Product strategy for SaaS startups and digital products in Lutsk and the Volyn region — positioning, ICP, JTBD, roadmap, metrics (North Star, AARRR), unit economics. I work as a fractional CPO — from early MVPs to products with 50K+ 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:
Examples of completed projects
Answers to the most popular questions
The cost depends on depth: a strategy sprint over 2 weeks (quick discovery + MVP scope + 3-month roadmap) is the basic package; a full product strategy over 4-6 weeks (15-25 interviews, JTBD, RICE prioritisation, metrics, 6-12 month roadmap) is the standard package; strategy + UX design of the MVP in a single cycle is the premium package.
Exact figures are in the “Pricing” block above. Prices don't depend on city: a team in Lutsk, Lviv or Berlin gets the same rates for the same scope. If strategy comes bundled with UI/UX design or mobile app design, a combined package costs less than the sum of services.
Yes. For teams from Lutsk and the Volyn region I come for discovery workshops in person — it's ~145 km from Lviv or ~75 km from Rivne, an accessible commute. An in-person session is mostly needed at kick-off: seeing the team, the whiteboard, debating hypotheses live is more efficient than over Zoom.
The usual schedule: 2 in-person days in Lutsk for kick-off (often at BC “Yevropeyskyy” on Hrushevskoho or coworking spaces on Lesi Ukrainky), then online via Figma, Miro and Telegram, with a final strategy presentation in person. If the team prefers fully remote — that's fine too; I've worked like that with teams from Poland, Germany and the US.
What you receive is a set of working artifacts, not “investor slides”:
Everything in Notion or Confluence — as a living document that updates, not a PDF that gathers dust.
This is the hardest part for Lutsk teams — your users aren't in town, they're in Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Hamburg. I use a three-tier approach:
The cycle is 2-3 weeks per interview wave. If a parallel UX audit of the current prototype is needed — we merge research plans so users aren't asked the same things twice.
RICE = Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort. It's a feature prioritisation framework from Intercom that answers the painful question “what do we build first”. ICE is a simpler version (Impact × Confidence × Ease) when there's not enough data for a full RICE.
For a small team in Lutsk (typically 2-5 people: founder, 1-2 developers, designer), RICE/ICE is critical because you have no budget or time to “try everything”. Every feature not justified by a metric is 2-4 weeks of development lost from the path to product-market fit.
In practice I run a RICE table in Notion with the team in a workshop (typically 4-6 hours). Of 30-40 ideas, 8-12 make it into the MVP — the rest go to backlog. It's often a shock for the founder, but this is exactly what lets you ship in 3-4 months instead of 12.
Yes. I've worked with EU clients (Poland, Germany, Czech Republic, UK) and know the key differences:
This doesn't mean I know EVERYTHING about Polish or German markets — niche segments need a local expert. But I know how to build a discovery process that acquires that knowledge. I often recommend partners — Polish or German UX researchers who handle the local part.
HEART (from Google) — Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success. A framework for UX metrics that measures how useful and pleasant a product is.
AARRR (from Dave McClure) — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue. The pirate metrics, the product growth funnel.
For MVP, Activation and Retention matter more. Not Acquisition (with nothing to activate, chasing traffic is wasteful). Not Revenue (most MVPs don't monetise meaningfully in the first 3-6 months). Not Referral (there's no one to refer until retention exists).
Activation = % of users who completed the key activation event (for SaaS — created the first project; for e-commerce — added an item to cart and completed checkout). Retention = % of users returning at D1, D7, D30.
For a Lutsk SaaS startup, a typical benchmark: D1 ≥ 40%, D7 ≥ 20%, D30 ≥ 10% — this is already a signal that product-market fit is near. If D7 < 5%, the product needs rethinking, not “pumping with traffic”.
Product-market fit (PMF) isn't a point, it's a continuum. There's no single “binary” indicator, but several signals I use together:
For most Lutsk startups, real PMF arrives 9-18 months after MVP launch. Before that — it's search for PMF, not PMF as is. So the strategy I build assumes 2-3 cycles of pivots: we don't play “guess the market on the first try”.
Yes — this is even more frequent than strategy from scratch. A Lutsk team that's been building for 1-2 years often ends up in a situation: features exist but metrics aren't growing, backlog has 200+ tasks with no priorities, team is burned out from “doing everything at once”.
