Tetiana Kobzar Podcast Transcript
Tetiana Kobzar joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Coruzant Technologies home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Tetiana Kobzar. Tetiana Kobzar is a founder, technologist, and product strategist with over 15 years of experience bridging the gap between software and business outcomes. With a master’s in computer science and hands-on coding roots, she understands technology. At its core, her real strength is helping startups transform ideas. Into products people actually want to use. In 2013, she founded Diversido and award-winning software development company that has since supported more than 65 startups across Health Tech, EdTech and IOT. She also leads Cure Range, a health tech startup making supplement choices simple and effective.
Well, good afternoon, Tanya. Welcome to the show.
Tetiana Kobzar: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. And I know you get outta your busy schedule to jump on this podcast. Typically you’re in London, but today you’re calling out of the country of France. So we’re about a six, seven hour difference from where I’m at here in Kansas City.
So thank you again. And Tanya, if I could, I’m gonna jump into your first question. You began with hands-on coding and technical roles, then groomed to founding and leading diverso. What was the hardest internal transition you had to make from doing the tech work yourself to letting go, delegating and leading the vision?
How did you navigate all that?
Tetiana Kobzar: That’s a very good question. Uh, Because indeed being able to do a good tech is a very different from being able to run a successful business. And so I think that for me, the biggest difficulty was, To transition from the developer, from project manager to a business owner.
And I needed to learn a lot. So, because I knew good the delivery part, development management, production, but business marketing, sales, finance corporate finance and also hr recruitment. So all those areas I needed to educate myself. But also that’s actually what is I am doing and I keep improving in all those fields.
So that was like the biggest mental shift of like, you know, just doing a great. Tech is not enough. And that’s, that was realized. And of course, when you are, when you’re growing, when you are getting more people in the team, you cannot do everything yourself. And you need to learn to delegate. You need to learn to trust, but not just give everything to the person and never check because you need to.
Like do it in iteration. So you delegate, but you control, and then you’re big, like delegating bigger chunks and you’re less control. And that is like, that the process that, that also is quite difficult after like being a good single contributor when you’re managing the team and when you are managing the departments.
So that’s that hard thing.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. And my hats off to you for doing that. Obviously it’s hard when it’s your company, your baby that you built to delegate’s hard enough. But then you had to learn a lot about the operations. You talked about HR and sales and different things. But you did it, you were able to step into that, and I know it was challenging, so I, I really appreciate that.
And I was a developer. In my that’s how I cut my teeth when I got into technology, by the way. So, appreciate that. So Tanya, You emphasize the game that gamification is not just about points and badges. Can you walk us through a product where you work on where gamification or behavioral design made a real difference in stickiness or motivation?
What principles or mechanics did you lean on most?
Tetiana Kobzar: Yeah, gamification and behavioral design is my passion, uh, because I started as a game developer and even like though my company, we work with like different industries and very few game games, but we do a lot of like gamification techniques. We do a lot of like, you know, motivational design and other things, and I believe that that’s like the most important thing is how users feel.
Using your application rather than, the features they can do. Like, you know, the, even the ease of using your app is not that important as those emotions that user do and their motivation to perform the desired action. So that’s why keeping this in mind rather than like the simple like, the shortest path to the required action is very important and to, like, in almost all our projects the gamification, especially with when it’s like, apps for kids it’s makes a very big difference.
So we have several projects that help kids to learn better with the gamification. Like, you know, when you’re incorporating the learning objectives into the game, they are more like. Likely and more heavily to do it. Now we have, we’re publishing the very cool project with one of the biggest children hospital in the uk.
When we did the gamified solution that helped. Kids with their speech development. So that’s like kids who have problem with with their speech and they’re going through the speech therapy to make them more engaged to practice at home. We created this this solution. Another very good example.
It it was a California startup we worked with and we created, it was like more designed for the elderly people or people who have some, cognitive issues and who needed to have, uh, their like their cognitive abilities checked very regularly. So that’s like people after stroke with dementia, after some brain surgeries or something.
And they like, they had a lot of like pen and paper tests and they hated to do them, and they like. And when not motivated too much to do their best because like they’re all the same and they’re boring. And so we replaced like, I think that almost. All of those pen and papers test with 29 mini games and all the, it’s, so this also proves that gamification is not only for kids because those, like, you know, elderly people and they were anyway much more motivated to, to do the test.
They were much motivated to do their best, inside the game. So like, you know, instead of just pressing some button as fast as you could, you were pressing the button on the screen to run away of the like angry bird or something like that. So that is like much more, or instead of repeating the words you are just.
Playing the spy who is overhearing the passwords, and you are just, you know, you’re progressing to the next level when you remember all the, this not connected words in a row. So there are a lot of application, a lot of interesting cases and yeah. Yeah, I’m truly believe that’s, that’s the way to, to do software, keeping the emotions and motivation in mind.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. I appreciate that and it’s great to hear you were a game developer. I think that was always an aspiration for me when I was really young, but but I like how you used and you understand that part of it, the gamification, but it you used it and you said some examples there around at.
Children’s Hospital, obviously for their speech impediments. And then with elderly folks there’s always a way that you can bring in some sort of motivation with gamification so that you can actually help people that have some sort of difficulties and help them learn as well.
