Konstantin Zavarov

The Brand Age, Paul Graham

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 12:00:00 +0300

Paul Graham is the co-founder of Y Combinator and one of the foremost philosopher-technologists of our time. For 25 years he has been publishing deep, thoughtful essays on his blog — though rarely. In 2025, for instance, he published just four pieces. In March 2026, a new one appeared: «The Brand Age». I’d like to discuss it.

Why does this matter to me? Among all the authors I follow, Paul Graham comes first. I’ve referenced his essays several times before — in my roundup of resources for product managers, in «The 10 Deadly Sins of a Product Manager», and in «Thinking Through Writing». What I also appreciate is his style: clarifying footnotes and acknowledgments to well-known experts who reviewed his drafts. In this latest essay, the reviewers include Sam Altman, among others. And equally important — there’s no advertising, no promotion of any services.

Product Strategy ≠ Template

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

The goal of strategy is to move from «build whatever anyone asks for» to a deliberate position aimed at creating a better future for both users and the business.

As much as we’d like one to exist, there’s no universal product strategy template — honestly, no template at all. The format depends on company and team maturity, team structure, business model, business strategy, and a whole host of other factors.

Second Brain: PARA × Obsidian × Granola × Claude

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0300

A few years ago I was organizing my notes using the Zettelkasten method in VS Code. A lot has changed since then, largely due to the exponential growth of LLMs and agentic AI. I want to share a fresh tool stack that helps reduce cognitive load and keep information from slipping through the cracks when time is short: PARA × Obsidian × Granola × Claude.

The article is called «Second Brain,» which means we’re going to build a system that mirrors the structure of the human brain.

People Who Write Interestingly

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:17:01 +0300

I want to share a collection of people on the internet who write compelling content on product-adjacent topics and are worth reading regularly. I often come back to articles from these authors — especially when I’m looking for creative inspiration.

Marty Cagan — an iconic figure in the product world and author of the widely popular book series: Inspired, Empowered, and Transformed. Founder of SVPG and an active blogger on product management. His ideas about product discovery and empowered teams have become industry standards.
Paul Graham — co-founder of Y Combinator and author of remarkable essays that hold up remarkably well over time. He writes about startups, thinking, and decision-making — concisely, precisely, and without filler.
Andrew Chen — partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of a popular blog on growth marketing.
Vitalik Buterin — founder of Ethereum and an active blogger. He writes deep technical and philosophical essays on decentralization and the future of technology.
Grigory Bakunov — founder of radio-t, former Director of Technology Spreading at Yandex. Writes about technology, management, and life in tech — sharp and free of corporate speak.
Oleg Yakubenkov — founder of GoPractice and author of the #1 most popular blog on product analytics. His simulators and articles are a must-read for anyone who wants to get serious about metrics and unit economics.
Artem Gorbunov & Co. — a curated collection of practical advice on product topics from cult-status specialists. Short and to the point — covering copywriting, interfaces, negotiations, and management.
Melissa Perri — author of Escaping the Build Trap. Writes about product as a value system, product culture, and why companies get stuck in feature-factory mode.
Teresa Torres — author of Continuous Discovery Habits. Her blog covers discovery practices: opportunity solution trees, customer interviews, and the habits of strong product teams.
Wes Kao — runs an excellent practical blog on management, product thinking, and career development. Publishes consistently.
Ben Thompson — tech analyst and author of the Stratechery blog. Offers deep dives into the business strategies of technology companies, platform models, and competitive market dynamics.
Valeria Rozova — product leader and curator of an article library on product topics, written by graduates of her courses. The articles are highly practical and detailed — a great resource for going deep on specific product skills.

ICE, RICE, DRICE Prioritization Frameworks

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 15:17:01 +0300

Ein, zwei, drei… There are endless ways to prioritize tasks. Every product I’ve ever worked on had its own unique ranking method, each with its own quirks. For a quick tour of all the approaches used at major companies, check out Misha Karpov’s talk at Yandex’s product meetup [1]. As for me, my personal favorite prioritization methods are the energy-based one — where priorities are chosen based on how you’re feeling that day — and the intuitive one, where you simply follow your gut and your heart. Too bad the team rarely agrees to go along with either.

