Product Team Lead Evgeniya

Originally, I am from Russia, but I have lived in Germany for 9 years now. After my bachelor’s degree I moved to Frankfurt (Oder), a German town bordering with Poland to do my double Master’s degree at German and Polish Universities. For around 6 years now, I’ve lived in Berlin and I am loving it here. It is a very international and multi-cultural city where it feels like everyone can be accepted no matter where they are from or what lifestyle they live.

In my free time, I love traveling. This is my greatest passion in life 😄 So far I’ve visited 35 countries, which means there is so much for me to still see in the world! Until the end of this year, I have already booked 3 more trips to Ireland, Finland, and Morocco. I am so looking forward to discovering these new to me places.

After work or over the weekend in Berlin, I enjoy watching TV series, reading books on my balcony overlooking the river Spree, and visiting countless exhibitions and performances (especially dance performances) that regularly take place in Berlin. I also quite like cooking dishes from scratch and recently I started getting into sewing.

Another thing about me is that I have 2 dogs: Tuck who is a mix of Cocker and Cavalier Spaniel, and cavapoo called Ruby. Tuck is 8 years old and he is the calmest and chillest dog I have met in my life 😄 Ruby, on the other hand, is a ball of energy. She is 11 months old and all she want to so is run around, chase her tail, and play with her toys. It is really cute to see how they interact with each other having such different personalities.

I started at Test IO in 2018 before it was acquired by EPAM. I started as a Community Manager and worked very closely with Stefan, our former Head of Community. There were just the two of us back then, so we had to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of completely different tasks. This is also how I got connected to the wonderful Community of Test IO and fell in love with it 🥰 I stayed in the Community team for around 2 years until I moved to the Product team as the Product Manager for Community. I was responsible for the tester & Team Leader interfaces as well as our mobile apps testNow. Now I am transitioning into the new role at Test IO as the Product Team Lead, which means I will be less involved in the day-to-day operational work as a product manager but instead will overlook the Test IO product team and different parts of our products. It is a very exciting journey for me and I am so grateful to Test IO for giving me the freedom and the opportunity to find myself and my professional passions.

I will also be more involved in Cirro and the new spaces for crowd work that we are building and hoping to be able to offer you soon. One of them is connected to translations, which I feel the most passionate about as I had my bachelors degree in linguistics. I am so excited to see where we’ll be able to go with it.

As for the position of the Product Manger for Community, we have found a wonderful replacement for me – you will soon hear form Anna, I am sure she will do great things from the product side.

It is funny that you all know this 😄 It is really hard for me to select one place that I like the most, but if I really have to, I would say Costa Rica. I visited Costa Rica in June this year and it has been an unforgettable experience for me. The trip started off a bit on the wrong side though. We hired a car from the capital city San José to drive to the north of the country to stay around the famous volcano in Costa Rica “Arenal”. We didn’t check the route that Google maps selected for us and blindly trusted its navigation. It turned out that it selected the fastest route, which wasn’t the safest, with really narrow mountain roads and speeding local cars. After having a near-death experience on one of these roads, I was ready to turn back and fly home 😄 Luckily, we made it to our destination and never regretted it as it was absolutely stunning! It was an out-of-this-world experience to wake to the view of the majestic Arenal volcano. We hiked through the jungles, relaxed in hot springs, tasted wonderful Costa Rican cuisine, drank the best coffee in the world and ate the sweetest chocolate I have ever tried. What could be better than this, right?

I enjoy all kinds of vacation. I don’t really remember a single trip I didn’t enjoy 😄 I just love being in a new place surrounded by new languages and meeting new people. I enjoy city tours, nature adventures as well as beach vacations. As long as it is a new country or a new city, I will have nothing to complain about.

I must confess I haven’t had as much time for reading as I would like to or used to when I was a student. Nowhere near Zorica’s reading record of one book per day.

Right now I am reading The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova, the author of Historian. It takes place in Bulgaria and explores the intertwined nature of past and present. It is really captivating. I usually start the book reading slowly the first part of it, only getting to know the characters and their lives. By around the middle of the book, I usually get so invested with the heroes of the story, that I basically can’t put the book down until the very end. Then I will need to take some time to grieve 😄 the loss of my friends as the book ends and I can’t be as close to them any longer before I move on to the next book.

Hm, it is hard… I would describe myself as enthusiastic, sympathetic, hard-working, a bit obsessive, and open to new adventures. I enjoy overcoming new challenges and finding solutions to tricky problems. But I can also be a bit of a perfectionist that makes me lose my sleep over trivial issues, this is something I am trying to work on at the moment.

In general, I think I am positive, optimistic, and accepting.