Hello, we're Nikita Filippov and Max Gaponov. We'll introduce ourselves later, but right in the first sentence, we want to invite you to a training that will help you learn how to build a good product strategy. To understand a few simple things that are expected from any product leader. Yes, we use this exact definition because we don't care if you're launching a single feature or launching a whole company/product, the skills we'll share will help you in any context.

This training will allow every Product Manager to shift their focus from professional execution to development strategy and leadership in a multi-team and multi-product environment, and gain all the necessary skills to become a Chief Product Officer.

And for company owners and startup founders, this course will help you understand how to manage a product and what skills and qualities your current or future product leader should possess.

Nikita Filippov

Nikita Filippov's career path is as exciting as a roller coaster. It all started at Samara State Aerospace University where he studied rocket building, but ended up creating software versions of language labs after the third year (2004) and sold three versions for $3000. Happily, he went to Kazantip with that money and left everything behind. After returning, he realized that the destiny of a rocket engineer was not so appealing. In 2007, he became a product manager at Begun (the leader in contextual advertising technology in Russia in the second half of the 2000s, they didn't call them managers back then, but nevertheless).

Seeing problems in production, he became interested in modern engineering approaches. He then co-founded ScrumTrek (2008), a consulting company that helped the top 50 Russian companies improve software development processes using Agile and Lean approaches. Nikita built development and product processes, helping to set up entire departments from scratch as an external contractor on a scale ranging from small teams to development departments of 300+ people.

After spending some time in consulting and understanding the processes, Nikita returned to the idea of product development as a service and founded Octoberry, a product company that launched projects with large organizations: the Sense project with Alfa Bank (a personalized banking concept with an interface that adapts to the customer's behavior, which became mainstream in Belarus and Ukraine), and the NoName Bank project for Modulbank (a concept of an ascetic bank for individual entrepreneurs on the phone, which later evolved into the Hiys product).

After some moderately successful products with large companies, Nikita launched his startup in the field of automated text support for large companies, Magneta.io. Despite the fact that the project and team were shortlisted for the YC16 interview, it was not the best experiment in terms of product development. However, the experience gained was valuable for his future colleagues and became part of the ANNA.Money (Absolutely No Nonsense Admin Ltd, UK) company, where Nikita became a co-founder and product leader, a role he still holds today. ANNA is a banking and automatic accounting service for small and medium-sized businesses. His product development skills were crucial in defining the vision and product strategy of ANNA.Money.

Now, in addition to the main job, he advises young companies as a product and organization-building advisor in various fields: http://zipsale.co.uk (e-commerce), http://preciouspayload.com (Space as a Service), https://codabra.org/ (Programming School for Children), https://presentum.io/ (interview practice for large IT organizations), http://Volee.io, and so on.

Max Gaponov

Max never focused on building his career, instead he says that if anyone built him, it was his career.

His love for aviation brought him to Moscow State Aviation Technological University - the world of software for avionics, jet engines, and multistory mathematics. A proposal from one of his colleagues to switch roles led him into management practices. His interest in the still-evolving User Experience field led him to product approaches. His first commercial product failure led him to Agile thinking. The unpredictability and unplanned nature of development phenomena in large organizations led him to a circle of psychotherapeutic institutes.

Working in support taught him more than anything how to look at the world through the eyes of the customer, and that's where it all began. Handling 150-200 external and internal requests per day at Afisha made Max realize that users don't always understand or like the company's plans for making their lives better.

Beautiful and multi-lane maps, such as the launch of the Russian MSN, showed Max that little goes according to plan, and most of the time is spent either actualizing and shifting those pictures or clearing up what was not there and could not be there during planning (more often than not, both).

Collaborating on a prototype application for automating and accounting for car sales with top players from a major importer and dealerships taught Max that the key to success (or failure) of a product often lies in how people's relationships within the organization look. And the subsequent development of this service to the scale of dozens of automotive brands on the market only confirmed this.

It was sheer madness for the entire banking market to see how QIWI, which had no experience or tools for creating credit products, managed to create and launch the Conscience installment card in 5 months. Max had a workload of 16 hours per day on average there.

Now, as an independent trainer, consultant, expert, and mentor, Max helps various companies create good products without the need for developing strategies, building story maps, developing processes and organizational structures, or relationship systems.