June 27, 2023

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19:00

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Offline

Product Engineering Culture

2025

Ukraine

💻 Engineering culture shapes how a team works, impacts product quality, and defines how decisions are made within a company. It’s built through actions — not declarations.

During this meetup, we discussed:

  • How culture influences code quality, collaboration, and long-term product success
  • Why culture doesn’t start with rules — it starts with leadership behavior and examples
  • How tech leaders can foster a culture of growth, experimentation, and feedback
  • What sets product-focused cultures — like at Mate Academy or MacPaw — apart from outsourcing models

The speakers shared personal stories and examples of how their roles, teams, and environments evolved. We explored why it’s not enough to “just write good code” — you need to build a system where quality, autonomy, and responsibility are built into the process.

Meetup speakers

Speaker
Vira Tkachenko

CTO @ MacPaw

Vira Tkachenko is Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at MacPaw. In 2009, a fellow student at Kyiv Polytechnic Institute invited her to join the newly founded company MacPaw which developed a cleaning utility for Macs. In 14 years Vira became a CTO and MacPaw became a global business.

Speaker
Vadym Ilchenko

Lead Software Engineer & CTO @ Mate academy

Vadym Ilchenko is a passionate advocate of modern website development. With over 6 years of experience in the tech industry, he embarked on his career as a Frontend developer in 2017. Since 2019, he has held the role of Lead Software Engineer, concurrently serving as the CTO at Mate academy.

Moderator
Yana Mykhailenko

Director of Engineering @ Turnitin

The moderator is Yana Mykhailenko, CTO of Turnitin, an international company that ensures the integrity of education and is a leader in anti-plagiarism solutions. She is a judge and mentor at international competitions and hackathons.

Upcoming events

Tech Stack

On the first Thursday of October, we will hold a Tech Stack meetup to discuss choosing the right technology stack, optimal use of cloud solutions, and effective practices that directly affect development speed, product quality, and infrastructure stability.

October 2
Artem Melnychenko
CTO @ Wantent
Oleksandr Tarasenko
CTO @ Rozetka Pay
Yana Mykhailenko
Director of Engineering @ Turnitin

Conference | How to Become Great CTO

In November, the DEV Challenge team, in cooperation with UNIT.City, will once again bring together Ukrainian tech leaders, entrepreneurs, company and startup founders, CTOs, and managers to discuss the most relevant and important topics in technology, business, and leadership.

13 November
120 seats
Alex Kovalchuk
Co-founder & CTO @ Cargofy
Yana Mykhailenko
Director of Engineering @ Turnitin
Volodymyr Sveredyuk
CTO @ DEV Challenge

Meetup #21

Full information about the meetup will appear here soon.

4 December
Оffline
18:00