I’ve Always Been the Only Female in the Team: An Interview With Anastasiia Moskovchenko

HackerNoon editorial team has launched this interview series with women in tech to celebrate their achievements and share their struggles. We need more women in technology, and by sharing stories, we can encourage many girls to follow their dreams. Share your story today!

Anastasiia Moskovchenko is an expert in product management with extensive experience in corporations and startups. Anastasia has been a mentor and held over 100 lectures about product management. She is also an owner of the community that aims to help women succeed in IT.

We asked Anastasiia about her career and experience in such companies as VK and Yandex, product management, the path towards winning success while being a single woman in the team, mentoring, life outside of work, and how hobbies help you grow professionally.

How Did You Start Your IT Career?

I graduated from the computational mathematics and cybernetics faculty at one of the best universities in the CIS region. Pursuing a tech career was kind of a logical step. After graduation, I joined one of the major IT companies in Russia and supported their IT management school.

I participated in the selection process, helped students with tasks and projects, and discussed their next steps.

After that, I started to be a mentor and a lecturer for IT professionals. Back then, I prepared more than 100 lessons and graduated around 700 students who successfully passed their interviews and got job offers from top IT companies.

What trends in IT do you follow? What in the industry are you most interested in today?

I have 2 topics I am passionate about right now. The first is the creator economy and user-generated content. Today, it’s important to know trends in social networks and blogging platforms, both from the author’s and user’s perspectives. And, besides, part of my professional experience was exactly about social media platforms.

My second passion is AI. If you are working in product management and IT, you have to know what’s going on in AI. Not because it’s a buzzword, but because these new tools might significantly help you with your tasks. I use a variety of such tools.

One example is Perplexity which disrupts the field of data search. You ask the question, and you get an exact answer and a variety of sources of this information.

Besides, I am a fan of Poised. This is an AI communication coach that tracks your speech during Zoom calls, analyzes voice confidence, eye movement, and such, and provides you with recommendations on how you can improve.

Some of these tools change the game completely, so I do think it’s important to monitor AI and constantly think about how you can improve your work processes with it.

Tell us about your hobbies outside of technology. How do they help you in your work?

I’ve been dancing professionally since I was 3 years old. Once, I was even on the national hip-hop team and participated in European and World Championships. This hobby impacted my life a lot, and my career too, I think.

While working in an IT corporation, I was invited to join a fancy team of the winners of the World Hip-Hop Championship “World of Dance'' in Las Vegas. I used to spend all my time after work and on weekends working out with them. It mastered my stress management - you just can't worry about work stuff all the time because your attention is instantly switched. It also gives you an extra backbone.

If something doesn't work out at work, but you have successes in other areas that you love, it's much easier to cope with stress.

Two years ago, I decided to take acting classes. There, we did many practices on understanding other people, empathy, communication, and even cognitive skills. It turned out to be an outstanding and very transformative experience. I learned how to create more trusting relationships at work. Besides that, it gave me extra creativity.

Back then, I was working at FunCorp, and I was in charge of managing push notifications. I generated an incredible amount of creative ideas. Once, I initiated the testing of a very bold idea with quite daring and even sexualized content. As a result, we grew the CTA by 2 times - not only the colleagues liked my idea, but also our users.

Women face various challenges within their careers: glass ceiling, sexism, etc. Have you ever faced such phenomena?

In my six years in IT, I've consistently been the only woman in my team and never had a female supervisor. Sometimes, male colleagues might underestimate a female's skills and knowledge, and that is what happened to me. This is a big issue if you are one who should guide and manage the developer’s work.

Once, the developers' team intentionally gave me wrong time estimates. In such cases, you have nothing else to do but prove your professionalism. To address this, I demonstrated completing the task in two hours, which earned their respect as a leader.

Beyond skill-based challenges, I've faced resistance to my extracurricular activities, like dancing and public speaking. However, it's important to recognize that there will always be detractors, regardless of gender. To overcome these situations, I would advise two strategies.

First, show your colleagues that you are one of them - demonstrate your skills and knowledge, common interests or background, and win their respect. Secondly, build relationships a level above with those who are mostly interested in the outcome, and not in the relationships.

Being the only female in a team is challenging, but by consistently proving your professionalism, you can be recognized first and foremost for your expertise.

Tell us about the most significant projects you’ve worked on?

In my career, I've led several pivotal projects, but the most notable was the transformation of the short-form video format for Dzen (one of the major Russian social media platforms). We tackled the challenge of skewed interaction data from oversized clip cards by transitioning to a user-friendly, full-screen vertical video format, and innovatively using machine learning to refine content recommendations, significantly enhancing both user engagement and satisfaction.

The User-Generated Content (UCG) platforms are quite hard to work with, as a minor change leads you to reputational losses if users don’t appreciate it. We did about 150 experiments to increase user engagement authentically. The result was extraordinary: a fourfold increase in daily active users (DAU) and time spent in four months.

It is important to focus not only on current metrics, but also to see the big picture, to understand how each decision and change will affect the quality of user interaction with your product.

Another major milestone was at Yandex. Back then, inside a huge corporation, my team and I created a project that later gave birth to a whole new unit. Amid the onset of COVID-19, our primary focus was on monetizing Yandex Maps. There was a clear need to react to ongoing changes in the world and do something helpful.

We came up with the idea of a medication delivery from local pharmacies that would be directly integrated into our maps. In just two months, we engaged around 30,000 pharmacies!

Then, we started to create supporting solutions for other small businesses that were also harmed by the pandemic. So, the project began to turn into a separate department within Yandex, focusing on special services for entrepreneurs.

What do you think about the gender gap in the IT industry? How is it possible to overcome it?

Back in my university years, I was one of a few girls at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics. One day, I got a free invitation to a large conference on marketing and product management. It turned out that was the way to increase the male audience’ engagement. Of course, today, we are not there anymore - we can see more female public speakers, product managers, and developers at such events.

But that’s still far from ideal; I wish we could see more girls in tech.

Right now in IT, only a third of the product managers are women. It's great that there are programs for us like Women in Tech, but it's even better if these systems work within companies.

Tell me about people in IT or industries that inspire you?

I'm always driven by stories when the people working on a product are users of this product themselves and make decisions based on their own experience. This always leads to awesome results.

For example, I'm really hooked by the story of the UX lead at YouTube Create - Cielo de la Paz. She is a photographer and used to do specifically mobile photography. In 2015, her work was noticed by Apple, and they used it widely for the promo campaign of the iPhone camera.

Then, she created a course on creating content with your phone and was invited to teach it at Stanford. One of YouTube's product directors was studying there at the time. Her expertise impressed him so much that after completing the course, she was invited to become a lead of UX design for YouTube Create.

Cielo is not an IT expert, but she is a professional in her field with 10 years of experience. At the same time, while working on the editor, she studied 2 thousand users to understand what problems other content creators face when shooting for YouTube. Now, the company is launching a new AI-powered editor under her leadership. When people aren't just improving products, but they are really that passionate about their field, you get real breakthroughs.

And that is why I strive to do things that inspire me.

Give advice to girls who are starting in this field?

The first thing is to do what you are passionate about. Even if you are just starting your IT journey, but you are very interested in a particular industry, you should go there. In certain cases, your keen interest may be more important to a company than having a solid background.

If there is no passion for a particular field yet, I suggest starting to get to know the different communities within IT. Follow different opinion leaders, read the comments under their posts, and get to know their networks to understand who these people are, how they live, etc.

Different industries in IT have completely different cultures and vibes. That's why it's important to understand what suits you and what doesn't from the very beginning.