Interview with Product Manager

Life At Clearmove
Interview with Product Manager

A Product Manager is a person who is always between the team and investors. Playing on both sides, he needs to make sure that everyone is happy. A guru of negotiations and a master of compromises, but who is he as a person? Today Myroslav shares with us about his life and personality, his difficult and responsible job, and his Clearmove experience.


About Myroslav

 

How can you describe yourself in short? 

I am a lazy person. Someone famous said that only lazy people can reach success, because they like optimizing, instead of doing the same things over and over again. And someday I want to be really good at what I do.

 

What hobbies do you have?

I’ve got many hobbies. I believe that if you want to keep your brain smart you need to work with your neuron connection all the time. That’s why it’s vital to have many interests and I’m working on it. Some people consider me a geek, some know me as a comics fan, some – as a fan of classical music (I studied it as a child playing the violin and I love the sound of it, I like to listen to it when I’m in a certain mood). My main hobby is woodworking, the last thing I’ve made was a guitar wall hanger. I also like playing guitar, cooking, and active sports. Oh, of course, I’m an animal lover, especially dogs.

 

What’s your favorite holiday type? Are you a beach potato or an active person?

I like sports, particularly extreme ones. It gives you a feeling of freedom and totally resets your brain after months of work, stresses, overtime deadlines, etc. It’s hard to always keep your brain focused without switching to something else.

I’m definitely not a beach potato, I’d be bored with that kind of holiday. It actually happened once, when I went on an all-inclusive holiday to Egypt and spent the first two days doing nothing. By the end of the second day, I opened Slack and started working. The only way to stop doing this was to arrange some activities. So, for the rest of the holiday, I didn’t spend a single hour in the hotel.

The only time I can lay down and read a book it’s when I’m exhausted, which is rare. I like to listen to audiobooks if I’m in the right mindset. Usually, I listen to books about self-development or related topics. Recently I shared my favorite books in this article. One small tip: if you think that audiobooks do not work, they do, you just need to listen to each of them 5 to 6 times. This is how it works for me.

 

What inspires you and gives you energy?

Well, I’m trying to get inspiration from different fields of my life: body and health, work and achievements, relationships, and future goals. You should listen to yourself, and your body. If you do everything right you won’t lose your inspiration for a single moment. I’ve got quite a lot of examples of what may inspire me: playing guitar, doing sports, cooking, hanging out with friends. Today I might feel like cooking an Ethiopean meal but tomorrow I’ll be teaching lectures on software development at Kyiv Polytechnical Institute. By the way, I’ve been teaching there voluntarily for the past 5 years and it gives me so much positive energy.

 

If you could choose the country to live in, where would you go?

I would stay in Ukraine, I adore Kyiv. Nonetheless, I do like traveling around Asia as well. I had a chance to move to the USA but I stayed here. I have lots of friends who relocated, I talked to them and I decided that it’s not for me. If all smart people leave Ukraine there won’t be anyone left here to change the country for the better.


About job

 

Describe your current job in one sentence.

That’s a tricky one. My job is making difficult decisions, and taking responsibility for the outcome, no matter what it is. But it is so important to understand that your key goal is to bring value to people.

 

How did you become who you are right now? How did you start your career?

My career started at University, I used to be in the student council, where I took different projects. Later I decided to start my career in Training and Development. I found a company that, I thought at that time, cared about its employee growth, and was willing to build a training center for them. It was a trend in the USA. After some time spent there, I realized that no one in Ukraine believed in employee training, so I switched back to product management. I joined one distribution company. It was interesting but way closer to marketing than to product management in its classic understanding. After a year or so I realized that I missed IT and came back. I was working in several outsourcing companies and product companies as a Business Analyst, Product Manager, or even a Project Manager on some projects. An interesting lesson I’ve learned throughout this time is: when you do everything right it doesn’t mean that you will beat the market. Sometimes it’s a matter of circumstance.

 

And what brought you to Clearmove after outsourcing companies?

Once I felt very tired and took a break for a month to do some wood stuff in my garage. I refused all the job offers I received, but my friend Rodion was very instructive about the job position in the company called Clearmove. By the way, this friend had invited me to work for Amadeus a few years before that but I refused.

 

So you refused to work at Amadeus for Clearmove?

Ha-ha. We can say so 🙂

 

What do you not like about being a Product Manager?

You are responsible for everything and this can be quite stressful.

 

As a product manager, do you often need to negotiate between the team and investors?

Not often, no – always! You always negotiate. From the product development side, you need to cut costs all the time, which means not caring about the people who work on this product. However, to deliver features you need resources. And this means you need money So you are the one to find this golden middle. You might also need to negotiate between developing a bad code that works vs beautiful code that requires lots of time to create, between good design vs easy implementation, and the list goes on.

By the way, Myroslav shared his views on which soft skills are needed to be a successful product manager in this article.

 

How do you measure your own performance at work?

I have no clue. For myself, it’s when everyone in my team can do their work without any obstacles or blockers.

You used to work for both Ukrainian and international companies. What is the difference between their approaches to business?

