Finland

Generalist Product Management

Technical Product Management

Growth Product Management

Platform Product Management

Community Management

Product Marketing

Alexandra Bystrova

Fractional CPO

Product strategy

Communication

Empathy

Stakeholder management

Marketing strategy

Typeform

WordPress

Amplitude

Balsamiq

Hotjar

InVision

Jira

Lucidchart

Confluence

Google Analytics

SEMrush

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Brand positioning

Branding

Content strategy

Email marketing

Social media marketing

Monetisation

Building a B2C platform for international job seekers.

Mentoring early-stage startups and helping them:
- Find Product-Market-Fit,
- Scale using Unit Economics.

4 FinTech and EdTech startups from Finland, the UK, and Eastern Europe are in the long-term consulting.

- Created a product development strategy for Keywords Research tools within 3 months.
- Identified 4 growth areas based on user research (including about 20 interviews within 2 months), data analysis, market research, trend analysis, etc.

Ingram Micro is a Fortune 500 company. I was a part of the CloudBlue platform division.
Managed a portfolio of 4 B2B SaaS products at once:
- PSA Integrations (between CloudBlue Commerce platform and Professional services automation and Accounting tools like ConnectWise, Autotask, Syncro, and QuickBooks, Xero),
- Tax, anti-fraud, payment plugins for CloudBlue Commerce,
- Approval Engine for subscription orders,
- Billing scenarios for subscription cancellations.

Achievements:
- Launched a new integration, improved the existing one and attracted 3+ providers as a result.
- Conducted 30+ interviews within 11 months with 3+ providers and 10+ resellers as a part of continuous customer development and product discovery. 
- Saved the product budget by identifying and disabling old unused plugins.
- Supported several billing scenarios in compliance with one of the vendor's prompt requirements within 3 months.
- Introduced OKR methodology and unit economics to the product team.
- Attracted 5 interns to the product team (from my personal network as a student mentor) 2 days after an internship program had been introduced at Ingram Micro. 3 of them got hired and passed their probation period. One of them still works at Ingram Micro and got promoted to a PM.

Mentoring ITMO University students who pursue a Product Manager career. Consulting startup founders.

MTS is the #1 Russian telecom company with 88 million users.
MyMTS is the top app at MTS (30+ million MAU). It was the #1 mobile app and #30 among all Russian apps (by AppStore ranking in 2018). That is a self-service app that accompanies self-service websites: mts.ru and lk.mts.ru (10+ million MAU).
I was responsible for a portfolio of products within the "Loyalty, ads, and targeted communications" vertical within these app&web services.

Achievements:
- Launched an integration with a new loyalty service (MTS Cashback) to MyMTS and lk.mts.ru. Closed the old integration, with the previous loyalty program – MTS Bonus. As a result, 20K+ users signed up for the new loyalty service within 3 months after launch.
- I justified the need to redesign the app for the whole MyMTS team (from team leader to CTO and the dev team). As a result, the traffic to MTS Cashback integration grew by 3 times. After the integration page update, the conversion to sign-up increased by 2 times.
- Launched and initiated raising the budget for an internal tool for tNPS and the other polls. That tool became an eco-system module that is now integrated into several mobile apps and websites within MTS digital portfolio. That tool saved several thousands of dollars due to stopping monthly spending by the other departments and a one-time investment in the all-in-one tool.
- I was a buddy to more than 5 product managers and product analysts (I onboarded and mentored them).
- I was the first in the MyMTS product team to hire an internal product analyst. Developed a job description for the product analyst role for the loyalty team. Interviewed and hired 2 analyst interns.

- Managed a portfolio of 3 B2B SaaS FinTech products: a part of the main product (https://lk.ofd.ru/) and 2 new products.

Achievements:
- Launched 2 B2B SaaS products from scratch (Ferma, Renta): from an idea stage to MVP and production.
- Established a system of getting feedback and input from the internal teams (customer support, account managers, etc.) on all the issues addressed to the Product Managers team via a poll and Zapier-based automation within 1 week. Conducted internal training sessions about that automation system.

I was responsible for several UK-based software development projects that Magora Systems took part in as an outsourcing company.
Achievements:
- Prepared 3 concepts based on market research for several product ideas.

- Created a concept of the show and community together with the co-hosts.
- Managed the whole project (finding guests, booking places for video interviews, preparing collective questions for the guest, etc.),
- Kept the podcast website up and running,
- Optimised YouTube video keywords and video descriptions.

