Listen before solving
I want to hear the user's problem, the team's worries, and the uncomfortable part people often leave out of the meeting.
PM value: better problem definitionPRODUCT · PROGRAM · PEOPLE · PRAGUE
Good products start with understanding people.
I help product and engineering teams make sense of difficult problems, work better together, and build things that people can actually use.
I am not the PM who walks in with a process and a pile of meetings. I listen first, make the problem clearer, and help the people closest to it make a better decision.
LISTEN✦MAKE THINGS CLEAR✦BUILD TRUST✦LEARN✦HAVE SOME FUN✦REPEAT
THE DIFFERENCE
There are enough PM websites that say "I lead, align and deliver."
Those things matter. They are just not the part I find most interesting.
The hard part is usually human. A user does not understand why a product works the way it does. An engineer does not believe the roadmap. A stakeholder is asking for a feature because nobody found the real problem. A security concern arrives after the architecture is already set.
My job is to help people understand each other well enough to move forward.
HOW I WORK
Empathy is useful when it changes what you do.
I use empathy as a practical product skill, not as a personality label.
Make the invisible visible
Turn assumptions, dependencies, risks and conflicting goals into something the room can actually discuss.
PM value: clearer decisionsConnect different worlds
I can talk to engineers about the system, to product people about outcomes, and to non-technical stakeholders about why both matter.
PM value: stronger alignmentLearn without blame
Plans go wrong. Users surprise us. People miss things. I care more about learning what happened than finding someone to blame.
PM value: healthier deliveryWHERE I CAN HELP
Human problems, with real delivery pressure.
Based on work I have actually done across product, program management, delivery, engineering, security and privacy.
Make sense of the mess
When priorities are tangled, stakeholders disagree, or a product has lost its sense of direction.
- Priorities and trade-offs
- Product and engineering alignment
- Outcome and risk thinking
- Decision facilitation
Help a team work together
When work is moving, but not really flowing, or when coordination across teams has become expensive.
- Delivery flow
- Cross-team dependencies
- Lean-Agile ways of working
- Program coordination
Build for real people
When security, privacy, ethics or user experience need to be part of the product conversation early.
- Threat modeling workshops
- Privacy-aware product discussions
- Ethical design reviews
- Security risk prioritization
Help people learn
Workshops, talks and mentoring for teams that want practical knowledge without the corporate theatre.
- Threat modeling
- Product and program mentoring
- Agile and delivery workshops
- Conference and internal talks
SELECTED EXPERIENCE
Places where I helped move things forward.
I have worked inside large product organisations and smaller teams, across security, identity, infrastructure, data and software delivery. These names are here for context. The useful part is what I helped make clearer, safer or easier to deliver.
GenBringing people, products and processes together around identity, trust and risk.
Portworx by Pure StorageHelping coordinate complex technical work while keeping delivery focused and visible.
CitrixMaking large-scale release coordination, dependencies and delivery easier to manage.
VistaprintHelping teams make safer decisions around security, identity and data.
AccoladeTurning a difficult data-ingestion problem into a system people could rely on.
InforMaking complex data more useful through analysis, product thinking and delivery.
Could you be next? ↗
A FEW RECEIPTS
Experience is more useful when you can point to it.
Revenue safeguarded
A risk mitigation solution built with general management alignment.
Data ingestion platform
Product and delivery work around a platform supporting company expansion.
Agile teams
Experience supporting 16 teams and 130 global contributors.
Years in technology
Web development, architecture, analysis, management, product and program work.
PUBLIC WORK
I talk about technology, but usually the real subject is people.
My talks are where I tend to test ideas in public. I tell stories, make things a little less serious, and then try to connect them back to how we build products.
Where did all the fun go?
After three days at a metal festival, I started wondering why software work had become so serious. This talk became a small investigation into what happened to curiosity, joy and the strange energy that used to make technical communities fun.
I brought it back to work: people do better things when they have room to experiment, laugh, care and be themselves. The talk later travelled to HalfStack Vienna and GeeCON Prague, with a guitar, a violin and a few different versions along the way.
What it says about me as a PMTeam health is not decoration. It affects collaboration, creativity, learning and the willingness to say "I think this plan is wrong."
See the OpenFest program ↗
FOSDEM · 2026
We d-build it, but they didn't come
A talk about the moment after you have built the tool: how do you help real people change their behaviour and adopt it?
PM value Adoption, user motivation and listening for the real reason people say no.
FOSDEM · 2026
What translating Thunderbird taught me
A personal story from years of translating Thunderbird into Bulgarian, including the messy details that appear when software meets language and real users.
PM value Localization, feedback loops, quality and the discipline of seeing the product from another person's context.
FOSDEM · 2026
Lessons from teaching 100+ beginners to use OpenStreetMap
Teaching people to start mapping is a very practical lesson in what beginners need, what scares them, and what gets them from "I don't know" to confidence.
PM value Onboarding, activation, learning curves and designing for the first useful moment.
UXCON · 2024
Heavy metal inspiration for becoming a better UX professional
I use music as a way to challenge how we think about creativity, emotion and the people on the other side of our interfaces.
PM value Human-centred thinking, emotional context and the courage to question "normal" product behaviour.
DEVCONF · 2024
What we all do wrong about threat modeling
A practical look at how teams approach threat modeling, why they miss important things, and how to make the exercise useful to the whole team.
PM value Risk framing, prioritization and making security a shared product responsibility instead of a specialist hand-off.
OPENALT · 2025
Thunderbird from a community perspective
Looking at Thunderbird through the people around the product: contributors, community, users, privacy and the ecosystem that keeps the project alive.
