BigCommerce Employee Spotlight: Elena Leonova

Welcome to the BigCommerce Employee Spotlight. Each month, we’ll chat with an employee who works on the BigCommerce product. These are the folks behind the scenes who are crafting the BigCommerce developer experience, from SDKs and APIs to themes and documentation. Discover what they’re building, their tools of the trade, and learn about the technologies they’re passionate about.

This month we sat down with Elena Leonova, Director of Product Management at BigCommerce. We spoke with her about leading the Product Management organization and how her team decides which features to build.

Hi Elena, Tell me about your path to BigCommerce.

That’s a good question! Prior to BigCommerce, I spent six years working for Magento, which is another ecommerce platform. I started there as a Business Analyst in their offices in Ukraine. Over time, I worked with a lot of different teams. I became a Senior Product Manager, then transitioned into Senior Manager of Product Management, which is what eventually brought me to Austin, Texas. After some time, I decided I was open to new opportunities and really wanted to bring my passion and knowledge for ecommerce to another company. I wanted to do something similar, at a new company, and have the chance to really leave a mark and make it better. That’s why I’m here at BigCommerce.

Do you have a formal education in computer science? What’s your background?

I’m originally from Ukraine and before I started working in the tech industry, I went to college at the National Technical University of Ukraine Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. In Ukraine, we have a really interesting specialization that is a mix of economics and computer science. That’s the program I enrolled in because I was passionate about computer science but unsure if I wanted to be a software engineer. I’ve always wanted to understand how to use computer science to make an impact on people’s lives.

After college, I wanted to use my skills and knowledge in computer science to understand the growth of specific business KPIs. While I was looking for a job, I found a Business Analyst position at Lissoft, a telecommunication company, and thought it would be close to economics. I found that role really fascinating — you can work with customers and understand what their goals are, then use your skills to find the best solution for them. Later, I used my analyst experience and got a job working at Magento. There, I fell in love with working in ecommerce.

Was it a difficult decision to leave Ukraine?

While working at Magento, I was traveling a lot and spent most of my time here in the US. Magento is a US-based company and it made more sense for me as a Product Manager to be closer to our customers, so my husband and I decided to move here. It was definitely a challenging experience because I had to learn a whole new culture and find a way to adapt to it. It’s like rebuilding your life, to be honest, because you leave everything behind and just start over. It’s so different than where I came from.

Tell me about what you do at BigCommerce and your day-to-day work.

I’m the Director of Product Management, which means that I have the amazing opportunity to work with all the Product Managers on many different initiatives: Catalog, Omni-Channel, Marketplaces, Billing and more. I’m responsible for helping us focus on important initiatives so that when we decide to spend our time and effort on a specific feature, we’re prioritizing what will make the biggest impact on our merchants’ and Partners’ lives and businesses. That’s my focus — doing what’s most important for our customers. It sounds easy, but it’s not. We’re not optimizing features for one specific customer, we’re building a platform. You have to learn what can make an impact on a lot of people at once.

How do you find out what’s most important to customers?

That’s part of the product management art. Understanding who you are building functionality for and really knowing your customer and understanding which problems they are trying to solve — not just building specifically what they ask for. It’s about understanding why they have a specific problem. There’s a famous quote from Henry Ford about asking his customers at that time what they wanted. They’d say “a faster horse”, but in reality, they wanted a car, but didn’t know cars were a possibility yet. That’s what it’s all about. Knowing your audience and understanding what they need, why they need it and having lots of those conversations so you can distill it into something that is meaningful. You don’t want to try to improve the horse, you want to build the car.

We talk to customers and Partners here at BigCommerce using the Community and schedule individual conversations. We also consult with our sales and Client Success team. We look at market changes and trends, trying to accumulate information to make a decision on what to build next. We also have to consider where we want to be as a company. We take all this information and then go through it and put together metrics that will allow us to build the smallest feature we can and validate it with customers as early as possible. Then you can understand if you’re building the right thing or not.

What’s an interesting problem that you’re solving at BigCommerce?

We’ve continued growing really fast, and with that, we’re obviously changing our market segment. Previously, BigCommerce was focused on the small business segment. Now we’re expanding into mid-market as well, and with that, customer needs change dramatically. Part of the challenge I’m working on is how can we take what we already have and build those incremental features in a way that will be easy for all of our small business customers to adopt. We want our new customers to get what they need as quickly as possible because ecommerce is really a highly competitive market with lots of competition. What I’m trying to do is create a feature set that we can build up which meets the needs of the mid-market segment.

What project are you working on that excites you?

One initiative that excites me the most is our commitment to open the platform for our developer and Partner community. We are constantly working on new APIs & SDKs to make sure that our developers and Partners can build best-of-breed solutions for BigCommerce, expanding merchant capabilities on the platform. There’s been significant progress made last year, and all new APIs and SDKs have been documented in our developer documentation, and there are many more that are coming. Stay tuned for the updates, and reach out to us if you want to learn more.

What are some tools and technologies that you use every day?

We use Product Board which is an amazing tool that helps us map all of the features to specific goals and provide visibility and transparency to the entire organization. JIRA helps us focus on execution and work with our engineering teams to give them the clarity they need in terms of engineering tickets and stories.

We use Salesforce for customer feedback and Community so that’s extremely helpful. We also work with tools like Segment, Google Analytics, and Full Story to give us insight into how people use our product, which is really amazing because we can understand how people perceive the product versus how they actually use it.

How has the ecommerce industry has changed since you started your career? Do you have any predictions for the future?

When I began my career in ecommerce, the biggest innovation at the time was mobile commerce, specifically responsive design. It seemed so revolutionary for a customer to be able to navigate to a site on their phone and order something, regardless of where they were! It’s become so popular now that the younger generation of customers expect this level of responsiveness, and no one is surprised by it. Mobile ecommerce has become such a normal part of life along with things like social commerce. You can go to any of your social channels like Facebook and Instagram to complete a purchase.

I believe the ecommerce industry is reorienting to become even more omni-channel, where customers will expect to find their products using any channel, whether it’s a social network, their phones, or purchasing through Alexa and Google Assistant. That trend will definitely continue and ecommerce platforms will need to adapt and adjust to a new reality.

Customer expectations are also changing. Previously, most customers were fine with waiting for their product to arrive. Now, especially with Amazon, everyone’s become so impatient! Consumers discover products and want them available at any time, and want to use any channels to buy them. Merchants have to provide really good customer service and make the magic happen. Consumers expect merchants to be able to deliver overnight, sometimes faster than that. I think most of those trends will definitely continue. And we at BigCommerce are staying on top of these trends to provide merchants the experience that their shoppers want.

What advice would you give to other women in tech?

My biggest advice is to find your true passion and do everything possible to get better at it. If you’re truly good at what you do and you’re passionate about it, then you will be able to succeed in any environment, any company, any country. And most importantly just be yourself.

“Be passionate, persistent, and authentic”

We’d like to thank Elena for sharing her story with us. If you have a question for BigCommerce, or want to learn more about our platform reach out in the comments below or tweet us at @BigCommerceDevs.