From Developer to CTO and COO of Manychat: Episode Materials (Series #Management)

On November 8, my conversation with Dima Kushnikov, CTO and COO of Manychat, came out (Code of Leadership, S2E30, episode #88). Before joining Manychat, Dima had already been CTO at a startup. Then he applied for a backend developer job because he wanted to write code again and understand how a product worked in a small company. At Manychat he went on to lead engineering and eventually took on operations as well. Along the way, what he was responsible for and what his team was responsible for changed several times.

We discussed:

🔸 What failed startups teach you On one project, pair programming helped the team make engineering decisions faster. The team only got serious about who would use the product in its final months. A group-buying service expected to earn a commission, even though payments went around the platform.

🔸 What choosing an audience gives you Flow Builder is almost a programming language under the hood. When you build a visual editor for marketers, it’s easier to decide which actions they actually need and which you can leave out for now.

🔸 Who owns quality as the number of teams grows Dima says Manychat’s head of testing helped make engineers responsible for quality throughout delivery. Around the same time, the teams moved to LeSS.

🔸 How operations became part of the CTO’s job Before the title changed, Dima was already helping set up people operations, had taken on analytics, and then started opening offices. He connects his willingness to try unfamiliar work to his cofounder’s trust and the freedom to get things wrong.

🔸 Where to try generative AI Engineers were given time to experiment on their own tasks, where they can check the answer themselves. If that answer goes to a customer’s audience, an error has different consequences. There were no results from the experiment at the time of the conversation.

Episode materials: — Episode page with timestamps — Video: YouTube, VK Video — Audio: Podster, Apple Podcasts — Written summary

If you went back to engineering after a leadership role, what did you notice about your team’s work once you were writing code again?

#CodeOfLeadership #Management #Leadership #Engineering #Product