The editorial staff asked Valentin Telegin, Technical Director of the Mobile Development Department at Rostelecom IT, where to look for cool specialists and how to organize the team's work so that mobile apps are released on time and take off.

Valentin Telegin has been successfully managing teams for over 10 years. He developed Yandex Maps, Rostelecom: Smart Home and ABBYY: Lingvo Live apps which are now used by millions of people.

Valentin, you have been in mobile development for almost 20 years. We could say you contributed to the initiation of the market; what did you start from?

I graduated from university in 2004 and chose the mobile development market as my career path. This is a huge and exciting industry that was just starting to boom and needed specialists. So I chose the narrow mobile games development market, little explored at the time.

I got my first experience in mobile development at Superscape. My work involved porting mobile games from the Symbian platform to J2ME.

Later on they invited me to Shamrock Games, which was the largest developer of multiplayer mobile games on the Russian market. In this company I developed mobile games from scratch. For example, the 'Sasha+Masha' game based on the popular TV series that aired on the TNT channel. It was very popular with TV viewers.

Thanks to my experience in creating games, including network ones, I was invited to Yandex that was forming a mobile apps development division.

At Yandex I worked as a Lead Software Developer on the creation of the first version of Yandex Maps mobile app. At first I created a version for push-button phones, which was long available for downloading on Yandex official page. However, with the advent of smartphones I ported the app to android.

Yandex Maps mobile was the first app in Russia to provide real-time information about the situation on the roads. We added some new useful functions: night mode, the ability to report on accidents and start a conversation. With the launching of GooglePlay and AppStore the number of users per month reached 35 million and the apps were ranked the first at the tops of these platforms. 

This was a lot of hard and meticulous work. I'm glad that the product has been useful and made navigation easier for a large number of users. I consider it a great success.

What was your first experience as a leader?

My first experience as a leader was managing an android team at Undev, which worked on product development. Undev had created its own Internet platform for broadcasting videos and needle qualified and experienced workers. 

The company's major task was to make their services available for mobile platforms and create additional functions for already existing apps. For this purpose I hired a team and coordinated our work with the iOS Development Department. I built the team's workflows, which made it possible to simplify and accelerate the launch of products with shared functionality of 50%.

I created more than 10 apps for Undev, including NPTV, a cloud platform for video streaming apps. The app allows you to broadcast from multiple sources at a time, and viewers can switch between them to see the same event from different cameras and angles. 

With the help of these apps we organized live broadcasts of the Olympic Games and St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. And set up contextual ads depending on the place where these events were broadcast.

Thus I managed to complete the task, scale the development processes, helping the company to reach the next level.

What challenges have you faced as a leader? How did you deal with them? 

A successful leader must deal with many pressing issues all the time to launch a quality product in demand on the market. I had to assess risks, look for optimization strategies, organize the work and increase development efficiency.

For example, as a head of mobile development at Rostelecom IT I had to deal with a difficult task. The company's work was set up with the use of outsourcing studios. They didn't meet deadlines, strive for optimization or fix application bugs for a long period of time. That's why I came up with a new strategy that involved moving development in-house, hiring a team and solving the existing problems.

The top management approved of my initiative. I selected and hired specialists and created an effective team of professionals. Under my management we were able to understand the existing code, refactor it and create an efficient development process in a short period of time.

Time has shown that this strategic decision was right.

How did you organize the recruitment process?

During my work at Rostelecom IT as a Technical Director of the Mobile Development Department I hired and trained over 100 workers. My main goal as a team leader was to recruit high-performing specialists with in-depth technical skills, so I took part in the hiring process.

I tried to optimize the process in order to select the best candidates in a short period of time. I created a large pool of interesting questions and tasks to discover the applicant's potential and not to bore them with standard questions.

After closing the most important positions I delegated a number of interview stages to other team members and only got involved at later stages to assess the applicants' soft skills and make a final decision.

I try to be honest during interviews and openly talk about the situation inside our team. It allows an applicant to form their expectations and be ready to solve difficult tasks. 

I'm convinced that considering the applicants' compatibility with the current team, their stress-resistance and ability to compromise is an important part of the recruitment process because hiring qualified workers results in quality product development and increase in company's profits.

Was it hard to set up the development process with a new team?

It was very hard at first. We had to release new functionality, conduct interviews and build processes. Within six months, I managed to hire a new team and stabilize the work with their help. 

I developed a common application architecture, which allowed us to quickly add new features and scale mobile apps, and also set up the team's working processes and implemented a code reuse mechanism, reducing the cost of typical tasks development by 75%.

Under my leadership we created Smart Home, Mobile Personal Account and Rostelecom Key apps. Together these apps have over 5 million users. They have been highly recognized by professionals in prestigious competitions. 

For instance, in 2020 our apps were presented in Golden App, an All-Russian open competition of the best mobile apps in Russia. Rostelecom Key won the popular vote of the competition, took 1st place in the Best Usability/UX App category and 3rd place in the Real Estate Apps category.

You participate in various prestigious events dedicated to modern technology, does it help with your work?

For sure it does. This is an important experience that gives an opportunity both to improve your skills and meet IT experts. You can also meet promising specialists at such events and invite them to be a part of your team.

During my career, I judged and was an industry expert in prestigious all-Russian hackathons: VirusHack 2020, GeekBrains IoT Hackathon and Rostelecom 2019 and also took part in various workshops and online academies.

On top of that, I judged in Digital Breakthrough, the largest IT competition, in 2020 and 2021 where I evaluated the works of the best developers in Russia, who proposed over a thousand solutions for the competition's tasks.

All the routine daily work shouldn't stand in the way of taking part in professional events and spending your free time trying out new interesting activities. I try to attend IT conferences and workshops whenever possible because I find it interesting to dive into complex practical development issues. 

Also, when it comes to professional events, there's meeting experts and cool networking as an extra bonus. 

You've been leading development teams for more than 10 years and have successfully launched a lot of apps. What advice would you give to aspiring leaders?

From my point of view, a good leader is someone who can take responsibility for both their own work and their team's work. It is the quality that will help you earn your employees' trust.

One of the main tasks of a leader is to grow their team and create a healthy atmosphere. You need to learn to properly motivate the employees, to be an example and an inspiration for your team.  It is also vital to communicate with team members 1 to 1, keep in touch with them, allow them to express their opinion and come up with initiatives. This leadership style makes employees feel like partners rather than just executors. 

And certainly, a leader must be good at something they're in charge of. This means having technical thinking, analyzing problems and looking for effective solutions.  It's necessary to maintain balance between delegating and supervising and to overcome challenges together. 

Moreover, you need to never stop learning new things, improve your soft skills and get feedback from the team in order to stay a successful leader and create high-quality projects.

Of course, understanding these principles comes with experience. A lifehack that I could recommend to aspiring leaders is to find your mentor. They will share their experience, help to deal with a particular case, achieve a goal and resolve a problem quickly and with less risk. 

I am a mentor myself and have experience with both executives and professionals in their developmental stage. I believe that such interaction is very productive.

Interview taken by Egor Kolomiets