Engineering Management: The Bottleneck Is the Organization

Anatoly Panov leads engineering for Yandex Maps, Navigator, and its geospatial platform after six years developing Avito verticals. His story begins with a dream of making games and the Moscow Institute of Steel and Alloys, where he studied metallurgy and drafted a pipe-mill business plan.

Anatoly built his practical skills on his own: a web studio, PHP from a book, mobile-content services, and an early social network with a forum and chat. Real-estate and hosting startups followed. At Badoo he spent five years on payments, rose from junior to senior engineer and technical lead, but saw no clear next step within the team.

The next challenge was Lazada's Moscow hub: grow to one hundred specialists while replacing overloaded PHP applications with Go services. The team hired, built infrastructure, and learned a new language at once. After Alibaba acquired Lazada and moved development to Asia, Anatoly chose Avito.

Avito's verticals developed cars, property, services, and goods through end-to-end teams instead of horizontal functions. A shared model of categories and attributes became the technical foundation. Architecture was insufficient on its own: autonomy required agreements with business leaders about metrics, ownership, and acceptable trade-offs.