The Guest – Anatolii Zotin, Executive VP of Software Development at Exinity
Anatolii Zotin is the Executive VP of Software Development at Exinity, a global fintech company offering innovative trading and investing products for emerging markets. As a seasoned engineering manager with years of experience, Anatolii has successfully led large software teams across various projects, with a focus on trust, openness, honesty, and teamwork. He joins us to talk about his career history, his experience in merging 2 tech teams into 1 and bridging the gap between engineering and business.
Bridging Tech and Business: Aligning Innovation with Strategy
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, the gap between technical teams and business stakeholders can lead to misalignment, missed opportunities, and inefficiencies. While engineers focus on building scalable, reliable solutions, business leaders prioritize speed, market fit, and ROI. The key to success lies in effective communication, shared goals, and a collaborative mindset. In this episode, we explore strategies for bridging the gap between tech and business, ensuring that innovation aligns with strategic objectives for long-term growth.
Some highlights of this episode include:
- Bridging the Gap Between Engineering and Business
- Building and Managing High-Performing Teams
- Challenges of Team Formation and Collaboration
- The Role of Team Augmentation in Scaling Development Teams
- The Impact of AI on Software Development
Q: Bridging the gap between tech and business – it’s always a bit tricky because there can be some misalignment, to say the least. What do you see as the primary drivers of misalignment between engineering and business teams?”
“Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve seen this a lot throughout my career. I’d say one of the key reasons is the lack of shared goals. In many cases, business and technical teams naturally end up with priorities that seem almost opposite. Business teams typically want tech teams to build things as quickly as possible. Business is always pushing for speed a nd that’s why it’s crucial to explain both perspectives to each side. As a technical leader, you need to help your team understand that while they want to build something of very high quality, they also need to consider efficiency and speed. Maybe that means starting with an MVP or accepting some level of technical debt, as long as there’s an agreement with the business that time will be allocated to addressing that debt immediately after the project.
At the same time, it shouldn’t be one-sided. You also need to communicate with the business team and help them understand that certain projects require a minimum amount of time to ensure the solution is sustainable in the long run. If it’s just a proof of concept, we can simplify it and build an MVP quickly. But if this product becomes successful and needs to scale, we may have to rewrite parts of it because it wasn’t originally built for long-term scalability. This is something that both sides need to align on from the start.
Ultimately, communication is key: exchanging perspectives and making sure both teams understand the trade-offs. The biggest challenge often comes when neither side is willing to listen to the other, and they work in silos, focusing only on their own priorities. That’s where a lot of misalignment happens.”
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