In this format we run a strategy refresh over 3-4 weeks:
Often a parallel UX audit or conversion optimisation is needed — I do this too, or I integrate findings with the product strategy without breaks.
Over 15+ years I've worked with:
Outside expertise: hardcore deep tech (quantum computing, biotech), gambling business, crypto projects with complex tokenomics (I can do UI but not strategic economics). If you're in such a niche — I'll say so honestly and recommend who's stronger there.
This is the key question for a Lutsk startup. The city has ~215k residents, the region ~1M — for most digital products this is too small to reach product scale. So strategy for a Lutsk team almost always includes expansion into:
I help with go-to-market hypotheses for each market: where the first traffic comes from, how to localise the product, which channels (PPC, content, partnerships). If SEO or Google Ads for the EU market is needed — I bring in my specialists.
Yes, fully. Most of my clients are from Kyiv, Lviv, Poland, Germany, the US — we work entirely online. For Lutsk teams the remote format is also available: discovery workshops in Miro and Zoom, interviews synchronously or asynchronously (Loom videos), shared Notion base.
If meeting in person is convenient — I come to Lutsk. Most Lutsk clients choose a hybrid: 1-2 in-person days for kick-off + final presentation, rest online. This gives team energy where it's needed and doesn't waste time where text can be written asynchronously. For global teams (some in Lutsk, some in Berlin or Warsaw) a fully distributed format is normal practice.
Comparison with other options
| Alex Filiuk | Product agency from Lviv/Kyiv or a freelancer | |
|---|---|---|
| Meetings in Lutsk | ✅ In person at discovery sessions | ❌ Only Zoom from Kyiv/Lviv |
| Understanding of EU market for Lutsk startups | ✅ Polish, German, EU clients in portfolio | 📋 Often Ukraine-only focus |
| Customer development with real users | ✅ 15-25 interviews per project | ⚠️ Sometimes 3-5 just for show |
| MVP scope with feature ballast cut | ✅ Strict RICE/ICE prioritisation | 💰 Everything into MVP — more billable |
| Product metrics (HEART, AARRR) | ✅ Configured before launch | 🔄 "We'll look after release" |
| Link between strategy → design → development | ✅ One specialist owns all three layers | ❌ Strategy at one team, design at another |
| Strategy documentation | ✅ Living doc, updated with data | 📋 Slides once and forgotten |
| Post-strategy support | ✅ 60 days of consultations included | 💰 Extra charge or none |
Most startups in Lutsk and the Volyn region die not because of weak development or bad design. They die because they built the wrong product, for the wrong audience, with the wrong metrics. Product strategy is the tool that reduces this risk: before a team invests 6-12 months into building, we validate key hypotheses, confirm JTBDs, define MVP scope and configure metrics that will demonstrate growth. I'm Alex Filiuk, Senior product and UX strategist with 15+ years of practice, working with Lutsk teams targeting Polish, German, EU-diaspora Ukrainian, and global English-speaking markets.
This page is a complete guide for a founder, product manager or CTO in Lutsk considering an investment in product strategy: what it is, which artifacts it consists of, how the process looks, how much it costs, how it differs from a “business plan” or a “marketing strategy”, and why Lutsk's geography gives unique advantages and challenges when building digital products.
Lutsk is a city of ~215k residents and ~1M people in the Volyn region. In the IT/product niche, there are ~3-5k specialists, several outsourcing offices (NIX Lutsk, Webx), a small but active startup scene. The local market for most SaaS, mobile apps and marketplaces is too small to reach product scale. This means that from day one a team must think about expanding into the national (Ukraine) or international (EU, USA) market.
And here lies the main trap: a strategy that works for the Ukrainian audience often fails in the Polish or German market. And vice versa — a strategy copied from an American product playbook can ignore the specifics of the re-emigrant community in the EU, which is a natural first market for many Lutsk-born ideas.
Product strategy for a Lutsk team performs three key functions:
Strategy isn't a single document — it's a system of artifacts. Each one is a tool the team uses not just once at kick-off but continuously over the next 6-12 months.
Everything is documented in Notion or Confluence — as a living document the team updates weekly during product review. Not “a PDF printed for an investor presentation and forgotten”.
The standard cycle for full product strategy is 4-6 weeks. Here's how each stage runs:
If UI/UX design for the MVP or mobile app design is needed in parallel, we can merge cycles — after MVP scope we go straight into design and prototyping. This saves 4-6 weeks vs. the sequential approach “strategist first, then designer, then developer”.
