Meet Vladimir Pokidko, Affise Reach Development Lead

Months later, I joined the HQ team as the company grew. I felt support and confidence from the people working with me. I love adventures! «Clobucks» gradually evolved into more than just an affiliate program. A few years later, it became a solution to simplify partnerships, Affise, and welcome new horizons. But I have gained invaluable experience to keep the fast-growing company afloat.

Affise became a leading partner marketing solution and transformed the industry soon after. Your role in the company also evolved.

A few years later, I moved to a new position as a product manager, where I helped start to understand customer needs, define product development across the lifecycle, and coordinate and manage trade-offs between engineering and design. I liked communication, decision-making, and cross-functional problem-solving, and I decided to move to the management level.

Then, as the development team grew, the capacity of the product team needed to be increased. We expanded our team with experienced professionals and grew to eight people in the product team.

You are currently Affise Reach Project Lead. Could you tell us more about your role?

I coordinate the processes between development and product, design and analysis, drive product and feature launches, and collaborate with senior management, product development, and operations to deliver impactful results to support business growth.

New challenges, new projects, and the launch of a new product. What was the process of developing Affise Reach like? How would you describe it in a few words?

In 2021, we introduced Affise Reach, an end-to-end technology that helps brands and advertisers to find and team up with the best affiliates, content creators, and influencers to partner with, build relationships and manage affiliate marketing campaigns.

As a back-end developer at Affise, I had good technical experience with high-load and big-data systems, so I started making the architecture for Reach, combining two positions where possible. We started hiring a new team, and for a while, I had two teams to which I could not fully dedicate myself.

As the team grew, there were more than ten of us, and we had to decide to assign me entirely to the Reach team as development manager and leave the product team in good hands. For me, Affise Reach was a great opportunity to build a solid product and an efficient and productive team from scratch. During the launch, we faced many difficulties and tight timelines as a team that we had to solve and overcome. This time taught us to be stronger.

Such a demanding event is only possible with a great team consisting not only of professionals but also of friends. How can a development team work well together?

Trust and coordination. People are different; everyone has their own goals in life, at work, on the road, wherever — it’s tough to find like-minded people, and it’s impossible to force someone to think like you.

But if you are open-minded and your own goals and those of the company are transparent, it is easy to spread your vision, show what the team stands for and enjoy shared successes.

I like playing football and often compare it to product development. Let’s imagine that the defenders and attackers of a team do not trust each other; what will happen? Will they pass the ball to each other? Will they win? Suppose the defenders do not know why they are on the pitch; will they stop the opponent? This may seem obvious, but it is important, and I often see a lack of it. We are all in the same company, but there is only one difference: at Affise Reach, we have a small team, which lets us be more flexible and friendly.