Vladimir Pokidko, Affise Reach Development Lead at Affise

You joined Affise in 2016 as one of the company’s first employees. 

Since then, you have gone through many steps in your career path at Affise. Could you tell us more about your journey?

More than six years ago, I was looking for remote work in Kazakhstan and found an affiliate programme, called “Clobucks,” founded by Dmitri Zotov. He knew many people and had several ideas to grow the programme into a business. I got involved as a back-end developer in similar projects like marketplaces or product feeds.

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.

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.

How do you foster trust between the team leader and the team members?

Just be me! The team sees me as the same employee, but they know where I can help, solve and support. I’m convinced that there is no “artificial way” to increase trust by playing to someone or listening to them just because you have to – that will not work. So my method is simple: I care about my team and want to help if I can. In this case, if you are honest, trust comes by itself.