10 Deadly Sins of a Beginning Product Manager

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 15:17:01 +0300

This article was originally published on habr.com.

These «deadly sins» can serve as a self-audit checklist for both new and more experienced product managers alike.

Here are the mistakes — and how to fix them.

1. Believing in multitasking

Every product manager faces massive flows of information — endless initiatives and product ideas that no single person can possibly process in the time available. Stakeholders push their agendas, users complain, the calendar is packed with meetings, and the product backlog keeps growing day by day.

Thinking Through Writing

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 15:17:01 +0300

I came across a fascinating interview with Andrei Styskin (Director at Amazon, former CEO of Yandex’s search portal), in which Andrei talks about some interesting aspects of Amazon’s internal culture — in particular, its «document-centric» approach to meetings and decision-making.

Every work meeting is a collaborative exercise in which participants work through a pre-prepared document on a specific problem. Part of the time (10 to 20 minutes) is spent reading the document independently; the rest is used for discussion and commentary. If open questions remain after the meeting, another one is scheduled in the same format. The process continues until requirements are unambiguously defined and agreed upon by all stakeholders.
Requirements for any product or feature are worked out using the «Working Backwards» method, through two documents: a «Press Release» and a «FAQ.» The product manager writes the press release well before the launch, establishing a vision of the ideal outcome that the entire product team can use as a north star throughout development.
All decisions are made through document reviews — not in casual verbal conversations during meetings or at the watercooler, as so often happens elsewhere.

Reflecting on my time at Yandex (a great company, though not quite on Amazon’s scale — in 2024, Yandex’s market cap was around $10 billion, compared to Amazon’s $2 trillion), I can say that the company’s internal culture actively encouraged employees to express their thinking in writing: Yandex had a strong tradition of maintaining detailed wiki documentation, writing thorough task descriptions in trackers, discussing issues in comments, and keeping internal blogs — both public and anonymous. The more senior the employee, the more convincingly and concisely they wrote and communicated.

Books and Materials for Product Managers

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 15:17:01 +0300

There’s no shortage of materials online for developing product skills and broadening your horizons. But I want to gather the most useful, practical, and valuable ones in one place. This list is constantly evolving — new materials are added, outdated ones are removed. I hope you find something worthwhile here.

Introduction to Product Culture and the Profession

Essay «How to Do Great Work,» Paul Graham. An essay by the legendary Paul Graham on how to do your work well — full of advice and reflection. Recommended reading for anyone starting out in their career, not just product managers.
Article «Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager,» Ben Horowitz. A short article written in 2012 that remains just as relevant today. It gives a solid general sense of what qualities a good product manager should have.
Article «Amazon Leadership Principles,» Amazon. Amazon’s 14 leadership principles — what the company expects from its managers, and what they’ll probe in interviews. If these don’t resonate with you at first, it’s worth coming back to them later.

Managing Yourself and Your Teams

Research

«The Mom Test,» Rob Fitzpatrick. A must-read classic on preparing for user interviews. The book has its fans and its critics, but both camps have read it and haven’t been left indifferent.
«Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works,» Ash Maurya
Video «How to Talk to Users,» Eric Migicovsky (Y Combinator)
Video «ABCDX Segmentation,» Artem Azevich (IIDF Accelerator)
Video «Market Sizing,» Alexander Skurikhin (IIDF Accelerator, Yandex)
producthunt.com

Analytics

«Playing the Numbers: How Analytics Helps Video Games Thrive,» Vasily Sabirov. Probably the only book on product analytics written by a Russian author. It reads less like a textbook and more like a conversation with a product analyst.
«Say It with Charts,» Gene Zelazny
GoPractice Blog. An absolute encyclopedia of knowledge on product analytics and product management. The articles are exceptionally well-written. Best read slowly and carefully, over a cup of tea in the evening.
Free course «Fundamentals of Statistics and A/B Testing» by Yandex Practicum. A very solid course on statistics fundamentals and A/B testing, put together by the Practicum math team.
Free course «Fundamentals of Statistics» by Anatoly Karpov. The most popular statistics course in the Russian-speaking internet, where Anatoly breaks down descriptive and inferential statistics in a clear, structured way. It has become a classic.

