I build, tinker, and experiment with all kinds of stuff - from coding POCs with Claude Code to creating ambient patches in VCV rack to shooting videos for my friend’s flamenco school in Krakow. On paper, I’m a technical product manager.
Fifteen years of that across ad tech, e-commerce, and SaaS. Ukrainian, moved to Poland in 2014. Married, three kids.
The path
Started at a photo production studio in Kyiv. I met the founder at a university party - friend of a friend, already a successful producer at another studio. I was a year into photography and showing my work to anyone who’d look. He looked, gave me brutally honest feedback, and we clicked. When he started his own studio a while later, he invited me to join. Five of us full-time, plus contractors when we needed them. We turned it into a high-end production studio, shooting worldwide ad campaigns and local Ukrainian ones for all the major agencies in Kyiv. I learned the full production process, from pre-production meetings to a billboard going up across the country. The kind of work where you spend fourteen hours shooting a single beer bottle because that’s the level of detail it takes. But the bigger thing I took from those five years was the experience of working with a small team that genuinely cares about what they’re making. That stuck with me - it’s still what I look for. Those people are lifetime friends now.
Then e-commerce at Kasta during their 12x growth year. I ran the end-to-end product processing pipeline - collecting samples, prepping them for shoots, photography with and without models, retouching, writing catalog descriptions, publishing to production. We went from processing 200 items a day to a couple of thousand. I came up with and pushed for a tracking system to follow each sample through the whole cycle, taught myself SQL by diving into production databases, and eventually built the company’s first BI system. That last one taught me about data democratization - giving every department a full picture from site visits to sales to inventory, instead of each team operating with their own slice of reality.
Nine years in ad tech after that - StrikeAd, Sizmek, then Amazon (which acquired Sizmek in 2019). At StrikeAd and Sizmek I taught myself Python to build a discrepancy monitoring dashboard that reduced detection time from weeks to hours. Delivered 15+ SSP integrations, cut infrastructure costs by 50%, launched private marketplace, video, native, and audio ad formats.
At Amazon, I built Visual Analytics from zero - a reporting dashboard that hit 80% adoption within weeks. Led the cross-team delivery of Search Engine Analytics, a migration-critical product. Mentored someone from support into a PM role - they’re a Senior PM at Amazon now. That one matters to me.
Voicemod brought me in as Principal PM for cloud infrastructure. The role was good until it became four jobs at once. Shipped good work, burned out.
The break
Two years off. Full-time parenting, not a career gap. Recovery from burnout and intentional time with my kids. During this time I picked up Python seriously, built tools, and figured out how I actually want to work. The tinkering instinct was always there. The break is when it crystallized.
Now
Running Satori Ads - wallet pass advertising through Apple and Google Wallet. First paying pilot landed, got into WPP’s accelerator. I do product strategy, write backend code, and handle the co-founder things - investors, partnerships, company ops.
Claude Code is my operating environment, not an experiment. Two years of daily use changed how I think about the PM role entirely. Less specs, more working code.
Open source stuff: Tribe Coding plugins, pidcast for podcast analysis, vulcan-notify for syncing my kids’ school data from an API I reverse-engineered because the school’s app was terrible.
Outside work
Photography - 42 million views on Unsplash. The photographer’s eye carries into everything I make.
Music - EP-133 sampler, Volca Drum, Kawai piano, Logic Pro. Weird electronic stuff. Not performing, not releasing - just exploring sound.