The very big difference actually. First of all, there is a wrong perception of leadership in Ukraine. Some people believe they are leaders simply because their father owned a business and gave it to them or put them in C level position, for example. However, to be a genuine and good leader, you must be chosen by the people you lead.

Ukrainians don’t know how to count money and often have very poor soft skills. Some ‘traditional’ employers in Ukraine offer their staff a salary that is barely enough to cover the bills and the people are used to exhaustion. At the same time, they buy expensive tools that no one knows how to use. It is so common to not care about people’s wellbeing. This is because those company holders do not think about the long term perspective, only the immediate benefit is important. As for me, it’s completely the wrong approach. Maybe it’s based on hard times after the collapse of the USSR. Hopefully, this will slowly change.

 

Who is your favorite leader and why?

It depends on the situation. I like history, I learn from many historical figures and events. We can see how different situations require different types of leadership. For example, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill,  Margaret Thatcher: all three famous British prime ministers. All of them had times when they failed. Chamberlain was prime minister at the start of World War Two and failed there, but he was a great leader for peacetime. Churchill was a great wartime leader but after the war, he failed as well. Thatcher was great for the depression. So you see they had the skills that the situation required. Steve Jobs was kicked from Apple, Elon Musk was kicked from Paypal that he created. Are they leaders? Yes. But sometimes you simply don’t have enough skills to handle the situation. So, to be a good leader, you need to know your strengths and work with your weaknesses so you can be suited to the situation or let someone else handle it.

 

What are the advantages of being a leader?

None. Being a leader is not something that is just a part of you. As I said, you don’t become a leader because you decided so, it’s because people choose you to be a leader.


About Clearmove

 

Did you work in Global Mobility before? What excites you in this industry?

Emm, no. I worked in different domains. Some of them were B2C businesses, but mostly B2B. I just like B2B more. When it comes to Clearmove, for me it’s not about Global Mobility but values and the team. Haitham is a great leader, Maksym is a great leader as well. We have many strong professionals here. I like my team a lot and I like my position here. There are a lot of interesting challenges to overcome and a lot of cases to learn from. The Global Mobility market is something that hasn’t been changed for a while and Clearmove wants to reinvent it completely! It’s great to be in that sort of company, in the position where you can make something new. `be the part of something big. Something that really can be useful to those who are going to use it.

 

Why do you prefer working in a start-up?

Who knows? Maybe I’m a crazy one and like stress. I worked in an outsourcing company before, where nothing interesting happened for two years. Not my cup of tea.

 

Do you prefer working from home to the office?

I prefer working from the office but there is no option now. Team efficiency is higher: I can communicate with three people at the same time answering three questions, whereas online I cannot do that.

 

Do you prefer working with professionals or beginners?

I prefer to work with professionals because they know how to take responsibility for their decisions. You can have a good team of people who really know the technical side of things, but if no one wants to take responsibility they won’t have success.

 

Which of the company’s values (Innovation, Initiative, Responsibility, Leadership, Resilience, Teamwork, People) resonates with you the most?

Leadership, Teamwork, People, Innovation. I believe that we can’t talk about one specific company value, we can only talk about them in a group. Each one on its own doesn’t give us anything, but they all balance each other out. Leadership balances people, Teamwork balances Resilience. If you are going to work for a company, you should check all their values. It’s like a machine: remove one part of it and you will get a completely different result. So more or less, I am into all of our values.

 

If you were to go on a Mars expedition with your Clearmove team, how would you divide the roles?

Can I stay at home and work remotely?

 

Yeah of course, but who goes where?

Okay so first of all, I would prefer to hire professionals and everyone else from Clearmove I put in the leadership positions.  For example:

  1. Vitaliy Yehorov would be responsible for the engine
  2. Maksym Dudkin would be in charge of roads, where we put the base, and what it looks like.
  3. Viktor Loktionov would be the person who is responsible for risk management, he will be the one who we ask what can go wrong.
  4. Andrew Ivaniv would be responsible for innovations, improving things, Alongside Viktor’s comments on risks it should be interesting
  5. Oleksii and Andrew Popovich will be responsible for Victor’s ideas implementation.
  6. Vika, Olya, Valeria, would help with innovations
  7. Valentyn would make sure we have background information, growth plans, and big and difficult stuff that no one else can handle.
  8. Artem would be responsible for fun, entertainment, music, everything else. And, probably I would put Julia with him as a teammate.
  9. Sofia will be responsible for all instructions and guidelines.
  10. Our design team may work on our enjoyment, I would say, not entertainment but the vision of beauty, for what we see, for how we are invigorated because we will miss Ukraine.
  11. Iryna Dubova definitely would be responsible for sports and other healthy activities. She is really good at it.
  12. Anna Vynokurova and Herman – for pets! They may also care about our people.
  13. Iryna Shapoval and Olha Maksymets would help with communications of course.

If we can add to this list London and Abu Dhabi offices then it’s even more fun. James Speirs would be responsible for finding someone else from another planet to sell our smart solution to. Haitham would be responsible for the whole of Mars and for the party (sorry, Artem loses that job). And me? I would do the cooking.


Do you want to join our amazing team on the way to Mars reshaping the Global Mobility industry?

 

Apply here!

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