Strategy

«Good Strategy Bad Strategy,» Richard Rumelt. A foundational conceptual book on strategy — what good strategy looks like, and what bad strategy looks like (of which there is no shortage). I have a short summary of it on this blog.
«The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,» Eliyahu Goldratt

Delivery Management / Backlog Management

«Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application,» Jason Fried + David Heinemeier Hansson + Matthew Linderman
Article «20 Product Prioritization Techniques: A Map and Guided Tour». A detailed overview of 20 techniques for prioritizing a backlog or a list of hypotheses.
Article «RICE: Simple prioritization for product managers,» Intercom. The original article from Intercom, where this prioritization method was born. Among other things, it includes an XLS template you can use right out of the box.

Interviews and Hiring

«The Art of Recruitment: How to Evaluate a Person in an Hour,» Svetlana Ivanova
«Who: The A Method for Hiring,» Geoff Smart and Randy Street
«Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology,» Laakmann McDowell
«Decode and Conquer,» Lewis C. Lin. One of Lewis Lin’s books — though if you can, it’s worth reading his others as well.
Podcast «Sobes» (Interview)
Podcast «Dva Stula» (Two Chairs)

Computer Science Basics

Free Python courses «Python Generation». A series of free Python courses for complete beginners by Timur Guev, a professional developer and instructor. Timur belongs to a generation of mathematicians who scored perfect marks on the national exam and a generation of engineers who went on to work at FAANG companies. You won’t find better beginner courses than this series.
Free SQL practice platform sql-ex.ru. One of the best — if not the best — SQL practice platforms out there, and it’s free. It includes a huge number of exercises; I recommend working through them to solidify your SQL skills. Don’t let the dated interface put you off.
«System Design Interview,» Alex Xu

Data Science Basics

Article «Machine Learning for People,» vas3k. A comprehensive introduction for anyone who has finally decided to understand machine learning — written in plain language, without formulas or theorems, with real-world examples and solutions.
«Machine Learning for Humans,» Vishal Maini, Samir Sabri

Inspiring Stories

«Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,» Ashlee Vance. A book about Musk’s rise as a businessman — the challenges he overcame, the risks he took. Including the story of his trip to Russia in 2002 to try to buy an intercontinental ballistic rocket.
«Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time,» Dori Jones Yang, Howard Schultz
«The Yandex Book,» Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich. The story of Yandex’s rise from its founding to its IPO — including the personalities of its founders, and the time Sergey Brin and Larry Page came to Moscow in 2003 to acquire the company, only to be turned down by Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich, who went on to build Russia’s most technologically advanced IT company.

The Evolution of Goal-Setting Frameworks: From OKR to NCT

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 15:17:01 +0300

I came across an interesting approach to goal-setting — NCT (Narratives, Commitments, Tasks) by Ravi Mehta [1]. What makes it compelling is that it positions itself as an alternative to OKR and could be genuinely useful for many product teams. Before diving into NCT, let’s do a quick historical overview of how goal-setting frameworks have evolved.

In 1954, Peter Drucker introduced the concept of MBO (Management by Objectives) in his book The Practice of Management [2]. The core idea: set goals at the company level and cascade them down to individual contributors at every layer. Many services within Yandex, for example, still use a similar approach today. They even have a dedicated internal tool for cascading goals called «Golzyatnitsa» (roughly, «the goal keeper»).

Product CEO: How a Product Manager Creates Meaning and Communicates Value

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 15:17:01 +0300

This article was originally published on Delovoy Mir.

Technology is advancing at a breathtaking pace — there’s even a concept called «technological singularity,» which suggests that in some hypothetical future, an explosive surge in technological growth will fundamentally transform our civilization.

But it’s worth remembering: technology doesn’t enter our lives on its own. It comes through IT products built to solve specific problems or address the needs of a particular audience.

Tools and Services for Product Managers

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 15:17:01 +0300

I want to share the services and apps I regularly use to get work done. Maybe you’ll discover something new and make your day-to-day a little smoother.

Product Awareness and UX

ProductHunt — the go-to resource for building product intuition. It keeps you up to speed on new product launches and how existing ones are evolving.
UserOnboard — a library of detailed UX teardowns of popular products like Gmail, Instagram, Apple Music, Netflix, and more.

