From Developer to Manager: Don't Judge People by Yourself

Vadim starts with how he ended up at T-Bank at all. After VK and a Moscow startup he spent over a year as a front-end developer for an American service that helped people look after their garden and house: remotely from Moscow, through a marketplace where a camera watches you, screenshots your screen and counts the paid hours — fall ill or step away and the hours stop. After a year came a crisis of meaning: the dollars are good, but the product is built for a market you do not live in and never use yourself. In the summer of 2017 an advert on a social network that is now banned — for the launch of a mobile operator, "we will change the world, come and join us" — inspired him to apply. He started in September, not with the operator but on the front end of the credit broker team, which was also shipping part of that launch: the application form and the tariff grid on the web.

A couple of months later Vadim happened to see what colleagues were doing on the bank's journal, fell for the project instantly and wrote to Alexander, who pointed him to Sasha Rai. For a while he effectively held two jobs: up at eight, an hour on a journal interactive straight away in the manner of Stephen King, then off to the broker. The journal, launched around 2015 by his reckoning, was the first bank-run media speaking in an almost punk register rather than in officialese; Maxim Ilyakhov was editor-in-chief then and, contrary to expectations, pushed not the terse information style but a freer format. Vadim's first interactives asked how long you would last if you were fired, and joked about living on instant noodles. Alexander adds the other half of the logic: an audience of roughly thirty million a month comes for usefulness, and financial-literacy journalism balances the image of a bank that earns on lending.

Sasha Rai offered Vadim the manager's job for his proactivity: whoever gets involved and solves problems is immediately a leadership candidate. They needed someone to own the technical side end to end. Arseny, who had moved the journal off WordPress onto Django, had no appetite for technical leadership, and Vadim treats that as a typical story — these are different roles. The monolith was then split into services by domain, a team on each, and a learning platform was launched. Vadim had almost no management experience: he downloaded some American management course and rang an acquaintance, though today he says the right move was to ask his own people — he was too embarrassed to admit he did not know. He then took a questionnaire round every stakeholder — what hurts now, what to fix in six months, what in two years — and came back with a plan in one table. Alexander did much the same when he took over mobile banking in late 2019, only with a far bigger team.

With few developers, Vadim worked hands-on and funnelled everything through himself: some five front-enders, every review on his desk, a queue — and, by his own account, he was tiresome in reviews and judged people by his own pace. By early 2020, as he recalls it, both the journal and the learning platform hung on him, delegation was not working, he could not grow leads, and a first burnout followed, lasting months; he had no one-to-ones with his manager: they were partners, business and engineering. He was on his way out when Alexander invited him into special projects — a team with annual turnover that the journal used to tease. A special project differs from a product in horizon: it lifts sales or loyalty within one quarter, through a game rather than a dull mailing. Hence a city quest where one player drove across half the country for the prize, and, for the bank's fifteenth anniversary, a series with helicopters and a Black Mirror-style decision tree, where a robot assistant rang to dictate a cipher. Roughly a hundred such projects came out over five years, and then games, where the hard part, Vadim stresses, starts after launch: live ops, the economy, events.

From there Vadim turns to his main theme, becoming a manager. The bank's in-house management programme, whose pilot he joined, overturned how he thought about the job; from it he took a pyramid of competence — a manager influences goals and behaviour, knowledge and skills can be trained, attitude only weakly, and personality is off limits, that being a therapist's work. Alexander objects that influence is a question of horizon: over years, a consistent attitude and real help with growth shift even that; the scale is simply different. Vadim agrees and admits he keeps revising his views. Then comes DISC with its four zones — dominant, energising, friendly, analytical — and his real discovery was the permission it gave: you are not great at some things, and that is fine. He went through it with a coach together with his wife: he is spontaneous, she needs a week's notice, and he used to drag her onto his own template. Beyond that, DISC never stuck for him — he simply forgot about it.

PCM did stick — a communication model out of Eric Berne's transactional analysis, which his cohort studied in September 2024. Vadim cannot recall the author's name but says he was a clinical psychologist on Clinton's campaign staff who split the electorate into six types so a speech would land with every segment. Vadim's own base is action: without projects he wilts; alongside sit warmth, logic, rebelliousness, dreaming and the persistence of people with opinions. Across a team of fifty-one he sees these shelves and, together with Belbin's roles found in an article on Habr, staffs a team for the job: in an interactive with three invented teams he shows that without the analytical types there will be no reliable service, that two dominant ones produce a leadership clash, and that the third will drown in architecture debate. Alexander recalls that all models are wrong but some are useful — a scalpel an untrained hand uses to cut its own finger. Vadim agrees, remembering his own cargo cult with scrum on the journal.