With such a particular type of work style, how they think, how they work, the culture. I think their candidate screening is the problem. And what I mean by that is this is a pretty intense workplace and they should screen their candidates.

Accordingly. And so they're obviously [00:07:00] not doing that because people are coming in and turning right back out again. There's a lot of commentary about people staying for a year and then jumping into other jobs. It's sort of a launchpad job. So there's some really big signals here. Um, and, um, whilst no company is perfect, um, it's going to be really interesting to see what Revolut can learn from this employee feedback and whether they can create a more balanced work-life that retains they're good people.

So will this working abroad, will this hybrid working model improve the employee satisfaction? That's what we have to find out. That is the question at hand. And my last thought here is that as the company grows, this challenge will become harder because the group of employees will be larger. The different marketplaces jurisdictions in which people are working will be more so [00:08:00] when you're all, you know, when you're 20, 50 people in one office, ah, that one's pretty straightforward.

You can see everyone, you can just grab everyone and put them in a room. And, and really work on problems, however, this, and this is a great proxy to their overall company challenges. Can they scale, can they go from being really smart, uh, payment solution or really smart, uh, transfer international currency solution to being a proper bank?

Can they go from being big in UK? To being big globally. Can they, uh, have this really strong commitment amongst the founders and can that trickle down throughout the entire organization? Because right now they continue to lose key executives. Their global head of marketing just left their global head of growth, just left.

It keeps on happening. So. Lots of challenges and I'm not betting against Revolut far from it [00:09:00] because we know that they've got a great product. They, we know they're onto something, but if they want to realize their vision, which is to be a global financial app, it's not only the product that needs to be good.

They need to have a viable business model. So they got to make freemium work. They've got to actually have a brand that builds trust and people recognize huge amount of work to do there. And lastly, as we look at all of this, they've got ...

Hello and welcome to the bottom-up skills podcast I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we continue our journey into the world of Revolut. Yes, the FinTech, the Neo bank that seems to be conquering all. And today we're going to look at the user experience from its product. Are they delighting customers?

I wonder, are they serving each and every user? Are they doing it right? These are the questions we're going to ask. Now, the starting point here. Is that they do indeed  provide a user experience, which is super fast, very snappy interface, easy, and boy, the features they just keep on coming. They are adding features at a prolific rate.

So you and I, we're going to dive into what users actually love about the [00:01:00] Revolut product. And we're going to learn what best practices we can take out from. This banking customer experience. We're going to see what we can use when we build products to now, the first thing I want to do is set some context because the Revolut story is quite simple.

When we come to product, it's just doing the basics right now. That's not particularly revolutionary or earth shattering, but in the context of banking, it most certainly is. Let me give you the proof just to compare what people really think about this product, what the customer experience is really like for Revolut.

I've gotten competitor to one of the better legacy banks in the United Kingdom. Buckeye spank. And what I did is I thought, well, okay, let's go find a really large number [00:02:00] of reviews for both in the same platform. And so I went to Trustpilot very good, a customer review application, and I compared. What over 5,000 people had to say about Barclays and then over 70,000 people, what they had to say with Revolut and the numbers just don't align.

Barclays can only muster our 1.5 stars out of five. So we're talking about an incredibly seasoned, traditional legacy bank. Huge incise. Yeah, customers rate it so poorly that Trustpilot has these different categories for the number of stars that you have. And Barclays with 1.5 stars out of five, they are in the bad category.

[00:03:00] I mean, what a travesty that a bank of their tenure, a bank. That is so institutionalized in the United Kingdom and abroad. Yeah. They can only muster at 1.5 out of five Revolut. On the other hand, I mean, huge number of reviews, 79,000 that already tells you something 4.3 average category. Excellent. And I think I've, I've chosen two reviews that I think expose the story behind, after sifting through them all.

This is what I want to share with you. Here's one. This is by a reviewer in the United Kingdom. His name is Chris packer. He gives Barclays one star out of five and his headline. Is avoid Barclays, if you can. I mean, this is when your customers go into what we call [00:04:00] detract mode. They're not neutral and they're certainly not advocates.

They are detractors. They're advocating against you. He says in his review, avoid Barclays. If you can, I've had numerous problems with Barclays, including having posts sent to the wrong address, access being denied, online banking and infuriating telephone banking system. Well, I mean, sending posts doesn't sound like too, how to thing, sorting out access denials to online banking, you know, with all the passwords and security procedures, that's kind of cost of entry for any bank these days and a telephone banking system.