This is the hardest part for a Lutsk startup — your users aren't in Lutsk, they're in Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, London. How do you interview a person you've never seen, in a country where you've never lived?
I use a three-tier approach:
For teams emphasising the Ukrainian re-emigrant market in the EU — this is a separate, very valuable audience for a Lutsk startup. ~5-7M Ukrainians in Poland, Germany, Czechia, Italy, the UK look for products that understand both Ukraine and EU realities at once: banking for those holding accounts in both jurisdictions; insurance with UA + EU coverage; job platforms with recognition of Ukrainian degrees; child education with support for Ukrainian identity. Competition here is low, willingness to pay is higher than the average UA market, and cultural proximity gives Lutsk startups a real edge over Polish or German players.
The biggest startup mistake is trying to do “everything at once”. A Lutsk startup with a team of 2-5 people doesn't have resources for 50 features in MVP — and that's actually a good thing because it forces choices. The question is only how to make these choices systematically.
RICE is a prioritisation framework from Intercom: Reach × Impact × Confidence ÷ Effort. Each feature is rated on four parameters:
The RICE score turns holy wars “we must do A!” / “no, B first!” into specific numbers. If feature A scores RICE = 12 and feature B = 4 — debate over, A goes first. ICE is a simplified version when there's no Reach data: Impact × Confidence × Ease.
In practice I run a RICE session with a Lutsk team in the format of a 4-6 hour workshop. We collect all backlog ideas (typically 30-40), score each by RICE, sort. The result: 8-12 features make it into the MVP — the rest go to backlog with a “possibly v1.1 or v1.2 if new info changes priority” tag. It's often painful for the founder (“but I wanted this feature from day one!”), but this is exactly what lets you launch the MVP in 3-4 months instead of 12.
“If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” Metrics are the nervous system of a product. Without them, strategy stays theory.
North Star Metric — one key metric reflecting the core value the user receives. Examples: for Slack — “messages sent in active workspaces per week”, for Airbnb — “nights booked”, for Spotify — “time spent listening”. A Lutsk SaaS startup must define its NSM before MVP launch — otherwise you'll optimise random metrics (e.g. registrations instead of active users).
HEART framework (Google). 5 dimensions of UX quality:
AARRR (pirate metrics, Dave McClure). The growth funnel:
For MVP, the most important are Activation and Retention. Acquisition without activation is money down the drain. Revenue without retention is fake revenue that disappears in 2-3 months. So I configure metrics before MVP launch, not “when we have time”. Tools: Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog (open-source alternative). For a Lutsk startup with a limited budget, PostHog is often the ideal choice.
Lutsk is a small city. ~215k people, ~1M in the region. For most digital products the local market is too small to reach product scale. But this isn't a problem — it's a characteristic that defines strategy from day one.
Key markets for Lutsk digital products:
Strategy always accounts for: which market the MVP serves, which is next, how we migrate the product (UI, payments, support, GDPR). If SEO for the EU market or PPC in Poland/Germany is needed in parallel — I bring in specialist partners.
Over 15+ years and dozens of cases I've seen recurring mistakes that Lutsk (and other Ukrainian) startups make. The key ones:
My portfolio includes 130+ projects, of which ~30 involved full product strategy or strategy refresh. Among clients — Ukrainian SaaS startups (cyty-app, fundly-hub, alt-mobile-crm, best365care), B2B products for the EU market (european-auto-parts-crm, bmw-service-crm-system), niche mobile apps (pet-alteration), digital products for the energy sector (solars-power-systems), brands with digital presence (imprint).
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 niche, product type and geography. It's often useful to look at strategy in an adjacent niche — it gives insights that competitor analysis in your niche won't.
Product strategy is the start. What's next:
I work not only with teams from Lutsk. Among other locations I actively collaborate 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 Telegram (contacts in the website footer). The first consultation is free, up to 60 minutes long. We'll discuss your product or idea, current discovery state, approximate budget and timing. After that I'll send a detailed proposal with a fixed price and a structured scope of work — no surprises and no hidden fees.
I'm ready to help your team in Lutsk build a product strategy that doesn't sit on a shelf, but works as a daily tool: from discovery to MVP, from MVP to product-market fit, from PMF to sustainable growth in markets across Ukraine, the EU and globally.