Why did you decide to become a mentor?
At 16 I imagined Google engineers as geniuses who built computers from scratch as kids and won international olympiads. I was a girl from Kyiv who loved math but hated cramming, so I assumed that world wasn't for me. I was wrong, and I only found out because people with more experience gave me their time for free. When DOU published my story in 2021, a commenter said it was a shame people like me leave Ukraine for London. My answer was that everyone chooses their own way to support Ukraine and Ukrainians, and mine is sharing my experience so people can see that world class tech companies are within reach. Mentoring is the most direct version of that. MentorCruise turned it into something structured and consistent instead of occasional. I still offer a free first call to students and anyone short on cash, because that's exactly who I was 💛
How did you get your career start?
I moved from Kyiv to Lviv at 16 to study Computer Science at UCU on a scholarship I planned like a project (yes, I wrote it down as a SMART goal 😅). In my first year I applied to Google's Inside Look program with a VR hackathon project and got flown to the London office. That turned into two internships and a full time offer at Google London in 2020, which I started remotely from Kyiv during the pandemic before moving to London. It wasn't a straight line. Facebook, Amazon and the Grace Hopper conference (twice) all said no, and one Google interview went so badly that I needed an extra round. What got me through was asking for help: I asked our deputy dean for a mock interview, then Ostap Stolyarchuk, a Google engineer visiting from Zurich. I did about ten. Even as an engineer I kept drifting into product work. On AdSense I drove a self service A/B testing API from discovery to launch that added $10M+ in ARR, and realized I cared more about what we built and why than about how. Next came the US: I moved to LA as an AI PM at Red Bull and launched their first global AI product, reaching 70K users in 40 countries. This year I joined Cresta and moved to San Francisco. Kyiv, Lviv, London, LA, SF: five cities in ten years, and every move was a bet on myself.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
Most people come with one of four goals: landing a big tech job or internship, moving from engineering into PM, moving from PM into AI PM, or shipping an AI product that actually works in production. Others come feeling stuck and want clarity on what's next. Every mentorship starts with a free intro call where we pin down one goal and what "done" looks like. Then I build a plan around it, with concrete next steps and a rhythm of 30 minute calls plus async Q&A in between. That can mean mock interviews, resume rewrites or an AI product spec review. More and more, I also teach mentees how to scale their own work 10x with AI. I'm not joking, I see it in my own outputs: I'm a PM who still writes code 💻 and since July I've shipped 60+ Conductor releases and 400+ PRs, with AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I walk mentees through exactly how I work. Whatever the goal, I push two rules. First, "why not?": if you see a great opportunity, apply even if you don't feel ready yet. That rule is how I ended up at Google. Second, always ask: for the promotion, the raise, the stretch project, the referral. You have to be your own biggest advocate, because nobody else will be.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
My favourite so far is a mentee who came from a non technical background and stayed with me for three months. The first thing we did was build a lesson plan around her goals, broken into steps we could actually check off. By the end she had built her first prototype with AI and went into real job applications feeling much more confident. In her review she said I set clear, achievable goals and helped her see situations from new perspectives, and that's exactly what I want every mentorship to feel like 🙂 The story that started it all is older. After my Google internships I referred a friend two years in a row, and in fall 2019 Google invited her to interview even though she hadn't applied that cycle. In 2020 I referred another UCU student, and she passed every stage of the internship selection. Seeing doors I walked through open for people from my university is a big part of why I mentor now.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
Clarity, mostly. Explaining how I'd approach an interview, a career switch or an AI product decision forces me to articulate things I usually do on instinct, and sometimes I realize my own answer needs work. That makes me a better PM. A big part of my day job at Cresta is enablement, teaching customer teams to build their own agents with Conductor, and mentoring is the same muscle in a one on one setting. It also keeps me close to what aspiring AI PMs are actually being asked and where they get stuck, which is hard to see from inside one company. And it's energizing. Every December since 2015 I've written my goals for the next year, and I still love the moment a vague ambition becomes a written, checkable plan. Watching that happen for someone else, and then seeing them hit the goal, is one of the best parts of my month ✨