Like, come on guys, telephone's been around a century now think we might be able to get that right. But on the other hand, Here's a review that I got from this, this person's called G fan 2015. And he says in his review of Revolut, [00:05:00] of course, Revolut is a great product, as long as you don't hit a snag. Hmm.

Okay. So this is interesting. The moment you're facing issue, there is no way to resolve it quickly. And he goes on to explain some of that. So it's interesting. Isn't it? Just the difference there, even though, I mean, I deliberately chose this Revolut one, which wasn't all strawberries and cream, but what it did say is I'll take you back to this.

Of course, Revolut is a great product and that's why we can learn so very, very much.  What is astounding to me? The actually Barclays isn't the worst customer experience in the United Kingdom because we have done a lot of work studying the UX of banking report by Peter Ramsey, where in the UK, he studied the experience and measured the customer experience throughout the UK banking system.

And barcodes actually was kind of one of the better. So I [00:06:00] really don't want to experience the worst there. So this is the context of why getting the basics is so innovative. It's so new in an existing category. So the story here is that legacy banks just get the basics wrong. It's not fast, they're not transparent about fees.

And some of their basic features like hello, telephone calls. They can't get those touch points. Right. And the truth is that Revolut gets the basics, right? Super fast product, very transparent about fees, and they just continue to add more features. But if we step back, there's still so much opportunity.

Whether it's for Revolut, Barclays or some other neobank or FinTech, you can see that it seems like everyone stumbles, when you have a particular  what we call in the industry, like an edge case where there's some unusual  characteristic that  blocks our user journey. Both banks seem [00:07:00] to struggle with that.

So there's the opportunity. So Revolut has got even further to grow and I think the gap for Barclays and other legacy banks becomes larger. Okay. So let's take now a snapshot and a check-in on what are the features that they actually include in their product? Well, money transfers. They seem to be the gods of, and.

What's really important on the back of a transfer or a payment is that you get instant, real time notifications and analytics. It's really important that if you study the customer experience, people hate the fact that they have to sometimes reload, close their account and reopen it to get the new balance.

Okay. So that's really good. Essential again. Revolut does it. Well, many others do not. And of course they've  Done a great job on bill splitting.  They've opened up into cryptocurrencies and they're doing this now across many markets, such as [00:08:00] Japan, India, and the U S they're really charging for some global expansion there.

I'm talking about being overseas. I mean, handling currencies and transfers in different currency seems to be one of their great strengths. It's it really is  exceptional when compared to the. Rest of the market. And of course there's lots of other features that help you manage your money. I want to focus on one feature in their product.

I think it tells a little bit the story of Revolut and why their customer experience is so good. So the way back in April, 2018, they launched volts. Volts are a special little area that you have.  It's a, it's a little envelope  where you can put your savings into. And  these little volts are really interesting.

It's a beautifully, simple idea. It's like a, a little savings area and here's the interesting thing. The [00:09:00] saving features are personal. All four groups. So you can chip in with your friends and check this out. Since they launched it, there have been over 4.5 million volts created by users. There is 6,000 new volts created each day and into those volts, the Revolut global user base has saved over...

Hello and welcome to the bottomup skills podcast. I'm Mike Parsons the CEO of Qualitance. And today we're talking about the growth strategy of none other than Revolut. I mean the guys at Revolut, they are a pretty clear leader in the Neo bank slash FinTech market. So we've done a lot of work stuff, being how they build product, how they build teams.

Got a great study, uh, on our website at bottom-up dot IO. So check that out. But today, We're going to revisit their growth strategy. We're going to do a 20, 21 update. We're going to get the latest and we're going to see what we can learn from their journey. We're going to dig into some of the new product features.

They have, how they're expanding in different markets. And we're going to ask ourselves, are they up for the [00:01:00] challenge? Can they transition into doing more than one thing? In the face of really fierce competition. I mean, it's getting hot in here, so let's dig into it. Okay. So quick snapshot on the growth of Revolut and boy, I got to say, I gotta hand it to these guys.

They've got some pretty serious growth going on. Let's start with customers. Now, uh, proceeding, uh, 2020 and all things that are COVID, we saw them ramping up pretty nicely. So from about early 2017, up until early 2019, they went from zero to about 6 million customers, not bad and, um, good growth. Um, and you know, did that across a couple of markets too.

So. They didn't kind of line for a while, um, in 2019 and then kind of go going again [00:02:00] and then they hit another flatline, um, which was, uh, obviously no surprise there. February, March 20, 20, things really slowed down. Sort of at about the, um, roughly about the nine, eight or 9 million Mark, but all credit to these guys because, um, as things kind of calm down a little bit at the back end of 2020, and as we look right now in April, 2021, they have hit 15 million customers.

