Turning Resistance into Results – Interview with Anastasiia Moskovchenko

Anastasiia Moskovchenko has built her career in markets where change is not welcomed – it is negotiated. Today, she is Lead Product Manager at RepRally and the founder of Product Trends, a global community of more than 6,000 product managers. In 2025, she was recognized as a PM Award winner by Products That Count and now serves on its Advisory Council.

Before that, she led digital transformation initiatives and built advertising platforms within major global technology companies, serving more than 200 million users.

"I've spent eight years building products in conditions where the real competitor wasn't another company – it was confusion and the deeply human resistance to change," – she says.

Anastasiia Moskovchenko's career has followed one clear pattern: introducing technology into industries that traditionally resist change.

She has also received international recognition for two product innovations: AIssist, which was honored for leveraging AI to automate tasks, respond to employee queries, and prevent issues through predictive analytics; and PIK, an innovation that earned the Leaders of Digital Transformation Award for optimizing water supply and sewage routing in residential buildings, significantly reducing pipeline installation time and resources.

Throughout her career, she has worked on bringing new technology into traditional industries – introducing location-based advertising to global brands such as McDonald's, Burger King, and Carrefour; scaling a content platform to 80 million monthly active users (MAU) with 400% DAU growth in just three months; and modernizing the digital systems of a historic auction house founded in 1796.

Now she is disrupting wholesale distribution through a platform that connects brands with independent retailers across the United States.

At RepRally, she leads the entire store experience, from loyalty systems to AI-powered recommendations. Within just three months of launching the redesigned experience, she generated 30% of the new product's total revenue. This milestone demonstrates not only her speed of execution but also the market-shifting impact of her approach, which drove significant increases in both average order value (AOV) and purchase frequency. She says that, at every stage of her career, one principle has remained constant: technology alone changes nothing. Understanding people does.

Entrepreneur spoke with Anastasiia Moskovchenko about her career, major projects, challenges and success.

Trained as an engineer in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Anastasiia began her career as a developer at a startup, writing code every day. Despite being deeply involved in the technical work, she found herself increasingly questioning the purpose behind it.

"Something kept bothering me: I had no idea why we were building what we were building. Features would come down from above and I would implement them, but I couldn't see the logic behind the decisions. As a developer, I had zero influence over those decisions. It was frustrating. You're putting in all this effort, but you can't even ask, "Should we be doing this at all? Then I picked up a book called Herding Cats. It's about leading people who are used to doing their own thing. It covers how to become a leader, how to identify and solve problems before they escalate and how to communicate with executives. While reading it, something clicked. I realized there's an entire discipline built around the questions I had been asking myself: Why are we building this? For whom? And what problem does it actually solve? That's when I knew I wanted to move into product management," – she recalls.

One of the earliest defining moments in Moskovchenko's career came during her tenure at Yandex – then the largest technology company in the CIS, with over 85 million monthly active users and a valuation exceeding $7 billion. There, she was entrusted with leading the product strategy for advertising platforms operating at a scale few product managers ever encounter. Her redesign of the ad banners alone delivered an 11.9% increase in revenue per user (ARPU) in the Turkish market.

"I was lucky that my career started in advertising. It's a market with millions of users and real money on the line. In that environment, you learn fast that just pitching ideas doesn't work. Nobody cares how clever your feature sounds. The only question is: what's the impact? So I learned early: if you can't model how a feature makes money in a spreadsheet, it won't make an impact in reality. A good hypothesis should be clear, make sense with numbers, match the product plan, and fit how the system works."

When starting a new product, Anastasiia Moskovchenko says she always begins with a simple but critical question – not about features, but about awareness. For her, understanding the user goes beyond research or personas – it starts with recognizing their readiness.

"I start by asking: 'Does this person even know they have a problem?' At Yandex, our ad platform was so complicated that only experts could use it. A small bike shop owner said creating an ad would take him a whole day, and online marketing wasn't even a priority. Simply making the interface easier wasn't enough. The real issue was he didn't see why he needed ads at all. So we changed the focus from 'launch ads' to 'get customers.' We made it a subscription instead of settings. Once the owner started seeing calls from customers, he understood the value himself."

The framework cuts through in any market: meet users at their actual level of awareness, not where you wish they were. Educate before you sell. Simplify before you scale. The full product is the reward for trust - not the introduction to it.

At RepRally, Anastasiia Moskovchenko applies the same approach to the US wholesale market – a $500 billion industry that still relies heavily on paper checks and manual processes. Many store owners have only seconds between customers and no time to browse complex catalogs. Instead of removing the human element, the model begins with a sales representative who builds the relationship and places the first order. Only after that initial trust is established, the technology steps in – through recommendations, loyalty systems, and customer segmentation.

"The framework is simple: if the user doesn't know the problem exists – educate through context. If they know but aren't ready – make it really easy to start. Only then give them the full product" – explains Anastasiia Moskovchenko.

