Dmitrii “Cooler” Utmanov

Fourteen years in tech, nine of them leading engineering at T-Bank. I started with a team of five, grew into running a group of six product teams, and ended up leading the company-wide platform standardization project. The main thing I learned in that time: teams rarely lose their effectiveness to technology. It drains away through fuzzy goals, lost focus, questions and decisions that nobody owns, and managers who lack the experience to see the system as a whole.

So I put my effort where it counts most: people. A company, a product, a project — the result comes down to them. About ten of my people grew into managers inside the company over those years. One went on to run a group of four teams; another became an architect for a whole domain. Watching a mentee get big results and then start teaching and growing their own people is my favorite part of the job. Now I do it outside the company, helping engineers and managers, new and experienced alike, get through what once cost me years.

Alongside that I am building a personal brand and launching products, with agentic development standing in for a whole team. I always keep an eye on trends and new technology: inside the company, we were the first team to build AI into a platform product. Everything I teach, in agentic development as much as in management, comes from my own experience — good calls and bad ones, mistakes, problems worked through, and an enormous amount of time spent finding what actually works. I can make that road much shorter for you.