A few facts about me
I would like to share my story with you. I was born in a beautiful Carpathian village in western Ukraine. When I turned 13 years old, I took responsibility for my choice and told my parents that I had decided to study economics in the lyceum. I wanted to contribute to improving the village where I was born and make it more prosperous. This idea motivated me at the time, and I believed that one day I would become an entrepreneur and launch something there.
My personal motto is "There is only one way to check if this is the right way or not. Just do it!"
I dedicated myself to my studies, and after completing the lyceum, I enrolled at Lviv Polytechnic University. It was there that I realized my interest in Business Analysis, and I delved into venture investments, focusing my attention on IT startups. As a result, in my second year of study, my dream of becoming an entrepreneur transformed into becoming someone who analyzes early-stage startups to help entrepreneurs raise funds and provide value to clients worldwide.
I joined a local business incubator called Startup Depot, which supports early-stage startups. I started as a trainee and eventually became a Project/Pipeline Manager. During my time there, I had the opportunity to explore hundreds of small startups and work with entrepreneurs, assisting them in finding investors and mentors. It was a unique experience that allowed me to learn the best practices for launching Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) and building Customer Development, while also witnessing some of the challenges and pitfalls.
During that time, I organized the largest startup competition in Eastern Europe. I am proud of the achievement. I gathered 150 startups for the selection process, out of which 30 pitched in the final stage, competing for the main prizes.
"Since I didn't have my own product, my goal was to join a team and become an excellent product manager."
I realized that I possessed enough knowledge to embark on a new path of helping startups and product companies solve their customers' problems. Although I didn't have complete expertise in product management, the idea to launch a product school emerged in collaboration with my colleagues at Startup Depot. It wasn't an easy task, but we managed to bring together the best lecturers, mentors, and professionals from IT companies who aspired to become product managers. That's how I became a founder of Product School in Lviv. However, after the first batch, I decided to step away from the project and sold my shares. The remarkable thing is that the school is still operating successfully today, having been in existence for over seven years.
After my last day at Startup Depot in November 2017, my journey led me to Slush, one of the world's largest startup conferences in Finland. My goal was to find a product and team to join.
"It doesn't matter how good you are at paving your path; what truly matters is what you do every day to grow."
Over the course of three days, I had hundreds of short meetings with CEOs, product managers, and recruiters from companies across Europe, including Ukraine. I also had several interviews during the conference with recruiters from companies such as Mercedes-Benz, Hubspot, Zalando, and others.
As a result, I returned to Lviv with dozens of new business connections and a great inspiration to continue my journey. After the New Year, I received a good offer to work as a product manager at Preply, a service for finding tutors in different languages. However, accepting the offer meant moving to Kyiv, leaving behind friends, favorite places, and the winter atmosphere of Lviv.
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On February 4, 2018, a new chapter began in my life's book. I had a small dream of building a "startup within a startup." In simpler terms, I wanted to launch new business directions within a SaaS company. This was a hypothesis that needed testing. The following 9 months within the company proved to be a "quantum leap" for me. I felt like I was in the right place at the right time. Everything went well: generating ideas, conducting numerous interviews, creating an MVP (minimum viable product), and working with an awesome team, among other things.
My main responsibility at Preply was to test ideas that could work in the medium term. The problem my team faced was that some tutors were successful while others were not. Typically, after classes with a "failed" tutor, students would either look for another tutor or not return to the website.
This presented an interesting challenge for me: figuring out how to retain students and maintain high-quality tutors. It took two months to find a solution, with a significant portion of that time dedicated to building an MVP (minimum valuable product). Eventually, my team successfully implemented the first version of the prototype, which was launched for a small group of tutors. And it worked. However, life wouldn't be life if everything went smoothly.
On the last Friday of September 2018, I was still in the office, but mentally already on the train to Lviv for the Lviv IT Arena conference. However, at that moment, my intuition prepared me for something unpleasant...
"Sorry, you are fired. The company needs to downsize the team. You can collect your belongings on Monday."
And there I was, on the train, in a slightly strange and seemingly shocked state. I was returning to Lviv, the city where I began my career in IT. Was it scary? Well, perhaps a little. But I gained valuable experience and made new friends at Preply, and I'm grateful for being part of such an amazing company with great people and culture.
In the following two weeks, I found myself in Portugal, where I took a moment to reboot and attend one of the world's largest conferences, Web Summit. Upon my return to Ukraine, I began searching for a new job where I could apply my knowledge and experience.
After several months of searching, I went through two dozen interviews, attended a dozen meetings, and participated in several in-depth interviews. It was all part of my quest to find "my" company where I could be helpful and productive. However, before making any decisions, there were a few things I needed to consider.
First, I decided to reject all companies that were not focused on Western markets.
Second, I needed to determine whether I wanted to work for a B2B or B2C company.
Third, I had to determine the industry in which I wanted to address user problems.
While attending a conference in Portugal, I came across numerous B2B products that caught my interest. This led me to pay more attention to this particular segment.
"Revenue Inbox" is a tool that assists sales managers in automatically saving information from their inbox and calendar to their CRM.
In January 2018, I began my journey at Invisible, which was known as Revenue Grid at that time. It is a B2B product in the field of sales automation, specifically focusing on data synchronization between email and customer databases.
As the first product manager to be hired, my initial challenges were to familiarize myself with the industry landscape, analyze competitors, and conduct a detailed study of Revenue Inbox—the product I was responsible for.
I held the responsibility for the entire product and the achievement of the company's business goals. "Revenue Inbox" is a B2B solution that caters to hundreds of end-users per customer. As the Product Manager, I led the "Revenue Inbox" product and assembled a small product team consisting of a Junior Product Manager, UX designer, Business Analyst, and Tech writers.
During my role, I encountered various user problems related to Sign Up, Setup, and the Aha moment, resulting in challenges with user activation and adoption rates. I actively participated in pre-sales engagements with medium and enterprise customers, where I had to quickly strategize on how to address their use cases through our product, either by finding workarounds or creating MVPs for new features or product directions.
This period offered tremendous opportunities for my professional growth, given the numerous business challenges and technical infrastructure changes. I developed a strong understanding of both Microsoft and Google APIs to effectively work within both ecosystems.
I stabilised product and have made core features more successful during the last two years. But COVID has made his changes and company decided to re-organise departments and my story in Revenue Grid has been done. I did not see me after those changes. Well, I wanted to try myself in B2B product, and I made it.
Over the past two years, I successfully stabilized the product and made core features more effective. However, the COVID pandemic brought about changes, leading the company to reorganize its departments, and my journey with Revenue Grid came to an end. I couldn't envision myself in the company following those changes. Nevertheless, I had always wanted to explore my potential in the B2B product space, and I finally got the chance to do so.
In February 2021, it was time for me to move forward and assist another company in solving their clients' problems. I embraced the challenge of building the cloud component of the Prism app from the ground up.
"My journey began with shared with me product vision and extensive research, which I then transformed into clear requirements and a roadmap."
An interesting fact is that I was the first employee to be hired in Ukraine for this project. After working on the specifications and plans, we started assembling a team to achieve our goal of building an MVP.
To be continued...
