Solve hard problems for the customers and businesses and learn how the best teams work by making contract work and side-projects. Check out my portfolio (link below) to see the descriptions, screenshots, GIFs, videos and direct links for each of 10+ of my products. 

Since early 2023 I work in a Product Operating Model (don't know what is that? - check out SVPG link below).

Product Manager

Meander

Junior and Middle QA Engineers grow faster and better in their careers with my mentorship and coaching. Currently I coach 2 QA Engineers, but have a capacity to coach a bit more. If you feel that you need help, please check out the link with my coaching offer description below!

Key results:
→ Coached 2 QA Engineers who started tests automation from scratch and for the first time on their projects using Cypress and CodeceptJS test frameworks and CI/CD pipelines and test runners on GitHub.
→ Mentored 1 QA Engineer to grow from Junior to Middle QA position in within a half of a year.
→ Coached 1 Automation QA Engineer to develop tests automation framework on Python+Selenium from scratch for their project.

Skills and Technologies: JavaScript, Cypress, CodeceptJS, Python, Selenium, GitHub, CI/CD

Mentor / Coach for QA Engineers

Arrival

Led manual and automation testing of Remote Diagnostics and Monitoring Platform for Arrival’s Electric Vehicles (EV) fleet.

Key results:
→ Initiated QA process in a team from scratch.
→ Coached a newcomer QA to grow from Junior to Middle position within a half of a year.
→ Developed from scratch and applied for regression tests automation test framework based on PyTest, Selenium and GitLab.

Also at that time I finished writing a book: "Join IT via Software Testing" (to help Russian-speaking people to figure out what to expect in IT if they decide to get there, so they could make more conscious decision) and sold more than 100 copies within first month.

Sr. QA Engineer, Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics for Electric Vehicles

RingCentral

Eliminated deployment problems in a Business Intelligence (BI) Data WareHouse (DWH) team.

Key results:
→ Dropped to 0 per month the rate of "forgotten scripts" (the most painful problem at that time) for BI DWH on Oracle EE by establishing a PDV process based on PL/SQL auto-tests in GitLab.
→ Improved open-source utPLSQL test-framework with advanced auto-tests tagging feature: https://github.com/utPLSQL/utPLSQL/issues/1042.
→ Developed an online service for Pairwise Testing which was by 2022 was used by 900+ users per month, and month-over-month usage continued to grow organically (see "Projects" section on LinkedIn)
→ Represented the company and shared knowledge with QA Engineers by speaking at 2 international QA Conferences: "SQA Mate test cases management tool" (Minsk, Belarus) and "Write better test cases titles" (St.Petersburg, Russia).

Sr. QA Engineer, Business Intelligence and DWH

Qualified development of and migration to in-house substitutes for the company critical infrastructure 3rd party Telephony and Multimedia processing servers and systems. 

Key results:
→ Secured with tests decomposition of functions of the main telephony server to several services.
→ Made the company completely free from 3rd party servers in telephony infrastructure: Media processing servers and Session Border Controller.
→ Organically got 350+ subscribers on Medium by writing tens of blog posts on Software Quality Assurance topics.

Sr. QA Engineer, IP-telephony backend

teleBricks Ltd.

Launched an Internet-telephony startup that provided simple VoIP service with great UX for the entrepreneurs and small businesses in Russia.

Key results:
→ Secured enough funding and established necessary business contacts to support company operations during the inaugural year.
→ Led cross-functional efforts to drive revenue growth which resulted in reaching a break-even for a company during first 10 months of operation:
-- Increased company sales up to 60% during 6 months by applying high intense A/B tests experiments in Google Adwords for Marketing.
-- Got 48 paying and loyal customers during 6 months of Marketing campaign.
-- Partnered with Zoiper (VoIP apps) to build branded soft-phones for fast and easy configuration (which was a chore) using QR-codes.
→ Built simple and easy to use UI both for Marketing and App web-sites that lead to an exceptional UX that VoIP customers in Russia haven't seen before.

Co-Founder, CEO of IP-telephony startup (B2B, SaaS)

Dino Systems

Collaborated with engineers to test company's web-site frontend, mobile apps and later IP-telephony services backend and billing system.

