Product strategy for SaaS startups and digital products in Chernivtsi and the Bukovyna region — product positioning, ICP, JTBD framework, roadmap, metrics (North Star, AARRR), unit economics. I work as a fractional CPO or in a strategy-session format — from early MVPs of Chernivtsi IT studios to products with 50K+ active users.
Tell me about your idea or product — I'll assess the potential and suggest next steps
Deep dive into your product, market, and audience — free for new clients
Clear product strategy with prioritized features, metrics, and implementation plan
I help at every stage — from idea validation to product scaling
Deep research into market, users and competitors to form a product hypothesis.
Defining minimum feature set for quick launch and market idea validation.
Strategic product development plan with feature prioritization and milestone definition.
Analysis of market trends, competitive landscape and opportunities for your product.
Testing product hypothesis through user interviews, prototypes and testing.
Assessing product-market fit and defining strategy to achieve PMF.
I research your idea, target audience, competitive landscape, and market potential to form a strategic vision.
I conduct interviews with potential users, create personas and customer journey maps to understand real needs.
I shape the minimum viable product concept: core features, user stories, and success criteria for the first launch.
I create prototypes of key scenarios and test them with real users to validate hypotheses before development.
I develop a strategic roadmap with development phases, metrics, and feature prioritization based on impact/effort.
I help with launch preparation, success metric definition, and iteration strategy based on user feedback.
Choose the optimal package for your project
One-time 2-hour session
$300$400What's included:
Comprehensive analysis in 1 week
$800$1000What's included:
1 month collaboration
$2000$2500What's included:
Answers to the most popular questions
I start with an audit of the founder's vision, market and competitor analysis, formulate ICP and JTBD hypotheses, calculate SAM/TAM/SOM, and lock in a North Star metric with a tree of supporting metrics. Then I build a 6-12 month roadmap prioritized via RICE/ICE, tie it to OKRs and unit economics. You receive all artifacts in Notion or Confluence and can hand them to your team without me.
I combine qualitative JTBD interviews, the Sean Ellis test, GA4/Mixpanel/Amplitude analytics, and cohort retention analysis. If 40%+ of users say they would be very disappointed without the product and D30 retention flattens, that signals PMF. Until then I do not recommend scaling marketing, because it only accelerates churn.
Personas describe who your user is, while JTBD shows why they hire your product in a specific situation. This makes product decisions far sharper: you see real competitors (sometimes it is Excel or nothing), understand triggers, barriers, and success criteria. Across 130+ projects, JTBD framing helped me find non-obvious segments that delivered most of the revenue. More on the product strategy page.
OKRs bridge the North Star and the team's daily work. I write 3-5 quarterly Objectives, attach Key Results through AARRR metrics, validate ambition (60-70% achievement target), and set a weekly check-in cadence. This frees the founder from micromanagement and gives the Chernivtsi team transparent rules of the game. Without OKRs, strategy turns into wishful thinking.
I use RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) for large bets and ICE for fast experiments. Each idea gets a score, and we discuss assumptions in the Confidence column, where most team disagreements actually live. After prioritization the backlog is split into Now/Next/Later and tied to OKRs. The endless CEO-versus-PM debates disappear.
Yes. I build a P&L model in Google Sheets with MRR, ARR, CAC, LTV, payback period, gross margin, and churn. The model is sensitive to scenarios: you can see how a 10% price change or a 1.5 pp churn reduction affects cash runway. For SaaS teams from Chernivtsi IT Cluster this often becomes the key argument with investors or the board.
A standard engagement is 6-10 weeks: 2 weeks of research (interviews, data, market), 2 weeks of synthesis (ICP, JTBD, North Star), 2-3 weeks of planning (OKRs, roadmap, P&L), and 1-2 weeks of validation with the team. For early-stage startups I run a 3-week sprint format. We always lock scope in a kick-off document to prevent unjustified scope creep.
Common situation at early stages. I can act as fractional CPO 2-3 days a week: running the backlog, rituals, and team communication while you hire a PM. In parallel I help with hiring: writing the role profile, running case interviews, and onboarding the new hire into all artifacts. This way the strategy does not die the day I leave the project.
For Chernivtsi IT Cluster teams I recommend a beachhead model: one segment in one country where the ICP feels the pain most sharply. I help with customer development, positioning localization, channel selection (often Product Hunt, niche communities, outbound), and the legal structure for accepting payments. I cover this in depth as part of product strategy.
Chernivtsi is a natural hub for cross-border trade. I help design products that account for EU VAT and customs nuances, multicurrency (UAH/EUR/RON/MDL), copy localization into 3-4 languages, and integrations with Nova Post and Romanian carriers. Strategy splits B2C tourists from small B2B in border towns. The conversion side I cover in more detail in conversion optimization in Chernivtsi.
Yes, and it is one of my favorite segments. For Bukovyna winemakers I have built strategies for DTC subscriptions, wine clubs, and tourism routes through vineyards. For agritech I have helped with crop monitoring platforms and marketplaces between farmers and Chernivtsi or Lviv HoReCa. The key in every case is the JTBD of the grower or farmer, not trendy AI features. Strategy disciplines the product around real value.
Medtech in Chernivtsi is a blend of Bukovyna Medical's academic expertise and technical teams. I help validate the clinical hypothesis, plan pilots with clinics in the Shevchenkivskyi district, and ensure GDPR and Ukrainian health-data compliance. Strategy matters even more here because the sales cycle is long and an ICP mistake costs 12-18 months. I usually pair this with conversion optimization for the clinic sales funnel.
