Eugene Bochkarev

If you’re a CEO/founder or PE operator and your tech org is: ❌ Shipping late ❌ Stuck in reactive mode ❌ Struggling through the Series A/B jump, or post-acquisition integration or after a major release It’s not “a delivery problem.” It’s an operating model problem. At the inflection point, the old playbook breaks: what worked at 10 engineers fails at 40… and breaks again across multiple products/teams. That’s where I come in as a fractional CTO: - Spot platform and delivery risks before they hit revenue and retention - Rebuild execution rituals (prioritization, ownership, release confidence) without derailing the roadmap - Align architecture + team structure to your value-creation plan (growth, margin, or exit timeline) If you’re feeling the strain of growth, I can help you turn “busy and reactive” into predictable shipping, and a platform that scales. #CTO #SaaS #StartupScale #PrivateEquity #TechStrategy

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When engineering leaders walk into PE board conversations armed with roadmaps, sprint velocity, and feature delivery timelines, that preparation isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. Boards care about product delivery — but not the way you think. They're not evaluating whether your team ships fast. They're evaluating whether what you're shipping is the right bet, and whether you can defend that in business terms. To a PE board, a roadmap isn't a delivery plan. It's a capital allocation document. Every feature represents a choice — why this, why now, and what are we giving up to build it? Four questions running in the background of every board conversation: 1️⃣ Is this roadmap connected to revenue and retention, or is it floating? Feature velocity means nothing if it isn't tied to business outcomes. 2️⃣ Can you tell me what you're not building, and why? The ability to defend trade-offs signals strategic judgment that a feature list never will. 3️⃣ What's underneath the roadmap? Tech debt, compliance gaps, scalability ceilings — boards want to know you see it and have a plan. Leaders who surface this proactively earn credibility. The ones who don't tend to have it surface at the worst possible moment. 4️⃣ What breaks if we push for more growth? PE firms are in the business of pushing. They want to know you've already stress-tested against that scenario. The language problem: Consider the difference between these two updates: "We shipped fourteen features last quarter and hit 94% of delivery commitments." "We prioritized two initiatives tied directly to enterprise retention over three others further from the revenue line. Churn in that segment is down 8%." Same team. Same quarter. Completely different signal. PE boards aren't anti-roadmap. They're anti-roadmap-as-religion. Stop trying to impress them with what you built and start being genuinely useful about why you built it, what you chose not to build, and what it'll take to keep building at scale. Those are different goals. They require different preparation. What's been your experience translating engineering strategy for board-level conversations? Curious what's landed well and what hasn't.

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When I was working in online video streaming, we were told we couldn't do CD because TV apps had to be certified by manufacturers. Yet we did CD. It helped us build enough trust so that some manufacturers allowed us to release most changes without certification, and others fast-tracked our certification process. When I was working on internal enterprise software, we were told we couldn't do CD because releases had to be planned and manually tested, deadlines respected, and users trained. Yet again, we did CD. Plans became high-level and abstract as iterative execution took over. Automated acceptance tests and feature flags allowed our QA testers to become our first users in production, rather than gatekeepers for releases. Training was built into the frontend applications. It may be the toughest challenge yet, but I'm determined to make it work in a business SaaS startup, where client demands and approvals are everything. The excuses are plentiful, but I have yet to see a domain where CD has failed to deliver results. After all, some of the most famous CD success stories are about printer firmware and an MMO game. Are you sure the software you are working on is more exotic than that?

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Great post by Aleix Morgadas and Eugene Sergueev on how Flo Health Inc. revamped mobile onboarding If you’re keen to learn how to: 🔹 break out of release-cycle bottlenecks with server-driven architecture 🔹 scale experimentation without scaling engineering effort 🔹 build internal platforms that empower teams across product, design and content …it’s well worth a read: https://lnkd.in/emiqM7NM

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Platform engineering is the future 🚀 Developers are at the core of everything we do at PagerDuty 💚 Our latest collaboration with Spotify for Backstage brings PagerDuty’s industry-leading Incident Management directly into Backstage, the open platform reimagining developer experience. With the new PagerDuty Plugin for Backstage, devs can see incidents, on-call context, and service ownership right where they already work : Less dilution ; More focus. Let’s go 🎉 Read more 👇 https://lnkd.in/gnsq8Nr9

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Standing Out When Everyone's Looking 🎯 At Bloomerang we recently opened three roles on my team – VP of Engineering, Data Engineering (closed applications), and Manager, Tier 3 Support Engineering. In a mere 72 hours, we hit over 400 applications for each role. This isn't just volume; it's a stark reminder of a critical truth most people miss: when everyone's doing the same thing, small differences create massive advantages. If you're out there hunting for your next move, here's what actually cuts through the noise: 1. Fill out the Free-Form Questions. 📝 I know, I know—another hoop to jump through. But this isn't about busywork; it's about basic effort. The data doesn't lie: 60% of applicants skip them entirely. By simply typing a few relevant sentences, you're instantly competing against 40% of the field instead of 100%. It's like showing up to a race where half the competitors forgot their shoes. Don't be that person. 2. Activate Your Network. Smartly. 🤝 Find someone in your orbit already inside the company. Don't hit them with a generic "can you get me a job?" Instead, ask intelligent questions about the culture, the challenges, what truly makes the company tick. Show genuine curiosity, not just desperation. A well-placed, authentic ping to the recruiting team from an internal ally is the closest thing you'll get to a cheat code. 3. Pre-Recruit Your Next Role. 🎥 This is the move that genuinely impresses. A few engineers in my network sent me 2-minute Loom videos before we even posted these roles. Not pitches, but brief, professional introductions: "Hey, I know you're probably hiring soon, here's who I am and what problems I'm thinking about next." This isn't about waiting for the perfect moment; it's about doing the work ahead of everybody else to make a human connection when there's no immediate ask. The harsh reality of hiring at scale is this: With a massive inbound pool, it's on candidates to make it easy for the recruiting and hiring teams to quickly identify them as the best fit. ⚡ The people who grasp this—and proactively work with that reality—are the ones who truly break through. To everyone looking for their next role right now: the game isn't rigged, but it does have cheat codes. Use them. 💪 We're currently hiring for VP of Engineering and Manager of Tier 3 Support Engineering. If you're interested in these roles, think you're the best fit, and want to work at a company that's building incredible software for non-profits—please apply. 📬 https://lnkd.in/gPBZxVrX

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We finally did it - we’ve launched an agentic test automation system that transforms natural-language test intent into verified, executable browser automation at scale. It’s built for PMs and QA engineers who want to define behavior and expected outcomes - not spend time authoring and maintaining test scripts. It’s equally designed for engineers, so script generation and upkeep are no longer core development burdens. I’m incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished.

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I love the idea of giving more autonomy and agency to our non-dev contributors. Product managers are already able to create prototypes with AI. Now, they can go one step further and actually contribute to the codebase. Chatting with GitHub Copilot directly from Teams, or opening a pull request from an issue with Copilot — this is just the beginning 🚀 This will clearly impact our development workflows: 🤏Shorter lead times for small and medium tasks 💨Faster path from idea to production 🚀Fewer handoffs and less friction Of course, developers may feel concerned — maintaining additional code written with AI, even after review, can be uncomfortable. But this is also a great opportunity: 👉 to better document developer expectations 👉 to formalize coding standards, architecture rules, and best practices 👉 so the AI can follow those guidelines and produce compliant, maintainable code Empowering PMs doesn’t mean replacing developers. It means raising the bar for collaboration between humans and AI — and between product and engineering. Curious to see how this evolves 👀

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