When asked what similarities and key differences she has noticed between these markets and how she addressed the challenges, Anastasiia answers:

"The similarity is that in every market you compete with habit, not with competitors. And the product always scales – trust never does. In Turkey, Carrefour didn't need better ad technology. They needed reporting in their cabinet, pricing in lira, native categories like 'small markets open late' that made zero sense anywhere else. The tech was ready. The local operations weren't. The result was a 14% increase in profit across expanded markets, driven not by shipping more features, but by understanding precisely what each market required to trust and adopt the product"

At Phillips auction house – New York, London, Geneva, Hong Kong – art collectors worth millions didn't want to feel like they were using software. We built 'popcorn bidding' that made online auctions feel like being in the room. 95% sell-through. The challenge wasn't the product, it was earning trust online from a 200-year-old institution.

In the U.S. with RepRally, the $500 billion wholesale market still runs on paper checks. You don't hand them an app. The sales rep walks in, builds the relationship, places the first order by hand. Technology comes after the handshake."

Having disrupted advertising across international markets and modernized a 200-year-old auction institution, Moskovchenko set her sights on an industry even further behind: American wholesale distribution.

RepRally is creating the go-to-market platform for offline retail, powered by AI. In the U.S., hundreds of thousands of independent stores – from bodegas and convenience stores to small groceries – still buy from brands through sales reps who walk in, take orders, and manage relationships. The entire process, including catalogs, invoices, samples and commissions, largely runs on paper, phone calls and spreadsheets, making it a $500 billion market operating like it's 1995.

RepRally is changing how products are distributed. For a new brand to reach 10,000 stores, it normally requires reps, relationships, logistics and months of work. RepRally speeds this up with real-time inventory, easy reordering and AI-powered recommendations.

When asked what drew her to RepRally, Moskovchenko explains that she was looking for a challenge unlike anything she had tackled before – a problem that was both complex and unsolved.

"After eight years building marketplaces and map products – geo-advertising, content platforms, online auctions – I wanted to apply everything I know to a problem that's genuinely hard and hasn't been solved yet. RepRally is building the default go-to-market platform for offline retail, powered by AI. That's a massive challenge: a three-sided marketplace connecting brands, sales reps and independent stores in a $500 billion market still running on paper checks and catalogs.

What attracted me is the complexity. My whole career has been transforming complex technical challenges into digital products – expanding geo-advertising platforms across international markets to deliver a 14% profit increase, building Al recommendations for tens of millions of users, running video streaming for live auctions across four continents. RepRally needs all of that: AI-powered recommendations, real-time inventory, commission tracking, reordering, but for users who have 30 seconds between customers and have never used anything like this. That intersection of deep technical product and real-world offline behavior – that's exactly where I do my best work."

When discussing her role at RepRally, Anastasiia Moskovchenko explains that she oversees the heart of the platform, balancing the needs of brands, sales reps and retail stores.

She is the Lead Product Manager for the core marketplace – a three-sided system connecting all these users. Her responsibility is to prioritize across all three sides and make the platform feel simple and intuitive. She manages the full product roadmap and execution for the entire platform.

"Day to day, I lead mobile-first experiences for field sales reps who are literally placing orders between store visits, building recommendations and pricing logic to make the marketplace smarter."

Anastasiia Moskovchenko says that one of the biggest challenges at RepRally is managing the needs of three very different users at once. Brands want data and wide distribution, sales reps want faster deals and clear commission tracking, while stores want simplicity and new products without extra clutter. Improving one side can easily disrupt another, making prioritization a constant challenge with no perfect answers. "Every decision matters. That's where I learn the most," – she says.

Throughout her career, Anastasiia has found that two principles remain constant across industries and scales when building successful products. First, she emphasizes understanding user readiness before building anything. Meeting users where they actually are ensures the product can sell itself.

As Moskovchenko explains, The second principle is to always put a number on it before writing a single line of code. She learned this in advertising, where real client money was at stake: you can't just ship a feature and hope it works. Every idea must be modeled first, with expected outcomes calculated. If the math doesn't work on paper, it won't magically work in production.

"This holds everywhere – at a 200M-user platform, at an auction house, at a startup. When someone on my team says 'users will love this,' my first question is always 'by how much, and what does that translate to?' If there's silence, we're not ready to build yet. That discipline, refusing to move forward until you can defend the number, has been the single biggest time-saver across every product I've ever worked on."

Anastasiia Moskovchenko's name is also closely associated with Product Trends, a global community she founded for product managers. The platform serves as a hub for knowledge-sharing, career guidance and practical insights, helping PMs navigate international job markets and connect with other product managers worldwide.

