From Product Manager to Venture Advisor: What I Learned About Turning Ideas Into Reality

More than ten years ago, I started my career in product management as an intern at Yandex, one of the largest technology companies in Russia. At that time, I did not know exactly where this path would take me. I only knew that I liked working on difficult problems. I liked the moment when something did not exist yet, when the problem was still unclear, and there was no obvious answer. I enjoyed asking questions, understanding how people behave, finding patterns, and then turning all of that into something real.

Over the years, that became the common thread across my career.

I grew from an intern into a product leader and eventually led the launch of a grocery delivery direction at Yandex during the COVID-19 pandemic, building the product and the operation from the ground up at a time when the market was changing almost every day. After that, I continued working across startups and digital products, including HealthTech and wellness. I took on product leadership roles, helped launch new products, and worked on projects where the biggest challenge was often not how to build something, but understanding what should actually be built in the first place.

Looking back, I realize that most of my work has always been connected to the same type of problem: taking an idea, an opportunity, or a difficult situation and turning it into something that can realistically work in the real world.

For a long time, I thought this was simply what product management was. Then I started mentoring.

I began helping founders and product people who reached out to me directly. Later, I joined accelerator programs as a mentor, helping startups with product thinking and strategy. At first, most of the questions were about products. What should we build? Which feature should we prioritize? How should we understand our customers? Why are people not using the product?

But gradually, I started noticing something interesting. The same way of thinking could be applied to problems that had nothing to do with product features.

A founder might ask how to choose the right audience for a marketing campaign. Another person might be trying to decide where to open a physical store. Someone else might be looking for the right supplier or trying to understand which business opportunity to pursue.

These problems looked different on the surface, but underneath, they often had something in common. There was uncertainty. There were multiple possible directions. There were assumptions that had not been tested. And there was usually a temptation to make a decision too early.

This is where I started to see the broader value of product thinking. At its core, product thinking is a structured way of dealing with uncertainty.

You start by trying to understand the problem instead of immediately jumping to a solution. You explore what is really happening, why it is happening, and for whom. You narrow the problem down until you can clearly define what needs to change. Then you explore possible solutions.

You generate options, choose where to focus, build something small enough to test, observe what happens, measure the result, and learn from it. If it works, you continue. If it does not, you change your approach. Then you repeat.

This process is often associated with product discovery, design thinking, or frameworks such as the Double Diamond. But I have come to see it as something much broader. It is a way of thinking. And once you start using it, you begin to notice that many problems in business and life can be approached in the same way.

Instead of asking, "What should we do?" you first ask, "What problem are we actually trying to solve?" Instead of choosing the first solution that sounds reasonable, you explore alternatives. Instead of spending months building based on assumptions, you find ways to learn faster. Instead of trying to predict the future perfectly, you create small experiments that help you understand it.

The more I worked with founders and companies, the more I realized that this was the way I had been thinking throughout my entire career. I was not simply managing products. I was constantly trying to make sense of complex situations.

I was looking for the real problem underneath the visible one. I was trying to understand where attention should go and what should be ignored. I was connecting information from different sources, asking questions, forming hypotheses, and helping teams decide what to do next.

This became especially clear when I looked at the projects I had worked on as a Product Manager and Product Director. Again and again, I found myself working on new products, new directions, or projects that needed to be built from zero.

Starting from zero is a very specific skill. There is no roadmap. There is no proven playbook.

The data is incomplete. The market may not exist yet. Customers may not know exactly what they want. The team has limited resources, and every decision creates an opportunity cost. You have to make progress without having certainty.

This is the environment where I feel most comfortable. I enjoy solving puzzles. I like situations where the answer is not obvious and where the problem itself may still be unclear. I am naturally curious, and I enjoy asking questions that help people see something they had not noticed before.

Over the years, I have also heard a similar thing from many people I worked with: I think differently. I never thought of this as a particular superpower. But I do think I have developed a habit of looking at problems from different angles and questioning assumptions that are easy to accept as facts.

Sometimes the most valuable thing I can do for a founder is not give them an answer. It is to help them ask a better question.

That realization eventually changed the direction of my work. I started teaching some of these approaches through courses and mentoring. But I gradually understood that I enjoyed the practical work more than teaching the theory. I wanted to be closer to the real problems.

Today, I work with founders and businesses, often at moments when something important needs to happen. A company wants to launch something new but does not know where to start. A founder has too many possible directions and cannot decide where to focus. A team has already built something, but the results are not coming. A business has grown, but the strategy that worked before is no longer enough.

Sometimes the problem is product. Sometimes it is positioning. Sometimes it is the customer. Sometimes it is the business model. And sometimes the real problem is simply that everyone is working hard without a shared understanding of what they are actually trying to achieve.

These situations look different, but they require the same fundamental ability: to step back, understand the system, identify the real problem, and create a path forward. This is the work I enjoy most. And this is also what led me to create Dreamstinct.

I believe that many companies do not need more ideas. They need more clarity. They need someone who can help them see the system underneath the problem, challenge their assumptions, identify what really matters, and turn uncertainty into a sequence of decisions and experiments.

That is especially important when building something new. When you are launching a new product, entering a new market, or starting a new venture, you cannot rely entirely on experience. The future is uncertain by definition.

You need a way to learn. You need a way to decide. And you need a way to keep moving without pretending that you already know the answer.

This is the approach I have developed over more than a decade — from starting as a product management intern at Yandex, to launching products from zero, to working as a product leader across startups and HealthTech, to mentoring founders and teams, and now helping companies as a venture and product advisor in the international market. The context has changed many times. The underlying work has not.

I help people turn uncertainty into clarity, and clarity into action.

I help them understand what problem they are really solving, decide where to focus, test their assumptions, and build something that has a real chance of working.

I still love products. But today I see product thinking as something much bigger than product management. It is a way to navigate uncertainty.

And in a world where almost every ambitious company is trying to build something new, I believe this way of thinking is becoming one of the most valuable skills a founder, leader, or team can develop.