So I really appreciate that. And Tanya, many products fail by building features nobody uses. What practices, research techniques or feedback loops do you rely on to ensure that your building aligns with real user problems? When have you pivoted based on user insights or maybe ignored them wrongly?
Tetiana Kobzar: Yeah, you’re absolutely right.
So, that’s what I’m always saying, that we cannot improve something that we are not measuring, and so that’s why it’s. Very important to measure as much as possible, to collect as much data about user behavior as possible. That is also one of the things that I always recommend my clients, and that’s often overlooked when you start the project and you are in a rush to to do the features as fast as possible and to release them to the people is to start with the logging as soon as possible. So collect all the user activities inside the app or inside the product. It could be done. There are like multiple tools that help to do it, like, you know, Crashlytics or the similar ones or the internal, just server logs of the user activities, what they did.
Even if you are not going to process it right now, better to have this data. And when you need it, you have access to it and you can visualize it. You can see where users get stuck. Where, what screen do they spend the most time at? Very important is like the crucial thing is what screen or what functionality or what part of your application.
People close the app or they go somewhere else. Because that is the most like, problematic thing that you need to address because like when you’re losing attention of your user. So that is like a very, very big opportunity that they are not coming back because probably something in, in the app is not I mean, especially if they’re leaving before.
Completing the action that is needed to be done on this screen. So that is like all those data and you need to analyze it regularly. So we did a lot of this especially in the game like apps when you see, when you have different levels or different mini games and you see that, for example statistics and you see that in some level.
So people play until some level and then they not playing. Further. So that means that you need to look inside and you need to either make it easier or more interesting or you know, so they’re having some problem there. Also, there are like, you know, if you work in with web post solution, there are multiple tools that help you also even do the, like heat maps, like mouse flow or similar.
So when you see where they. Spent most of the time with their cursor where, so you it’s, you can even see how they’re getting confused if they go there and then they’re okay. No, they’re moving to the other direction. So like, yeah, absolutely. I absolutely agree. You need to measure as much as possible and you need to analyze this data also like as often, like as possible.
And also any feature, any idea, it should be treated as a hypothesis. So it’s a assumption that needs to be either proven right or proven wrong. So never just invent some feature and go for it without like, okay, so what we are trying to achieve with this functionality and how we can say if we achieved it or not.
So it should be some measurable goal and to, we need to check if we are getting what we are expecting of it.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s very helpful. And what I really took away from this is you’re really focused on that, on the customer and the customer experience. What I really liked to hear is that you actually look at the logs to see what people are actually doing which is very helpful because a lot of times.
Business requirements, as you know, just don’t always cut it. Sometimes there’s things that are missing or not explained well or not translated well. So I appreciate the insights there. And Tanya, the last question I have for you today, for early stage founders or product builders without big budgets, what minimal set of tools, processes, or mindsets would you recommend to start building something people want and then scale it?
What mistakes do you see new founders repeatedly falling into?
Tetiana Kobzar: So from my experience, what I see is and my recommendation is to start with MVP, always with the minimum viable product, and I mean, minimal, but still viable. So to if you are, especially in the limited budget and you don’t have like all the time to to do it.
So just what is the, like the main feature of the, of your app. What makes you different from the other sponsor that already available on the market? So why users would want to try it, but let’s have it only like one main feature first. Because like often, especially like, you know, when the startup founder, they inspired and they have so many ideas and they want to, and all of them seem to be very important, but they are like, covering the very different, areas of problem that we are trying to address. And they are like sometimes, they even like combination of all the apps existing in one thing, but it’s like, it’s not the right way to go because like you need to deliver something. You need to see, you need to measure that we discussed in the previous question.
And also you need to make sure to pivot early as well if you if you see the need of it. So like, you know, this, this one thing that I, I really recommend to focus on this minimum viable product. And another thing that I also see a lot of first time founders, they miss this part, is to think what is going to happen next after you have your software built?
So you have your product, and what are you doing with it? With it? Because like, get new users is very. Hard and expensive task. So you need to understand how you, at least, like roughly, you need to plan. How are you going to, to get the new user? So user requisition is something that’s often overlooked by first time founders.
The second and third time founder. They’re much more practical, much more like, you know, structured in this part. But it’s not enough. To build a very good software to, for people to use it because there is so much noise now, so much every day. I dunno, hundreds of new apps appear on the app store and it’s like so quiet, so difficult to stand out.
And even if you, your app is absolutely brilliant and Target, your idea is awesome. You still need to gain this critical mass of users. To start the organic growth before that, it’ll be like, you know, very, very hard. And that is something that you need to include in your business strategy even before the development.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. I know there’s a lot of entrepreneurs, developers, and technologists in our audience here on the podcast. So. But just to take away, you, I think you, you hit the nail on the head there with having that MVP minimal viable product is so important and be prepared to make changes accept feedback obviously early on and then you need to pivot sometimes to be prepared for that.
But it is a crowded marketplace out there. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get that critical mass of users, as you said, and start to build that organic growth. So I really appreciate the feedback and the insights. Tanya, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Tetiana Kobzar: Thank you for having me, Brian. Have a good day.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Tetiana Kobzar Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
