Dmitri Mihhailov

How I work

1. The team is the product.

   My product is my team. I see my role as finding the right people for the right places, and giving them what they need to do their best work.

2. I think of trust as a bank account.

   Authority comes with the role. Trust doesn't. It's earned through small consistent things — showing up, doing what you said, investing time in the team when nothing immediate is at stake. And it's spent on the hard calls — the ones where people need to commit without all the context, the ones that don't go to a vote. If I haven't been depositing on the way up, the withdrawal doesn't work when I need it.

3. Sustainable team, replaceable me.

   I want the team to keep working without me. After I get it running, my job is mostly oiling — small fixes, a check-in here and there. Every so often I do a reorg or a shake-up. Not because anything's broken. Just to keep a sense of evolution. Teams age. A small jolt now is cheaper than letting them stagnate.

4. I'm not the smartest in the room.

   I'm not the smartest in the room. I'm the flexible and universal one — I can talk about almost anything, but rarely deep enough to be the expert. My job is to find the smartest people and enable them. That's the thing I'm trying to be good at.

5. It's easy to disagree with me.

   Disagree with me. With a good case, I change my mind. I want to hear all sides. Less emotion, more facts. We're not competing for who's the smartest. I expect grown-ups to behave as grown-ups.

6. The decision is already made before the meeting.

   A good decision is made before the decision meeting. We meet beforehand, we talk it through, we sleep on it, we come back. By the time we sit down to "decide," we're completely sure. The meeting is for rubber-stamping. If we're still arguing in the room, we haven't done the work yet — leave and come back.

7. Architecture follows the org.

   I shape architecture through organizational structure. Teams naturally build interfaces between their systems and everyone else's — they have to, to communicate. So if I want a different architecture, I usually start by changing who owns what.

8. The metric I trust is the one nobody had to compile.

   If a number requires someone to put a deck or a pivot table together, it's not a metric — it's a story being told to me. Real metrics show up in dashboards because the system already produces them. I push hard on automation here. Partly because I want signal. Partly because I think manual reporting is one of the worst things you can ask a team to do.

9. I keep my word.

   When I commit to something, it gets done. That's also why I push back when I'm not sure we can deliver — I'd rather argue at the start than apologize at the end. If we're going to miss, you'll hear it from me first, with time to react.

10. The hardest part is the microactions.

    Leading is always being in the spotlight. Setting examples not just by words, but by actions, microactions, day after day, staying consistent, living up to the standards I set for others. That's the hardest part.