Achievements:
- Organised 10+ offline meet-ups,
- Was an interviewer 30+ times,
- Recorded 4 short solo educational videos about Product Management,
- Was an editor for 25+ YouTube videos.

- Managed an ads templates maker in a team of 10 people (Developers, QA engineers, DevOps engineers),
- Created product roadmaps for two high-load products.
- Coordinated compound features development with the other IT teams.

My achievements:
- Introduced Scrum to the product team that was absolutely not familiar with this approach. Established new procedures and educated the team within 3 weeks.

- Managed 3+ high-load projects within DevOps & IT Tech Support departments (from initiation, planning, and execution to integration, support, establishing processes, and educating people about new systems and processes).

Achievements:
- Organised IT Tech Support flow across the company. Created a system for structured input to PM teams via Youtrack using issue-type templates.
- Developed IT Support Team motivation scheme (for a team of 5 people).

- Processed IT-related queries regarding a high-load AdTech system (ad network) from the sales team, HR team, DevOps team, and the other teams (IT teams and non-IT teams),
- Set and assigned tasks for software developers and the other IT team members inside my department and outside my department,
- Resolved conflicts between team members, and between teams.
- Coordinated the tasks that require cooperation with the other IT departments.
- Improved processes: invented and organised new processes, created process documentation, educated colleagues, and controlled process compliance with the plans.
- Conducted onboarding training programs for new employees, and informed sales departments about process improvements.

Achievements:
- Established the processes according to the ITIL principles.

Created and translated (Ru->En) different types of texts (in English) for marketing activities:
- Press releases,
- Emails to journalists,
- Posts for social networks, etc.

- Created internal technical documentation in English in Confluence Wiki format (describing software development process, describing XML files format),
 - Developed e-learning content for people with disabilities (created transcripts describing math graphs, formulas and the other elements of interactive tasks in order to give blind students who use screen readers an opportunity to hear the description of what is going on the screen).

From time to time I also took part in testing and analytics activities:
 - Collected functional and business requirements and developed BRDs (a Business Requirements Document),
 - Performed applications manual testing (with the help of browser plug-ins for developers, packet sniffers, and cross-platform testing tools).

Developed customer documentation for CloudBerry Backup, CloudBerry Explorer, and CloudBerry Drive solutions for Cloud Storages (Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, etc.).

Prepared documentation in the following formats:
- Posts for the company blog,
- HTML files for an embedded Help system,
- Installation Guides in MS Word format.

Responsibilities:
- Android application manual testing:
-   Test cases execution,
-   Defects submission to a bug-tracking system.

PlanGo organizer was my diploma project with a group mate. It was a mobile app for managing personal activities. 

My responsibilities:
- Strategic planning.
- Business analysis and marketing research (micro-environment analysis, macro-environment analysis, market research, competitor analysis, customer analysis) with the help of the following tools: SWOT, PEST, benchmarking, business model canvases (Lean Canvas/Ash Maurya Canvas, Alexander Osterwalder Canvas), 4P/Marketing mix concept, Competitive Profile Matrix, etc.
- Gathering requirements for the mobile application.
- Creating project documentation (FRD/FRS - Functional Requirements Document/Specification, BRD - Business Requirements Document).
- Prioritizing the requirements for different software development stages (from MVP - Minimal Viable Product - to Production).
- Project coordination according to Customer Development methodology, Lean Startup methodology.
- Creating user interface sketches, mockups, wireframes, UI prototypes.
- Marketing strategy development and implementation.
- Mobile app PR, promotion.
- SMM (Social Media Management) and Content Management activities in English (managing brand and company accounts in social networks, content creation, content curation, followers base expansion, viral techniques application, communication with followers).
- Brand website creation and support.
- Managing an email marketing campaign (integrating Mailchimp to the website, creating an email gathering form, administering the subscribers list, creating and designing the signup form, the response emails).
- Monitoring the website metrics.
- Team management (personnel recruitment and motivation, human resources allocation and planning).

Responsibilities:
- Coordinated improvement ideas processing.
- Reorganized the process of ideas management.
- Participated in defects prevention discussions.

Responsibilities:
- Developed and supported customer documents for several projects,
- Translated internal and accompanying documentation from English to Russian and vice versa.
- Worked with issue-tracking and version control systems.

Integration testing:
- Test cases development and test automation programs development for the software of iDEN mobile network Base Stations.
- Code changes in the test environment.
- Cooperation with the test team and interaction with the development team.
- Participation in technical documents verification (test plans, test cases, features description).

Alexandra Bystrova🇫🇮