I had two chances to lead a team in my life. And both times I have created from scratch cross-functional teams of highly-skilled professionals that I can be proud of.

After receiving a PhD in Technology I have got my first team as a Head of research department in Information and communication center of the Research institute. I had to build my own research team for automated systems design. I have achieved such a good results building a team of IT professionals and building a test lab infrastructure that some time later I have been assigned as head of IT department of the Institute. While staying as a head of research department I have managed both system administrators and researchers. That was very interesting experience for me. I had a chance to participate both in scientific projects and help people practically, both times being tasked with dealing with IT problems. That period of time was very important for my development as a multi-spectrum specialist and a good manager.

Me second chance to lead a team happened in my current workplace when I was asked to form a new documentation team for VK Cloud Solutions (Mail.Ru Cloud Solutions at that time). I have been working in the company for more than a year already. This was a great chance for me not only build a new team from scratch but also improve upon my leadership skills in an Agile environment. My previous experience was in classic management (also called a Waterfall method). Since then I have created and managed a team of 11 professionals in different areas (5 technical writers, 4 analysts, 1 QA and 1 DocOps specialist). I have established effective processes with regular (daily, weekly and monthly) meetings, short-term (one sprint) and mid-term (1-3 months) planing, sprint retrospectives, style guide discussions and regular feedback exchange.

Also now I am the leader of the Technical writer’s guild in my company. It is a professional group with regular (bi weekly) internal meetups and discussions for experience exchange.