→ Secured with tests mobile apps (iOS, Android, Blackberry) RingCentral made for AT&T.
→ Moved IP-telephony media processing from Audiocodes to Convedia for the company.
→ Made the company billing PCI DSS Compliant to let the company go to IPO.

QA Engineer, Mobile Apps and IP-telephony backend

EPAM Systems

Studied at EPAM Training Center and then worked as a Jr. QA Engineer, as a Field Engineer: I went to the factories around St.Petersburg and Moscow and supported deployments of the system and provided technical and user feedback back to the team.

Jr. QA Engineer / Field Engineer

Product Manager with engineering and entrepreneurship backgrounds and passion for solving real problems for the customers and businesses

Builder at heart, ex Product Software Engineer and currently a Product Manager who makes products with deep and lasting feeling of exceptional care. Currently I am looking for a Product Manager job in an Empowered Product Team working in a Product Operating Model primarily in Northern Europe.

Check out my portfolio to learn more about me and my projects: https://togetherisbetter.github.io/portfolio

HIGH INTEGRITY OUTCOME-BASED ROADMAPS

This is an example of a rare interview when an interviewer decided to devote the whole discussion to a single topic. And as a result as to me we've got a brilliantly cool episode that addresses so many hot questions on roadmaps: "Are roadmaps ever useful?" by Marty Cagan and Phil Hornby on a "Talking Roadmaps" YouTube channel: https://lnkd.in/gX4Yz328 (34 min).

If you are interested in understanding why do most teams almost always are out of a schedule on roadmaps, are in fire missing deadlines and blaming stakeholders (who blame the teams) -- then this episode is for you 👍 

#roadmaps #outcomes #productdiscovery #martycagan

Aleksei Sotskov

ROADMAP THEMES: REPLACING FEATURES WITH THE CUSTOMER PROBLEMS TO SOLVE

During last 9 years I watched this "Building a winning product & UX strategy from the Kano Model" speech by Jared Spool at Mind the Product conference, London, 2015 (https://lnkd.in/dDD8vTi7 YouTube, 48 minutes) 15+ times. I know it so well, that I can literally quote!

If you're a Product Manager or a Product Designer and still haven't seen that speech yet, please find a time to watch it! Jared Spool almost made it a "UX Stand-Up": it's funny, it's practical and useful. I love it!

And since I am on "understanding roadmaps deeper" learning this week, I cut you a few minutes from that speech related to "Themes Roadmap". I see that many product people still haven't heard about such roadmaps. And I feel sad about it. Let's fix that?!

#roadmaps #ux #uxstrategy #jaredspool

PRODUCT MANAGERS SKILLS ASSESSMENT TOOL

Was reading "Coaching Tools – The Assessment" article written by Marty Cagan in SVPG blog in 2019 (https://lnkd.in/dKyHxHMV), and since I practice using Miro to visualize things, I decided to make a board with the required skills assessment. I hope, that Product Managers and Product Leaders if they didn't know about this article or didn't read it, will find this diagram interesting to check-out and maybe useful to read the article and refer to it once they need it.

👉 Shared Miro board: https://lnkd.in/dpNtAb-e

#productmanagement #coaching #svpg #miro

BACKLOG LONGER THAN 2 WEEKS OF WORK (IN AGILE) IS A ROTTEN BACKLOG

This week I dove deeper into the roadmaps understanding (check out in the comments links to "Roadmap Themes" and "High integrity Outcomes-based Roadmaps" videos) and on that dive I came to a deeper understanding of a product backlog and I'd like to share with you some of the ideas and statements that you may find interesting.

Marty Cagan tells: "Don’t prioritize your backlog – simply try thousands of ideas!" And I understand that this phrase might be difficult to get if we already have hundreds (maybe thousands) of tickets in backlog. I mean, that it might be difficult if we have it in reverse already: we try a few ideas and have thousands of tickets in backlog instead of trying thousands of ideas and having a few tickets in backlog. See it? If we do it in reverse, then what should we do with those thousands tickets in our backlogs? We don't understand because it doesn't meet our reality.

