A Plesk Journey: Told By Our Two Longest-serving Employees

I’m Sergey Lystsev, vice president of research and development and I joined Plesk like in 2001 so it’s over 18 years of me in the company in different roles.

My name is Sergey Egorov. I’ve been working at Plesk for about 18 years.

My role has actually changed several times. I started as a test engineer, then 1 or 2 months later, I switched to developer.

And starting from 2015, I’m working as lead of the program management team.

Our main goal is to make products valuable for users.

( THEY HAD A MISSION FOR PLESK )

Plesk delivers to people technology in a convenient way and they probably wouldn’t have been able to use the technology otherwise because of all the knowledge needed.

( AND ACHIEVED SO MUCH… )

last year, when I asked our users ‘what would you like to see in Plesk, like features or improvements’ and several people answered that ‘it’s hard to say’ and I asked why… and they said ‘it seemed that Plesk is almost full from functional perspective, it solves all our tasks’

Starting in 2015/2016, we are really happy to see that Plesk has a real high satisfaction rate with our customers, and that was probably like the biggest achievement.

( THEY DID IT BY LISTENING TO CUSTOMERS)

We pay a lot of attention to what users say, we have a lot of..we literally have tons of user feedback to analyze.

There are probably thousands of like requests processed every month.

We choose the requests and generate some ideas which will produce some features which will give our customers the biggest value.

( WITH A STRONG TEAM ON BOARD..))

What we really look at people – we are looking for potential. A portfolio would be good, but it’s a relatively fresh industry.

So we are taking people for how quickly they can actually learn and the best metric for us is like a kind of a forecast. What would this person be able to do in like 6 months, 12 months, 18 months.

We hire like several star level people like with all sorts of certificates and so on.

For the rest, potential is more important.

( THEY NEVER STOP LEARNING HOW TO DO BETTER)

We are visiting thematic conferences.

Also we use some online services like the Gopractice simulator. It has gamification – you are learning some aspects of product development, producing some product to market from scratch.

( NOW THIS IS THEIR ADVICE FOR YOU…)

We needed to try, to fail and learn and through that we have built quite a decent product and all of our customers they’re kind of in the same position.

Keep trying, trying new stuff, keep learning. Don’t be afraid to fail, and success will come to you.