"By the time I started Product Trends, I had already spent years contributing to the field: teaching product management to over 700 university students and sharing practical case studies at industry conferences. I was regularly invited to judge some of the most competitive AI and product events in the world, such as the Digital Breakthrough hackathon series. There, I evaluated AI solutions across five regional and international stages, attracting over 2,000 specialists from China, Canada, and beyond. I also served on the jury of the Burning Heroes Pitch Competition in London, evaluating early-stage startups pitching to top VC firms, including Antler, Angels Den, and Fuel Venture. When I began navigating international job markets myself, I noticed how little content existed for product managers, who were trying to break into companies abroad. Not theory. Not generic career advice. Actual answers to questions like: how do you position your experience for a Western audience, what does compensation really look like in Europe, how do you get a recruiter to find you on LinkedIn rather than the other way around?

So I started a Telegram channel, just writing, just sharing. No grand community strategy. That channel now has over 6,000 followers, which still surprises me, because I never optimized it for growth. I optimized it for usefulness."

From there, the community grew organically. Anastasiia began hosting live talks and conversations with experienced professionals, covering real-world topics like job search strategies for international markets, life on a highly qualified worker visa in Spain and hiring realities for product managers in the Netherlands. These sessions, recorded and shared, gradually built a practical library of insights for product managers at every stage of their careers.

"What I realized along the way is that the audience wasn't just looking for information – they wanted a community of people trying to do the same thing. That's what Product Trends became. Less a channel, more a place where ambitious product managers find each other.

Recently, Anastasiia Moskovchenko was named one of just 25 recipients of the 2025 Product Manager Award - presented by Products That Count, the world's largest product management association with over 600,000 members globally. Selected from a pool of more than 500 nominees through a rigorous multi-stage evaluation by an independent Advisory Board of industry leaders, the PM Award is recognized as one of the highest honors in the field of product management. Winners represent a who's who of product innovation, spanning companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

For Moskovchenko, innovation isn't about big ideas – it's about closing the gap between what users actually do and what a product assumes they do. Moskovchenko was recognized specifically for pioneering product frameworks that others in the industry have since adopted – most notably her application of behavioral data analysis to transform low-frequency marketplace engagement. Her methods of reframing normalized data anomalies into solvable product problems have been cited as a model approach.

"The most meaningful breakthroughs I've had didn't start with a big idea. They started with a data anomaly everyone else had normalized. Reframing that as a solvable problem and driving a team toward fixing it, is where real innovation lives."

When asked what advice she would give product managers working in markets that resist change or are heavily tradition-driven, Moskovchenko emphasizes the value of patience and understanding:

"Don't fight the tradition. Understand what it's protecting. The instinct of most product managers is to come in with a roadmap and a sense of urgency. In tradition-driven markets, that's the fastest way to lose credibility. The people who've been operating in these spaces for decades aren't resistant to change because they're unsophisticated. They're resistant because they've seen bad change and they're protecting something that works. The job is to earn the right to change things slowly. That means spending more time listening than building in the early days, finding the metric the market already cares about and making your innovation serve it rather than replace it."

Looking back on her career, Moskovchenko highlights two key lessons that have shaped her approach to product management.

"The first is that the best product decisions come from the most uncomfortable questions. Early in my career I was good at finding solutions. It took me years to get good at questioning whether I was solving the right problem. Those are completely different skills and the second one matters more. The second is that momentum beats perfection. I've seen skilled product managers get stuck because they wanted the plan to be perfect before taking action. Markets don't wait. Users don't wait. Shipping something real and learning from it, is almost always more valuable than the extra month spent refining a plan."

Looking ahead, Moskovchenko sees product management evolving in two major ways.

"For a long time, product management was mostly about coordination – running sprints, writing tickets, and aligning teams. Now AI is automating much of that work. This means the PMs who will succeed are the ones who can think big, make decisions with limited information, and truly own the results.

Another big shift is that PMs need to be much closer to the business. Not just understand users and data, but understand money – what drives profit, how margins work, and how the company actually makes decisions. In B2B, this is already expected, and soon it will be expected everywhere."

Anastasiia Moskovchenko also shared her perspective on the skills and trends shaping the next wave of product management, emphasizing the combination of business insight, AI fluency and high-level communication.

In her view, the first skill that will truly matter is the ability to clearly explain how a product decision impacts business results. As AI takes over more of the execution work, the most valuable PMs will be those who can confidently answer one key question: why does this decision make sense for the business?

The second skill she highlights is what she calls "taste in AI." Today, everyone has access to the same tools. The real difference is not who uses AI, but who uses it wisely – to make better and faster decisions without losing judgment. That means knowing when to trust AI's output and when to challenge it.

The third is communication – this will matter more than ever. If AI can write documents and summaries, what truly sets someone apart is the ability to think clearly and speak convincingly in real time. Presence, confidence and the ability to influence others will become even more valuable as written work becomes easier to automate.