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Product management had become (PDF) more influential within many technology companies by 2024, with product leaders becoming more involved in company direction and commercial decisions.
According to the 2023 CPO Insights Report, 30% of Fortune 1000 companies had a chief product officer in 2023, up from about 15% in 2022. These are historical figures, but they show how product leadership moved beyond feature development and became more involved in company strategy.
One example of this broader role is the work of Aleksandr Belov, a product manager whose experience includes fintech, mapping, user-generated content (UGC) and search technology. His earlier product work included Tinkoff Junior, a banking product for children and parents.
The product combined child-focused banking features with spending controls, tasks and rewards, financial education content and an optional feature through which parents could view their child’s location. Belov later worked on account, profile, and UGC products at Yandex Maps, followed by work associated with the Dubai rollout of Yango Maps.
Turning Local Success Into Scalable Product Models
Product strategy can come from several internal and external sources. In the 2024 State of Product Management Report, ProductPlan surveyed more than 1,440 product professionals.
Senior leadership was the primary influence on product strategy for 31% of respondents. Customer feedback and feature requests accounted for 27%, competition and market information for 21%, and sales or support feedback for 16%.
Another source of product strategy is a model that has already worked in a different country. Reusing that model can save time, but the product still needs to be adapted to local regulations, infrastructure, audience behaviour, and available content.
Yango Maps in Dubai provides an example. Sensor Tower estimated that the app’s weekly Android downloads in the UAE increased from 851 at the end of June 2023 to nearly 24,000 by the end of September. Estimated weekly active users increased from 459 to approximately 22,000 during the same period.
The estimates placed Yango Maps among the most downloaded Android navigation and mapping apps in the UAE during Q3 2023. They document the app’s growth during that quarter, although download figures alone do not identify what caused it.
Belov said the product work in Dubai focused on adapting the navigation experience to the city rather than copying an existing mapping service without changes. Dubai’s multi-level roads, complex interchanges, towers, districts, and drop-off points required detailed local information.
Yango Maps combined lane guidance, real-time traffic information, parking suggestions, walking and public transport routes, 3D city features, and user contributions such as reviews and photos. These functions addressed practical navigation needs, but their value depended on the accuracy and availability of local data.
Belov had previously worked on a related account and UGC features within Yandex Maps. He developed product strategy, established cross-team processes, and worked on a system for handling user-submitted videos associated with business listings.
Belov recalled:
‘I had to deliver an updatable, experiment-ready personal account within the Yandex Maps mobile app, an area that had seen no substantial development for nearly five years. This required introducing a webview-based architecture into the mobile app and aligning previously separate mobile and desktop teams around a shared technical approach. The initiative also introduced new technologies for teams, along with a new data format – video content associated with organizations.’’
The project introduced a redesigned account area and user profile with gamification features and notifications encouraging users to submit reviews and photos. It also included a photo-suggestion system that used image timestamps and location information, where the user had granted the relevant permissions, to recommend uploads for specific places.
Structured prompts helped users decide what to address in their reviews, while video uploads allowed them to contribute another form of content to business listings. According to internal project data supplied by Belov, the combined number of user-submitted reviews and photos increased by 60% after these changes.
Challenges of Replicating Product Launches Across Markets
Technology is only one part of taking a digital product into another country. Teams must also account for the conditions that exist before launch, including the size of the initial audience, the availability of local content, and differences in how people understand physical locations.
Belov described the problem:
‘I think of maps as a digital model of the real world, and the main difficulty is understanding how that world is actually structured. In Dubai, for example, navigation is built more around towers and districts rather than the address logic I was used to. This created a different set of challenges for the product.
Another critical layer was understanding how local regulations work around personal data, public photos, and reviews. I leaned heavily on my UGC experience in Yandex Maps. However, I couldn’t ignore the fact that there was a very small initial user base in Dubai.’
A new mapping service needs enough accurate listings, photographs, reviews, and route information to be useful from its first day. At the same time, it may not yet have a large community producing that information.
This requires a documented content plan that distinguishes material obtained from licensed datasets, verified contributors, business owners and ordinary users. The plan must also cover labelling, moderation, image rights and the handling of personal and location data.
According to Belov, the initial Dubai launch primarily served a Russian-speaking audience. This gave the team a defined group with which to test the product before expanding its positioning and promotional activity to reach a broader audience.
Yango Group subsequently presented Yango Maps at GITEX Global 2024 as part of its wider technology portfolio. The company’s GITEX announcement confirms that the service was featured at the event but does not provide a combined Android and iOS download total.
Product Leadership and Prioritization
Scaling a product across countries requires decisions about which parts of an existing model can be reused and which need to be rebuilt for local users.
ProductPlan’s 2024 survey found that chief product officers controlled product prioritization decisions in approximately 40% (PDF) of respondents’ organizations, compared with 38% for CEOs. The finding concerned product prioritization specifically, not every strategic decision made within those companies.
The role of product leadership in this process is to connect business objectives with evidence from users, local specialists, competitors, and product data. Experience from another country can provide a starting point, but it cannot replace local research.
The work described by Belov shows why market-to-market scaling is not simply a matter of translating an interface or copying a feature list. A product must also account for local infrastructure, regulations, user expectations, and the information available when it launches.
The strongest product model preserves the elements that have already proved useful while testing every assumption that depends on local conditions. This gives teams a practical way to expand into another country without treating every market as if it works the same way.
