Engineering Management: An Org Structure for the Moment

Vladimir Kokhanov is a CTO at T-Bank. He led debit and deposit products, spending operations, and transaction processing before moving to the mass-market segment. The episode links that role to a career that began in Astrakhan with a first computer, competitive programming, and studies at MIET.

Assignments at his older brother's company steered Vladimir toward Android, while his first paid job required five hours of commuting each day. In 2015 he joined Tinkoff Business as an experienced mobile engineer. Initiative, teaching, and community work helped him become a team lead, and the team grew from three people to twelve or thirteen.

In 2019 Vladimir joined Project X, later Vivid Money, to build a European mobile bank from scratch. Within a year, mobile engineering grew from one person to twenty and the full engineering group to roughly seventy. After launch, functional teams were reorganized around products, and Vladimir became Head of Engineering.

Returning to T-Bank in 2023, he had to take on roughly fifty teams, define organizational boundaries, improve delivery speed, and create a technology strategy. That strategy spans architecture, people, process, cost, and multi-year business plans, while the segment model shifts attention from isolated products to customer needs.