Hello! Tell us about your experience as a project manager: how long have you been working, and how many projects have you had?

I’ve been working as a project manager for about two years now. During this time, I have had one big project with a team of 15 people and many small projects.

Tell us about the project you feel the most comfortable working on it.

I can’t mark out a definite most comfortable project; they were all enjoyable. On each project, you learn something and discover many new things.

Your work experience allows you to create a portrait of an ideal client. What is he like?

An ideal client is a man who has an idea and is ready to trust the team’s expertise in its successful implementation.

We can run a project successfully from the Discovery Phase to release, with the client’s full involvement in the work process, participation in communication and discussion of ideas.

It’s essential to keep transparent working relations and be on the same page.

What is worth paying attention to the customer at the beginning of the work on the project?

First, most customers worry about the solution’s price and time. Therefore, it is essential to prepare a detailed estimate and indicate the time to implement the selected features to predict the timing and budget accurately.

After that, everything depends on the needs and priorities of the client. Finally, we agreed on the team, reporting, and volume of work and started working on the project.

How do you and your team communicate with the customer, so he understands what he wants?

Usually, if you need to deal with complex terms, the explanation always works on simple and understandable to anyone examples and various analogies. If we discuss implementing features, you can consistently demonstrate and approve everything on the wireframes.

When there are customer problems — how does the team help him?

We had a situation when a client wrote us early Saturday morning that he needed help logging in to the site. The product has been on the market for several years, and many clients have assessed the damage.

We have a great team, and the devs quickly solved the problem even early Saturday morning. During that time, I was in touch with the customer and reported what we were doing to solve the problem.

In the end, it turned out that AWS had to move us to a new instance and delete the old one due to outdated Amazon hardware at the end of the month. But early on, they just purged all of our data without warning.

We quickly restored the backups and got the product back up and running. But it turned out that in addition to the main product, there was a small service to store important information. We hadn’t backed it up since we hadn’t worked with it before and had no idea it existed.

Important data that affected the system and the customer experience was stored there, so we needed to recover it however we could.

We told the customer we would do everything possible to figure it out and help.

Next, we wrote to Amazon support. They said to correspond to tech support, and there was a fee. But unfortunately, the customer had already lost a lot of money because of problems with Amazon, so we had not wanted to pay them again.

We kept writing to free support and create new tickets. Then, as an exception, they referred our request to tech support at no additional charge and restored all the data.

The customer was happy and thought we had done the impossible.

We had to spend a lot of time and effort, but we care about the product as much as possible, so we are always willing to find a way to help.

When I need more time to work on the project — how do I explain the technical issues in non-technical language?

Usually, it is enough to explain in technical language with examples and justify why it happened that extra time is needed.

We often solve them through analysis and risk management. First, you take a feature and immediately analyze possible risks with your team. Then you write them down in a risk analysis table and show them to the client.

If you warn the customer about the risks at every stage and keep everyone informed, then when they occur, everyone already understands that this could happen and how to deal with it further.

Do you have any personal criteria for a client?

I feel more comfortable working with a client when he is involved in the process and passionate about his work. It simplifies further communication.

I am happy if the client understands that work needs time and a specific budget.

Someone who wants to contact Wamisoftware for collaboration will read this interview. So what advice would you like to give this person right away?

I recommend generating an idea, making a preliminary market analysis on this solution’s relevance and creating a budget. Then we will help with the Discovery Phase, if necessary, or implementation of the product.

What projects would you be interested in working with in the future?

Working with systems that use artificial intelligence algorithms and operations with large data volumes would be interesting.