And from there I'd like to add: if we have a backlog that is longer than 2 weeks of work for our product development team, then this backlog is rotten, we have a problem. And on the contrary: if we have 1-2 weeks long backlog, then there's no sense in backlog prioritization, - this is exactly what Marty told us!

Why backlog is up to 2 weeks of work for the Agile teams? This is because in Agile, in a true Agile, we ship to learn and we don't know what we'll learn this week and how will it change everything that we do. But what we know is that it will change for sure. Product Trio (Product Manager, Product Designer and Tech Lead) works together in a Product Discovery trying those "thousands of ideas" aforementioned by Marty: they build prototypes, show them to customers, users, stakeholders, to the engineers of the team every day addressing major product risks. And for only those prototypes that seem are going to work (have risks addressed enough), Product Trio creates implementation tickets into the backlog for the engineering team.

And that's why we need to deploy to real customers at least every 2 weeks. Otherwise we learn too slow. Otherwise we're not Agile, guys. We may practice Scrum / Kanban, we may tell that we're Agile, but if we don't test our best ideas on real customers at least once in 2 weeks, then (sorry but) we're not Agile.

✳ TAKE AWAYS: for Agile teams backlog is up to 2 weeks of work for the team; deployment of the next product version to real customers is no longer than every 2 weeks.

And from here it has to be clear how we 1️⃣ test thousands of ideas and 2️⃣ have a small, up to 2 weeks of work backlog that doesn't need any prioritization. 

✴ I understand that this is completely different compared to how most teams work -- that's why I wrote this post and that's why I will be waiting to gently answer every your comment here. So, please don't hesitate to ask your questions! 🤗

// Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

#backlog #agile #productmanagement #productdiscovery

PAUSED MY 5+ YEARS LONG NON-STOP INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOTHERAPY

During last 5+ years I wasn't just in a therapy, but I read and watched a lot on psychotherapy, children pedagogy, emotional intelligence, non-violent communications, etc. -- to understand more about myself and about people around me. I learned it so intense that some people even started to ask me if I study to become a therapist by myself. But that was not the reason: I didn't (and still don't) want to become a therapist. Instead, I saw that this my emotional intelligence becomes an "unfair competitive advantage" everywhere in my life.

Most people in the world, and especially most men (men are only 20% among all the people who go to therapists) don't have such experience of 5+ years of non-stop weekly, twice a week and biweekly sessions with different therapists of different approaches to psychotherapy (humanistic, behavioral, group, etc.). And I understand that this works the same as with muscles in our body, with fitness: emotional intelligence can not be gained on a month or a year-long intensive course. People need to spend years with the right therapists to get to that type of fitness not just intellectually, but behaviorally -- so it could become a norm, rather than a small part of their life. 

That's why I see it as a powerful and an "unfair competitive advantage" for me. And for example, if I ever become a Founder or a Co-Founder again, now I'll be an emotionally intelligent one. And I'll union and hire people who are also emotionally intelligent who will build safe environment where people could work and grow at their natural best. And as you see, (sadly) this is not what we typically have in the world today and not what we expect to have in the nearest future...

Why is this post?

👉 If you ever thought about to try therapy, but didn't try, maybe this is the next call to you;
👉 If you already tried and have an unpleasant experience, then maybe it's a call to you to try with another person, with another approach;
👉 If you already there right now and just starting, I share with you what you can expect if you continue for years;
👉 And if you're there for years already, then you probably know what I'm talking about.

Feel free to ask me any questions here in the comments or directly!
Hugs! 🤗 

P.S.: I am glad and want to support Marty Cagan and Christian Idiodi who recently started their podcast and called it "Product Therapy" -- because therapy is what we really need in our crazy world. For us, for our children, relatives, friends and neighbors https://lnkd.in/d7XusxHD (YouTube, 1 min, trailer).

#therapy #psychotherapy #producttherapy

Open video: Product Therapy Trailer on youtu.be

https://youtu.be/x6M3l88-rgE?si=XJ_0kfoh5GOh1q0p

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