Comparison with other options
| Me | Other consultants | |
|---|---|---|
| Experience | 15+ years, 130+ products | 2-5 years, course-level cases |
| Artifacts | ICP, JTBD, North Star, OKRs, RICE backlog | Slides without metrics or priorities |
| Unit economics | Working P&L model with LTV/CAC and churn | Generic assumptions, no numbers |
| Local context | I know Chernivtsi IT Cluster and Bukovyna market | Template without city understanding |
| Format | Online or offline in Chernivtsi | Scripted calls only |
| Accountability | I drive PMF and MRR/ARR growth | Delivered a doc and disappeared |
Product strategy is not a vision-statement document that sits in Notion and nobody opens. For a startup or growing SaaS in Chernivtsi and the Bukovyna region, it’s a working tool that answers the question every week: “what are we building next sprint and why this specifically”. Without a strategy, the team scatters across features that “seem needed”, burns out on work without visible results, and spends investor money (or the founder’s personal savings) on functions real users don’t want. I’m Alex Filiuk, Senior UI/UX designer and product strategist with 15+ years of experience, working on product strategies for Ukrainian and international teams since the 2010s. My portfolio includes 40+ products driven from discovery to launch, including a number of startups from Chernivtsi and the Bukovyna region that have entered the national and international markets.
This page brings together everything a founder, product manager or CTO should know before commissioning product strategy work in Chernivtsi: what the process looks like, how discovery differs from “brainstorms in a meeting room”, how the JTBD, RICE/ICE, HEART and AARRR frameworks work, which key mistakes Chernivtsi startups make, and why it pays off to engage a strategist who deeply understands the local IT ecosystem rather than a random Bay-Area agency that has never heard of your city.
Chernivtsi is a city of 240,000+ residents with a unique IT ecosystem: there is a strong outsourcing segment (local companies serving American and European clients), and a growing pool of in-house product teams building SaaS, mobile apps, fintech products and B2B tools. Chernivtsi startups have an important specifics — they almost always go to the national or international market from day one, because the local city market is too small for a typical SaaS product.
This creates a particular challenge: the strategy has to be both pragmatically local (taking into account resources realistically available to a Chernivtsi team — a smaller pool of senior talent, less local access to angel investment, a limited investor network in the city) and ambitiously global (because the product will be sold to clients in Kyiv, Berlin or San Francisco). It requires a separate approach, different from “copying Kyiv startups” or “copying Silicon Valley”.
Product strategy for a Chernivtsi startup serves three key functions:
There’s no “universal” product strategy — each startup needs its own depth and emphasis. Before starting, we agree with the team which of the following blocks are critical for your product and which can wait.
If you’re also planning UI/UX design, a mobile app, or full development in parallel — strategy comes first, because everything downstream is built on it. Design without strategy is drawing pretty screens at random.
I work via a transparent process all my product clients have gone through. Each stage has fixed deliverables — you see weekly progress, no “black boxes” for a month.
The total cycle is 4–6 weeks, depending on depth. If you’re at the idea stage — a discovery sprint can compress to 2 weeks. If a fractional CPO format is needed — after the strategy I stay with the team for 3–6 months, regularly join sprint planning and retros.
The price comes from the scope of work, not from geography — residents of Chernivtsi, Kyiv or Berlin get the same rates for the same packages. Approximate ranges (exact figures are in the “Pricing” block above):
Worth a separate note: if you order strategy together with UI/UX design, mobile app design or SaaS development — the combined package costs less than the sum of individual services. Savings for you and more efficient work for me (one context, one logic, no knowledge transfer between contractors).
Over 15+ years of work with product teams I’ve seen dozens of cases where startups in Chernivtsi (and across Ukraine) spent months and hundreds of thousands of UAH on work that didn’t need to be done at all. Here are the key mistakes:
Product management is evolving. Here are the approaches I bake in for Chernivtsi teams:
My portfolio includes 130+ projects, of which ~40 are full work at the intersection of product strategy and UI/UX design. Among them — both indie product launches by Chernivtsi founders and clients from Kyiv, Chernivtsi, the US and Europe. This lets me see how the product approach works in different contexts — and how to adapt best practices to the realities of a particular team.
If you want concrete examples — go to the “Projects” section or get in touch via the contact form. I’ll pick 5–10 most relevant cases for your vertical (B2B SaaS, marketplace, mobile app, fintech, healthtech) and show not just final products but the working process — discovery docs, JTBD maps, RICE tables, roadmaps. This will give you a realistic picture of what the work will look like in your case.
Strategy is the start of the journey. If you’re building a serious product, a complex approach is worth considering:
I work not only with Chernivtsi teams. If you have a distributed team (some in Chernivtsi, some in Kyiv, some in the US) — that’s often even better for the strategic process, because there are more perspectives. Among other locations I actively work with:
The full list of locations is on the “Service Areas” page.
If you have a specific request — fill in the contact form or write to email/Telegram (contacts in the website footer). The first consultation is free, up to 60 minutes long. We’ll discuss your startup, current product stage, key challenges, an approximate budget and timeline. After that I’ll send a detailed proposal with a fixed price — no surprises and no hidden fees.
I’m ready to build for your product in Chernivtsi a strategy that doesn’t just “sit in Notion”, but works every day for focus, speed and product-market fit. Not “another document”, but a working product-management tool.