Research and A/B Testing

Statista — a knowledge base packed with up-to-date market analytics and research. A corporate account unlocks detailed reports, but even the free version gives you access to the basics.
Yandex Wordstat — useful for analyzing user search queries in the Russian-language web.
ResearchGate — a massive library of academic papers on virtually any topic.
Evan’s Awesome A/B Tools — one of the oldest and most popular online tools for planning and analyzing A/B tests: sample size estimation and experiment result evaluation.
GoodUI — a pattern library featuring A/B tests and breakdowns of their results.

Diagrams, Flowcharts, and Graphics

Miro — the de facto standard for visual collaboration.
Mermaid — a tool for generating diagrams from plain text descriptions (code). Integrates with a wide range of modern wiki systems: Notion, Google Docs, Confluence.
Draw.io — a simple and convenient tool for creating more complex diagrams than Mermaid can handle. Lets you save files directly to Google Drive with no registration or login required.
Canva — the best tool for creating visual assets. The free version is more than enough for most straightforward tasks.
Emojipedia — an emoji reference for adding a little personality to requirements and task descriptions.

Personal and Team Productivity

Things — a clean, beautifully designed to-do app for Mac and iOS. Minimalist UI, great typography — a treat for design perfectionists.
Ilya Birman’s Typography Layout — a keyboard layout for writing polished text and typing the right characters quickly (✓≈≠₽x↓−""). If you write a lot and care about how your text looks, give Birman’s layout a try — it’s a genuine pleasure to use.
Obsidian — a note-taking app built around Markdown (.md) files.
ChatGPT — my replacement for Google Search.
Google Sheets, Slides, Colab — the bare essentials for any product manager.

Rapid MVP Development and Vibe Coding

Cursor IDE — a code editor on steroids that lets you build apps and services with minimal programming knowledge, incredibly fast.
GitHub / GitHub Pages — deploy static sites to production quickly and for free.
Vercel — deploy more complex services to production quickly and for free.

The Growth Dilemma of Online Course Economics

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:17:01 +0300

While comparing top edTech companies in the Russian internet market, I noticed an interesting scaling problem baked into the economics of their courses — one they all seem to live with. I’m not talking about product-driven edTech platforms like LinguaLeo, but companies that create educational courses for upskilling or career transitions.

Product EdTech Theorem #1

The absence of deadlines in an educational course leads to ↑ Revenue and ↓ Completion Rate (COR). Conversely, the presence of deadlines leads to ↓ Revenue and ↑ Completion Rate.

Product Management Is Marketing Management

Fri, 24 May 2024 15:17:01 +0300

And a product manager is a marketing specialist.

This definition is obvious to people who studied marketing in college. But it’s not always clear to those who came to product management from a technical background.

As someone who came up through the technical ranks, I long believed that «marketing» was limited to finding promotion channels, communicating a product’s value to users, and selling goods — whether physical or digital, it didn’t much matter. But that understanding of marketing is very, very far from the truth.

Loyalty ≠ Satisfaction

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 15:17:01 +0300

Loyalty

Customer Loyalty is a user’s devotion to a brand or product. It means that, all else being equal, the user will choose your product over alternatives. This choice is often emotional — a user who is genuinely in love with a product will recommend it to friends and family.

The standard metric for measuring customer loyalty is NPS (Net Promoter Score). Its growth positively correlates with sales growth and market share expansion. This relationship, combined with the simplicity of measurement, is exactly what made NPS so widely adopted. That said, the metric has its fair share of pitfalls — here’s a solid article on the subject: «12 подводных камней Net Promoter Score».

On Leadership

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 15:17:01 +0300

The original interview was published on VC.

— Konstantin, why do you think it’s worthwhile or interesting to be a leader?

— Let’s start with what leadership actually is. There are many different definitions — Peter Drucker, for instance, wrote: «Leadership is the ability to help a person step beyond their own limitations.»

Leadership is the skill of positively influencing people in a way that allows a group to achieve ambitious goals through the contributions of each individual member.

Calculating Classic, Rolling, and Full Retention in Python

Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:00:00 +0300

In this post, I want to walk through how to manually calculate 3 types of Retention metrics using Python and Pandas, and how to plot a Retention curve with Matplotlib. Most of the time, a product manager will rely on an analytics platform for data analysis — but let’s imagine our PM has been stranded on a desert island with nothing but a Python interpreter and a few extra libraries. That’s exactly what we’ll work with.

