Episode Materials: Leading in an Unfamiliar Field with Leonid Chernyy (Category #Leadership)

You can build a search engine that outperforms a competitor and still hear a user ask, “Why would I switch?” In my conversation with Leonid Chernyy, this story about Yandex in Turkey helped explain why moving into a new field takes more than transferring familiar solutions.

I’ve collected the recording and summary of our Code of Leadership S2E23 conversation from September 29. Leonid writes Irregular CDO and has worked at Cybiko, Nival, Yandex, Rambler, MegaFon, oneFactor, and Uzum. We followed his career and discussed a situation where you already need to lead, while the team understands the subject better than you do.

In this episode:

🔸 Building testing from scratch How a part-time job paid by the bug led to managing testers and then establishing quality processes at Nival. And why explaining the expected outcome proved useful in publishing as well as testing. 🔸 A different market brings different constraints Allods Online in Japan and Korea, adapting a game to local culture, and search in Turkey. In Leonid’s account, café visitors preferred unbranded Yandex results but did not intend to leave their familiar Google. Strong internal metrics do not automatically give someone a reason to switch. 🔸 Permission to disagree with the boss At MegaFon, Leonid started with relationships, his own learning, and convincing the team to raise concerns before a decision if they thought the manager was wrong. We also discussed the limits of protecting a team: people still need to learn to work with the surrounding organization. 🔸 A CDO without authority One title may cover policies, a data warehouse, or commercial machine-learning applications. So “What am I responsible for?” belongs alongside “Which decisions can I influence?”

Episode materials:

📌 Episode page with timestamps 🎬 YouTube, VK Video 🎧 Podster, Yandex Music, Apple Podcasts 📝 7-minute summary

If you have moved into management in an unfamiliar field, what was harder: learning the subject or letting go of your usual way of solving everything?

#CodeOfLeadership #Leadership #Management #Product #Data