Maxim Konkin – Product Manager,
Customer Operations Platform

What’s your role at ANNA, and how does your job make a difference to customers?

I'm a product manager leading a small team of backend developers, frontend developers, a designer, and a data science person. Our job is working closely with the CX team so they can help customers faster and better.

We're improving how customer requests get routed so the question reaches the right person quickly without bouncing between teams. We constantly track satisfaction scores and jump on anything that dips. We recently added AI that can write case summaries, so agents see the full picture in seconds instead of hunting through systems for scattered information. My team and I spend half our day reading actual customer chats – seeing how what we build makes their lives easier.

What’s the biggest challenge in building a tool that customers never see directly?

Finding the balance between technical requests and actually getting on with things that help customers. Our tech team has a long list of "we should rebuild this" or "let's refactor that," and it's all valid, but I need to keep asking how this makes a customer's day better.

The other challenge is measurement. It's tempting to count features like "we added five new buttons this sprint!" but that doesn't tell you much. We track the customer experience picture instead, are resolution times dropping? Are handovers down? Is satisfaction up? The technical work is completely invisible to customers, but it shapes everything they feel when they contact us.

What’s the secret ingredient that makes a tool genuinely helpful for customer experience agents?

We shadow agents, watch how they work, read their chats, and dig into the metrics. Pretty soon, patterns start to appear where things break down.
The thing is, you can't fool agents. If something slows them down, they'll ignore it because they just get used to not using it. Quick wins help prove value fast, but the bigger projects take time, and the payoff isn't always obvious right away.

That's why we bring agents with us through the process, we explain the goal, get their input, keep them in the loop. If they don't trust what we're building, it won't land. So while the secret ingredient is including the agents, the project itself has to make their day easier.

A team that builds tools for people who help people feel like something from Inception. What’s the most rewarding part?

The best feedback is when someone from the CX team says, "I owe you a pint for that one!" I've probably got plenty owed already. But honestly, those moments when people appreciate what you've built, that keeps you going.
Before I became a PM, I was a front-end engineer for around eight years. I loved the fast feedback loop – you ship something, you see it work, done. As a PM, the loop is way longer. You might spend months on a project before anyone feels the benefit. But when it lands? When you see something genuinely useful that you and your team built actually making people's work easier? The satisfaction is so much higher. It's worth the wait.

How do you keep your team motivated when the tool isn’t something that gets flashy press releases?

We work closely with our CX lead, Negi. She's involved in everything – planning, feedback, what's breaking, what's working – so the team feels the heartbeat of CX directly. It's not "here's a metric in a dashboard," the devs hear real stories like "your routing change just saved me ten minutes" or "this summary feature is a lifesaver."
But also, all engineers are perfectionists. So we make time for internal polishing work – refactoring, improving performance, cleaning up tech debt. That keeps people happy. You need to balance, ship things that help customers, but also let the team build something they're proud of technically.

If you had a magic wand and could instantly add one dream feature to the tool tomorrow, what would it be?

Integrate AI properly into our internal resolution flows and give agents the instruments to manage it. Right now we've got AI doing summaries, which is brilliant. But imagine agents could use AI to draft responses, suggest next steps, or flag risks, and they'd have full control to edit, ignore, or approve. It's not about replacing agents, it's about giving them a smart assistant that speeds up the boring bits so they can focus on actually helping customers. And honestly, I think we can bring this in. It's not magic-wand territory, it's on the roadmap.

What has been your proudest moment at ANNA?

I started at ANNA seven years ago as a developer. We built the whole WorkStation from scratch – lots of good technical and product decisions back then. But I only switched to the PM role a year and a half ago, and honestly, it was hard.

Changing my own mindset from technical to product was tough. Changing the team's mindset was tougher. We had to build a proper roadmap, completely rethink how we work, focus on customer outcomes instead of just shipping features. Not everything worked out, some things failed. But we didn't stop. That shift – moving from "let's build cool tech" to "let's solve real problems for customers" – that's what I'm proudest of.

What’s the best thing about working at ANNA?

I love the people and the vibe. You can make a real difference – everything is in your hands. There's no "that's not my job" or "we need to wait for approval from five layers up." If you see a problem, you can fix it. If you have an idea, you can test it. The team backs you, the culture trusts you, and you're building something that actually helps small business owners every day. That's rare.