Michael Isayev

“I worked with Michael Isaev in Exness during the period from the beginning of 2018 till June 2019 when I was in the roles of a Scrum Master and Agile Coach, and Michael was my line manager in the position of the Head Business Unit. Michael’s role was very difficult because of many factors, including that it was a brand new business unit formed based solely on a very high-level and pretty abstract product vision, without any business model. There were around 30 people who moved to this business unit and they were under permanent stress caused by this huge uncertainty. From the other side, the top management requested progress in specific projects, yet not setting any business goals to the unit. Michael managed to deal with all these challenges with very high proficiency of a business, technology and people manager. He organized this period as an organizational transformation project with a clear focus on transparency for both employees and management. In parallel, he gathered a management team, which took on their shoulders the most part of the organizational challenges, as well as developed the business model, product definition, and organized product development employing the Scrum Framework under the umbrella of Agile philosophy. He managed to organize work in the business unit, cultivating continuous improvement and personal ownership as key principles. It means that the entire business unit, as well as each team within it, went through short try-learn-improve cycles in respect to both the product they produced and the processes by means of which they did it. From the other side, each employee felt personal ownership not only for his personal tasks but rather for the overall result of his/her team and overall business unit. Michael cultivated Agile philosophy from the very beginning, promoted teamwork and technical excellence with a constant focus on the business value. He has managed to engage employees to the creation of the corporate culture and made it not just another unnecessary one but working, for instance as a basis for the 360 feedback as part of the Performance Management cycle. Michael led people by example. His approach was to enable instead of push. It was based on an Agile principle that you can trust motivated people and should just give them a respective environment to unfold their potential. From the other side, if you have to push somebody, then probably you do not need such kind of employee. According to one survey, the majority of employees chose him the role model that they would like to follow. I am really proud of that period when I had a chance to work with Michael. I can not say that we always had easy discussions, but the results were always really the best in those circumstances. I believe that his potential is still far from being fully resolved. Herewith, without doubts, I recommend Michael for any organization, in which he will have enough challenges from one side and enough authority to deal with them from”

“Michael is a great manager who is natively passionate for technology and constant personal growth. We worked with Michael together for several years during the massive growth of the company. As a CTO, I needed to improve overall stability, and predictability of infrastructure, make it agile and able to grow together with product development and Michael was the one who delivered this together with other improvements. Being a financial broker, it was vital for us to have a stable and fast global network to provide our services worldwide and specifically in China and this was successfully achieved due to Michaels solutions which were delivered with full dedication to AGILE principals in an iterative and lean manner. Michael was the initial evangelist of a cloud-first development approach, and due to that, we were able to migrate our on-premise infrastructure into hybrid one, decrease pitfalls between Dev and Ops and increase observability of all services. Successful hybrid cloud experience and cloud-first vision were one of the crucial factors for further promotion of Michael to drive our B2B business direction. Michael is an excellent communicator and has powerful people management skills. He successfully acts as a solution architect, has a robust cyber security experience. Each decision that he makes have a full strategic alignment and organically fit into current demand and any future plans. Michael perfectly works at the organizational level and able to work directly with C-level and shareholders. He is open-minded, always able to explain complicated technology domain to any audience and has a native influence on engineering staff. I recommend Michael both to mature businesses and startups due to his business acumen.”