The Good Tech Companies - How Pearce Dolan Built World-Class Product Teams at Revolut and Deel

Episode Date: May 13, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/how-pearce-dolan-built-world-class-product-teams-at-revolut-and-deel. How Pearce Dolan scaled product teams at Revolut and Deel, driving record growth through speed, adaptability, and bold product innovation. Check more stories related to product-management at: https://hackernoon.com/c/product-management. You can also check exclusive content about #pearce-dolan, #product-management, #revolut-product-team, #deel-hr-platform, #startup-growth-strategy, #building-product-teams, #product-innovation, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @jonstojanjournalist. Learn more about this writer by checking @jonstojanjournalist's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Pearce Dolan built groundbreaking product teams at Revolut and Deel by combining speed, strategic adaptability, and user-focused innovation. From launching viral fintech features to scaling a global HR platform in record time, Dolan's journey shows how strong product leadership fuels sustainable, hyper-growth in startups.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. How Pierce Dolan built world-class product teams at Revolut and Deal, by John Stoyan, journalist. The product team is one of the most critical aspects of any startup. If an organization is to succeed and be self-sustaining beyond initial funding, it must maintain execution speed while simultaneously evolving its workflows to accommodate growth, responsibilities that largely fall on the shoulders of product managers. Pierce Dolan has overcome these challenges twice. At digital banking platform Revolut, he joined as the brand's first dedicated product manager and launched features like bill-splitting

functionalities and gift payments before they became standard in fintech. He's now the head of product at payroll and HR service provider deal, where he built a product team that delivered a global HR platform in just six months, compared to the industry standard of one to two years. His experiences offer a wealth of insight into developing product teams that can build and maintain momentum through rapid growth. From technology enthusiast to product leader. As a child, Pierce Dolan was dreaming about creating technology while his peers preferred to consume it. At a young age, I would buy technology magazines and read them cover to cover, he recalls.

My ambition was to one day work for technology companies and help them strategize on how to make the best products in the world. Though he was born in England, his family moved to Hong Kong when he was 10, then to Dubai a couple of years later. He didn't realize it at the time, but these global experiences would prove invaluable when it came time to build products for worldwide audiences. Spending my formative years in international settings really influenced my view of the world, Dolan reflects. Now, it's where I feel most comfortable, in an international setting. He went on to study computer science and business management at King's College London, planning to work as an engineer before transitioning to product management. But when the opportunity came early, he seized it.

Expanding Revolut's digital banking services. When Dolan joined Revolut as its 250th employee, the company was just starting to expand its offerings beyond its core currency exchange service. It was a hire that the organization had needed to make for a long time. While prior engineers had served in the rollout of necessity, Dolan was the organization's first dedicated product manager. He ran the company's first sprint, conducted its first A-B test, pioneered customer interview processes, he basically created the entire product culture. The focus was speed, with traditional banking notorious for its slow, bureaucratic development

cycles, speed would be Revolut's greatest advantage. To this end, Dolan focused in creating systems that would allow the company to iterate faster than its competitors, including lightweight approval processes, direct customer feedback loops, and rapid testing protocols that garnered feedback in days rather than months. The result was a suite of features that redefined what users expected from financial applications' bill-splitting functionalities, making dividing expenses frictionless. Shareable payment links, eliminating the need for bank details. QR code payments, launching long before widespread European adoption. Group and username-based payments, simplifying transactions. But one of Dolan's most innovative additions, and

one that would have ripple effects throughout the sector, was the ability to pay alongside gifts. An industry first that added an unprecedented emotional connection to financial transactions. The idea came to me while walking down the streets of London," Dolan says. E still have the doodles. The feature was built in just two weeks, and in testing, Dolan and his team saw an increase in payment frequency and that one-third of all payments were sent with a GIF. After launching and achieving widespread popularity, the feature was later adopted by major payment platforms globally. Over the next two and a half years, in part due to Dolan's innovations and streamlining

of product development, Revolut's user base exploded from 3.5 million to 10 million, its revenue nearly tripled, achieving dekakorn status with a $10 billion valuation, a figure that would later climb a $10 billion valuation, a figure that would later climb to $45 billion. Building a global team at Deal, Dolan's next challenge came at Deal, a SaaS company that empowers businesses worldwide to hire, manage, and pay talent globally. A challenge that became particularly urgent as remote work expanded. When Dolan was brought on as the brand's 20th employee, the existing infrastructure

was minimal. There was me, a first-time designer they found on Reddit, a CTO, eight engineers, and no QA. This lean structure demanded breakneck speeds from Dolan and his team. Ifrevolute's product culture was fast-paced, deals was practically frenzied in its infancy. The culture was hyper-execution-driven, Dolan says. We moved fast and broke things. Literally, we would build things in crazy rapid time, push a dough production with no QA, and crash the site multiple times a day. This pace wasn't recklessness, it was strategy.

Deal was solving a completely new problem as it defined what a global HR platform should be from scratch. Speed wasn't just an advantage, it was fundamental to the organization's success. It was a strategy that paid off in spades. Deal built the world's first global human resource information system, HRIS, in just six months. A process that competitors would typically take one to two years to complete. Building upon this momentum, Dolan oversaw the rapid development and deployment of other vital features like global immigration services,

helping migrant workers secure their visas. Employer of Record, a service that employs workers on behalf of companies in countries where they don't have legal entities. Contractor of Record, an industry-first solution with advanced compliant controls, shielding employers from risk and empowering them to hire and pay contractors around the world. As a result, Deal became the fastest-growing SaaS company in history, reaching $100 million in annual revenue just 20 months after hitting $1 million. The product team expanded to over 1,000 product managers and engineers, distributed across 150 specialized teams.

Finally, the company scaled to 5000 employees operating in more than 100 countries, all without establishing any physical offices. While this explosive growth speaks to the virtues of speed and feature development, Dolin stresses the importance of adapting your product strategy as you go. At Deal, for example, Dolin began to prioritize high-level strategy as he fine-tuned his vision for the product org. While singular focus and breakneck speeds were what propelled Deal to initial success, it wouldn't be a sustainable practice at scale.

This meant the critical transformation from a monolithic product to specialized teams. That is, evolving from having a single product team working on one platform to having multiple teams focusing on different verticals. Each stage of the journey has required a different approach and behavior, Dolan reflects. What works at 50 employees won't work at 500, and what works at 500 won't work at 5000. The best teams, therefore, are the ones that adapt the fastest. Achieving a balanced approach to product excellence. Pierce Dolan's success

demonstrates that the companies that thrive aren't necessarily those with the best ideas or most resources. Instead, much of the impressive growth that Revolut and Deal achieved can be attributed to Dolan's work in establishing a strong foundation of product practices early on, prioritizing speed of execution over perfection, and creating adaptable systems that can evolve as the organization scales. The product leaders who master this balancing act create the foundation for sustainable growth that outlasts any single product feature or market trend. That's what effective product leadership in high-growth companies requires, and it's something that Dolan has demonstrated throughout his career.

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