PM value Ecosystem thinking, stakeholder empathy and understanding the wider system around a product.
INSTALLFEST · 2025
Build your brand as an engineer using privacy-respecting services
A practical conversation about professional visibility without treating privacy as something you have to give up to be seen.
PM value Trust, trade-offs and understanding that a product choice is also a statement about what you value.
FOSDEM · 2024
It's all about the email. Ugh, what?
A look at a technology most people simply want to work, and the human expectations hiding underneath a very old product category.
PM value Reduce complexity for users. The technology can be complicated without making the user's life complicated.
CURIOSITY IN ACTION
Sometimes I follow a strange question until it becomes useful.
I like questions that do not fit neatly into a roadmap. Sometimes they become a privacy investigation. Sometimes they become an experiment on a street. The important part is the habit: notice something, get curious, test what you can, and learn from what happens.
What happens when a strange little data listing is actually a big privacy problem?
In 2012, I bought a dataset containing names, user IDs and email addresses of around 1.1 million Facebook users for five dollars. I was curious about what was possible, but the useful part was what came next: the purchase exposed a much bigger question about how personal data could move through third-party applications and what users could reasonably expect.
What I take into product workCuriosity is often the first step in risk discovery. Ask what happens in the real system, not only what the design says should happen.
Read the Forbes story ↗
What if a pothole is really an interface problem?
We treated potholes like software bugs. Instead of sending another complaint into a system that was already full of complaints, we made the problem visible by painting around it. People noticed. Photos spread. The idea travelled. What started as a small experiment became a story about visibility, behaviour and civic action.
What I take into product workWhen users keep reporting the same problem, adding another ticket may not help. Sometimes you need to change the interface around the problem so people can finally see it.
Read the 27k+ read story ↗
THINGS I WRITE ABOUT
Writing is another way I think in public.
I do not write only about product management. I write when I notice something worth investigating: a delivery problem, a privacy gap, a strange human behaviour, or a technical question that keeps bothering me. A few of these pieces show how I think when nobody has given me a roadmap.
HACKERNOON · 2026
AI Is Not a Football Team: Why I'm Still Trying to Figure This Out
I wrote this because I was tired of the pressure to be either completely excited about AI or completely against it. The useful position, for me, is curiosity: stay with the uncertainty long enough to understand what is actually changing and what is just noise.
PM valueGood product decisions need intellectual honesty. You can hold uncertainty, ask better questions, and avoid turning a new technology into a belief system.
Read the article ↗
HACKERNOON · 2023 · 10,905 READS
Everything I Achieved With My Mozilla Contribution Sprint
A practical look at what happens when you stop waiting for the perfect plan and use a focused sprint to make a contribution to a project you care about.
PM valueTurn intention into a small, visible delivery loop. Set a goal, make the work concrete, learn fast, and show what changed.
Read the article ↗
HACKERNOON · 2023
How a Program Manager Can Estimate Items Too Early To Be Estimated
One of my more practical delivery pieces. It explains how to work with early, imperfect estimates without pretending that uncertainty does not exist.
PM valueMake uncertainty visible. Use evidence, historical data and regular updates instead of false precision.
Read the article ↗
HACKERNOON · 2021
Contributing to Open Source Privacy Projects is Easier Than You Think
A practical invitation to make privacy work less intimidating and more approachable by showing people where they can start.
PM valueLower the barrier to participation. Good systems help people take the first step instead of asking them to become experts first.
Read the article ↗
HACKERNOON · 2023 · FEATURED STORY
Mastering Shortwave Listening with Fedora Linux and Software Defined Radio
A personal technical journey that starts with curiosity about radio and ends up in a story about communication, access to technology and the ethics of building with it.
PM valueCuriosity is not a distraction from product work. It is often how you discover a user's context, a new constraint, or a better question.
Read the article ↗
OUTSIDE THE PM TITLE
Curiosity also takes me off the usual product path.
Some of the things I build and perform do not look like product management on paper. They still come from the same place: notice people, understand what is happening, experiment with a different approach, and create enough trust for people to take part.
TPM and Heavy Metal Fusion
I mix technology, people and mindset with a very personal ingredient: heavy metal. The newsletter lets me explore the space between serious product and program work and the human stuff that often gets left out.
What it says about me as a PMCuriosity makes it easier to challenge default thinking. A useful PM does not need every idea to come from a product management book.
Visit the newsletter ↗
SystemErr 2052
I created an experimental theatre play about a future without rights and free will. It started as an experiment at OpenFest 2024 and grew into a participatory performance where the audience is asked to stop being a spectator and become part of the story.
What it says about me as a PMFacilitation is not about talking at people. It is about creating a situation where people feel safe enough to participate, question, imagine and act.
Explore SystemErr 2052 ↗
WHO I AM
Technical enough to understand the details. Human enough to ask why.
I have spent 20+ years across web development, architecture, analysis, management, product and program management. I have worked in different environments and software industries, including healthcare and hospitality.
I have also spent a lot of time outside the formal job title: community events, Mozilla and Thunderbird, OpenStreetMap, privacy, security, public speaking, teaching and creative experiments.
That combination matters because product work does not happen in a box. It happens between people, systems, constraints, incentives and the users who eventually have to live with the result.
START WITH THE REAL PROBLEM
You do not need a polished brief.
Tell me what you are trying to build, where it hurts, what people are disagreeing about, and what you have already tried.
Good first conversations are usually about the problem, not about selling a predefined service.
bogomil@talkweb.eu ↗ No funnel. Just an email.