Yuliya Tikhokhod

Three ways to work with me

• Mentoring — for product managers growing into lead roles, and for founders before their first product hire.

  → Mentoring

• Fractional product lead — two to four months inside your team: diagnose, set direction, ship, hand over.

  → Fractional

• Consulting — strategy, marketplace economics, team structure, analytics stack. For EdTech and platform businesses.

  → Consulting

Mentoring

Who it’s for

• Product managers moving from mid to senior, or from senior to lead
• Product people in EdTech who want a peer who has been on both sides of a marketplace
• Founders at pre-seed who need product judgement, not another framework

What we usually work on

• Product strategy when the team is small and the runway is real
• The jump from “I own a feature” to “I own the number”
• Hiring your first product manager, and a test task that actually predicts performance
• Using LLMs and agents in daily product work without pretending they replace thinking
• Career moves: product → CPO → CEO, and whether you want that

How it works

Single sessions on request, or a light cadence. Some of my longest mentoring relationships have been a call every few months over two years, with a promotion at the end of it. Sixty-minute video sessions; pricing on request.

What people say

“You’ll stay my role model. I’ve never seen such a kind and attentive mentor. You helped me through this whole journey into project management and didn’t let me give up. I haven’t seen a better project lead than you.”

“I got promoted to product manager. You had a hand in this — thank you.”

A mentoring case

An independent programming educator came with a website that didn’t explain the value and a sales process that ran through one-off consultations. We rebuilt the funnel around a free mini-course as the entry point. It now converts 65% of those who finish it into the paid programme.

Ask about mentoring

Fractional product lead

What it is

I join your team for two to four months as an interim or part-time product lead. Typical reasons: the product lead left, the founder is stretched across three roles, or the roadmap is a list of wishes and nobody owns the number.

What you get

• Weeks 1–2: a diagnosis you can argue with — data, interviews, what is actually driving the metric
• Weeks 3–6: a strategy with a hard perimeter (“everything outside these tracks we don’t do this quarter”) and the first shipped changes
• Until handover: hiring or growing your permanent lead, and leaving the team stronger than I found it

Recent examples

• Interim product and business lead, developer-education platform (2026). Diagnosed the gap between what was being sold (a subscription) and what users actually buy (an outcome), drafted the product strategy, designed the test task and ran the interviews for the permanent lead.
• Fractional CPO, language-learning startup (2025–2026). Business plan, product direction, and an AI agent that runs part of the marketing.
• Cohort-based bootcamps from a self-paced product (2023). Designed the format, built the tooling, structured the curriculum, hired the team, made the first sales. The line still runs as sequential cohorts.
• Kids’ social network, rebuilt to 30K MAU (2021). Took over a rebuild with one ticket (“redo everything”) and a three-week deadline. Turned tribal knowledge into a roadmap with data migration and a beta. Shipped on time with zero data loss; 30,000 monthly active users six months later.

Terms

Part-time engagements, typically two to three days a week, minimum two months. Contractor model with a written scope and an early-exit clause on both sides. Registered as a self-employed contractor (autónomo) in Spain; invoicing EU, US and other entities.

Discuss a fractional engagement

Consulting

For EdTech companies, marketplaces and two-sided platforms. The questions I get called about:

Strategy and metrics

• “Our growth stalled. Is it the product or the channel?”
• Building a strategy a small team can actually execute: metric trees, three tracks, a hard perimeter
• What to do about LLMs eating the perceived value of courses

Marketplace economics

• Author activation: why it takes a year from sign-up to first sale, and what shortens it
• Commission, subscription and cohort models, and which one you are actually selling

Team and organisation

• Restructuring into product teams around a metric tree
• Grading systems for product roles
• Hiring PMs: test tasks, interview design, reading candidates from transcripts

Analytics and operations

• An analytics stack a small team can maintain (ClickHouse, dbt, Superset, notebooks), plus a data skill for AI agents

Format

A ninety-minute diagnostic session, then a two-to-four-week sprint with a written deliverable, then optional follow-up. Pricing on request.

Recent work

• Running a learning marketplace since 2023: authors earning income nearly tripled, more learner segments served, self-sustaining business (2023–2026)
• Recommendation block on a telecom’s homepage: +80% conversion for logged-in users; cross-channel device recommendations: +1% to the retail customer base (2020)

Book a diagnostic session

What colleagues say

Translated from Russian.

“You’ll stay my role model. I’ve never seen such a kind and attentive mentor. I haven’t seen a better project lead than you.”

“What I value is your itch to change processes. Honestly, I borrow a lot from you.”

“You took it on yourself and autonomously did a great deal in the product.”

“Your energy and enthusiasm at work — it was a pleasure to work with someone like you.”

“When someone says ‘systems thinking’, I think of you.”

Public record

• Why workforce problems need more than a training catalog — building a workforce-intelligence product: what it does, how it was built and what the build taught (Hyperskill, 2026). hyperskill.org
• AI-powered hypothesis testing — a 54-minute masterclass on taking a product hypothesis from framing to prototype with AI tools (Hyperskill, 2025). youtube.com
• Key insights from developer job listings — an analysis of 2,500 software developer postings: what separates junior from experienced requirements, and what that means for curriculum design (Hyperskill, 2024). hyperskill.org
• Schema.org, 2013–2015 — Steering Group for Yandex, alongside Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. Author of the VideoGame vocabulary, one of three invited speakers at KESW 2015, lecturer in Yandex’s School of Webmasters. Steering Group · VideoGame proposal · KESW · lectures 092, 094 and a talk on markup (in Russian)

About

I grew up in a small town in Russia in the nineties and first sat at a computer at thirteen. The one hobby that never changed is learning, which is probably why I ended up building learning products.

Career in one line: Yandex (webmaster services, Schema.org) → DevHub (workforce management, built from zero as product manager) → MTS (Big Data, recommendation systems) → Kodland (kids’ EdTech) → Hyperskill (Product Lead, then CPO) → since 2023, CEO of an online learning marketplace with 1.5 million monthly users and 20,000+ courses, self-sustaining and growing without outside investors. Along the way: founder of Aprena, a workforce-intelligence product for mid-market companies, and venture partner at an AI-native studio.

What colleagues consistently say about me in peer reviews: systems thinking. What I’d add: I don’t mind opening a terminal.

Master’s in Business Analytics from HSE University. PMP. I live in Asturias with my family and walk the Camino del Norte in stages.

Why ½

It started literally. Half my week ran an online learning marketplace; the other half I was product lead, then CPO, at Hyperskill. When the Hyperskill half ended I nearly renamed the Telegram channel — on paper I was down to one thing. Then a second startup appeared with me as a founder, and the half grew back: a product lead role I was not hired into, an analytics stack nobody asked for, a company.

I kept the name because the second half is not taken from the first. It is what gives the first one range. I carry things across — between companies, between work and what is not work — and that carrying is most of how I think.

The convention says pick one direction and push, and I have tried. What it would cost me is the thing colleagues keep writing in my peer reviews: systems thinking. That does not come from depth alone. It comes from having more than one thing to think with.

How I work

• Contractor model, written scope, early-exit clause on both sides
• Registered as a self-employed contractor (autónomo) in Spain; invoicing EU, US and other entities
• Time zone CET; comfortable with US-morning overlap
• Languages: English and Russian for work; Spanish for everyday life
• Tools I bring: Notion, Superset/ClickHouse, Claude Code and agent workflows

Contact

• Email: julia.tikhokhod@gmail.com
• Calendar: book a time directly
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/yuliya-tikhokhod
• Newsletter: halfceo.substack.com
• Telegram: @half_ceo (in Russian)