Chart Templates for Data Visualization

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 12:00:00 +0300

Product managers present constantly: they run research → share findings; a new quarter kicks off → they set goals; a quarter, half-year, or year wraps up → they review results; and so on.

Data visualization is often the weakest part of these presentations, so I decided to put together a Google Sheets template where I’ll collect and update reference chart examples covering the most common product, business, and financial data scenarios.

The Zettelkästen Note-Taking Method

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 12:00:00 +0300

Zettelkästen is an increasingly popular method of organizing notes and ideas, developed by the extraordinarily productive German sociologist Niklas Luhmann — a man who, over the course of his life, authored more than 70 major academic books and 500 scholarly articles, and received prestigious doctoral honors and prizes for his contributions to sociology.

The Zettelkästen note-taking method helped Luhmann acquire new knowledge more effectively and engage in deep research. This gives rise to a compelling hypothesis: «If Zettelkästen helped Luhmann absorb new knowledge, it can help us too.» All that’s left is to put this promising hypothesis to the test.

Online discussions of Zettelkästen — in both English and Russian — only began to gain traction in 2020, following the publication of David Clear’s article «Zettelkasten — How One German Scholar Was So Freakishly Productive,» which was also translated into Russian and published on Habr. This is despite the fact that Luhmann never kept his unique knowledge management method a secret — detailed descriptions of it in the original can be found in German academic journals from 1981 to 1987 (originals in German).

How to Run a Retrospective for a Large Team

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 12:00:00 +0300

A retrospective is a form of group reflection — a tool for continuous improvement and cultural change within a team.

We usually hear about «retros» in the context of end-of-sprint ceremonies in iterative development. Yet the vast majority of teams don’t follow Scrum or any iterative approach to building products. That’s no reason, however, to give up on self-reflection or group reflection when hitting key project milestones.

Below is a detailed 8-step plan with timings for running an engaging retrospective with a large team (10+ people).

A/B Test Design Template

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 12:00:00 +0300

A Google Sheets template for designing A/B tests. It helps you structure an experiment before launch — from writing the hypothesis to calculating how long the test should run.

Download template

What’s inside

Experiment description — a hypothesis written in the format: «If [product change], then [target metric] will change by [expected result], because [research data].» This section also captures the target metric and the experiment start date.

ICE, RICE, DRICE Prioritization Framework Template

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 12:00:00 +0300

A Google Sheets template for prioritizing product initiatives using three frameworks: ICE, RICE, and DRICE. For a deeper dive into the methods, check out the article «ICE, RICE, DRICE Prioritization Methods».

Download template

What’s inside

ICE — the simplest prioritization method. Each initiative is scored on three factors from 0 to 10:

Impact (effect on the metric)
Confidence (confidence in the estimate)
Ease (ease of implementation)
ICE Score = I × C × E

RICE — a more precise method developed by Intercom. The table includes the following columns:

On Getting Certified as a Certified Scrum Product Owner

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 12:00:00 +0300

In his book Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products, Marty Cagan recommends that aspiring product managers get CSPO-certified early in their careers. I want to share what you can actually expect from this training and certification — beyond collecting yet another badge (and a rather pricey one at that).

The training runs for two full days. The first day covers the fundamentals of Agile and Scrum through group exercises, with a brief overview of other product development methodologies. For those just entering the profession, this day is genuinely valuable — it builds a deeper, more grounded understanding of Scrum. That knowledge serves as a useful foundation for evaluating and comparing the processes at your own company or within your product.

More experienced product managers will find it helpful for formalizing and structuring what they already know. Most of us work directly with development teams, and a fresh infusion of ideas can bring new creativity and engagement to the team.

Personal Consultation

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

For those just starting out — I’ll help you understand how the product manager role works, what managers expect, and what core competencies matter. After the session, you’ll know exactly what’s missing for a confident start and how to build your development plan. I can help you review or write your resume, and prepare for case interviews to land your first job.

For experienced product managers — I’ll help you assess your current grade level and put together a personalized growth plan. We’ll go through the key competencies, identify areas for improvement, and map out concrete steps toward the next level in your career. I can also help with product process organization and defining the right product metrics.