So if we step back just a little bit, that's 5 million customers, um, Since that six Mark and well beyond. And actually they've done this only since 2017, so it's not even funny five years. So, you know, they've roughly been growing at about 3 million plus customers a year. Um, so the growth is pretty exceptional.

[00:03:00] Now, if we now kind of move across to their evaluation, this is what they're worth to investors. They have previously raised, um, 5.5 valuation that's $5.5 billion in their series D round. So you're getting pretty late in the investing game year. You're not too far off IPO and, um, their last and most recent round, they came in at 5.5 billion, which, uh, Is interesting.

Cause that was probably, uh, somewhere in the space of, uh, eight to 9 million customers. So you can do the math there to kind of work out the value per customer. The interesting thing is because they've grown so much since that D series round of investment, the rumor is, and it's, this is hot off the press.

This is literally just a few days old is that they are talking. Uh, two investors again, and they are looking at more than a 10 billion valuation that's [00:04:00] post-money valuation. So if you want to look at growth, you know, it's the classic startup gain, lots of customer growth, lots of growth in the valuation.

So as a snapshot, 50 million customers, Roughly 10 billion valuation. That's solid. That's really, really solid. So good on them. Now the question is, you know, they started off being brilliant at like sending money to your friends, maybe, um, you know, currency when you're on holiday. That was certainly the kind of.

Early adopter, innovator segment. They went after they got that growth. But now, uh, it's really interesting. Um, next Darren AUSkey, uh, CEO and co-founder of overload recently kind of shared the, what they think their, their mission is right now. And they're gonna, this is according to him and I quote. We're on a mission to build the world's first global financial super app.

[00:05:00] And, uh, that's pretty bold and heavy stuff. And a big tactic in that strategy is going to be getting a banking license in the U S and we're going to talk about that in a little bit. Another thing. That they've seen as they think about the U S and we think about their growth strategy, how they're going to grow the business.

Here's another interesting insight that they've shared, and it's about going after a new segment, the small business. So you got to remember, well, it's pretty famous for being a very consumer focused offering. So now they're going to stop moving across into small and medium businesses. Um, you know, the fascinating thing about that is that not only goes to.

Helping them with their banking. I think, um, I think you're going to see them, uh, do a full play here. Think about zero or QuickBooks, uh, for small business. I think they're going to, uh, I think there's a lot of clues that that's the way [00:06:00] they're going to play this. Uh, I've got, I've managed to do some research here and I've got another quote, uh, from Starsky that I want to share with you.

Uh, not only about small business, but how they're going to do it. He says small and medium-sized businesses are massively underserved in the U S and we want to empower them with tools to grow and scale globally. So this is sounding like Neo bank plus FinTech, plus I dunno, turbo boost. And then here is a really good thing.

He identifies. Um, some of the challenges that they face as tackling fragmented processes, high fees, and other banking, pain points, uh, we've built an end to end solution that saves business owners time and resources to focus on what really matters running their business. Now, nothing revolutionary here, but I always love it when a company is prepared to.

Listen to understand too, they [00:07:00] understand their customers and is really clear about what they face as a challenge. And we'll happily put that up as their mission. So quite clearly, if we want to think about growth, it's all about the U S it's all about small businesses. So let's break this down a little bit because it's not all like sunshine and, uh, balloons and party favorites.

So good news is for Revolut that they've applied for a banking chatter in the U S challenges. This thing takes forever and not everybody gets one. And it might not necessarily even, even if they did get it, if they, if Revolut gets a full banking charter, so they can operate as a licensed bank, that doesn't necessarily mean success.

And we'll come to some reasons why in a moment, but let's just kind of look at where the complexity here starts to come to the fore. And I've got this big [00:08:00] insight that actually. I think Revolut is about to go through its hardest period yet because they grew up being this challenge of brand. They did a couple of things.

One thing, particularly well with currency and money transfer between friends like this little niche, and now they've ballooned into 15 million people. And now they got to do a lot of things, a lot of different offerings from crypto to insurance, to banking, to credit cards, et cetera, et cetera. But they've also got to do that in a number of markets.

So they're obviously revving up in the U S they're they're revving up in India too, but here's an interesting thing. They have already launched, failed and closed in Canada. I just couldn't make any money, too many incumbent constraints, pretty close market, probably very similar to Australia. It's quite hard to shake up the financial market in Australia too.

[00:09:00] So ...