I'm David Osipov

Challenge

• Fragmented market: private-label manufacturing dominates the ready-to-eat category, so per-brand market share was rarely published.
• Scarce financials: detailed figures for private companies were often unavailable, requiring estimation with stated limitations.
• Language and access barriers: Chinese and Japanese sources needed translation, and several Russian retail sites were unreachable from Georgia.

Method

• Source hierarchy: subscription databases (Passport GMID / Euromonitor, Statista, SPARK), industry reports, annual reports, government statistics, and web-sourced retail data.
• AI-assisted extraction: Gemini and Claude for multilingual translation, data cleaning, structuring, summarization, and cross-source fact-checking — every output reviewed and validated by me.
• Human validation: informal consultations with industry experts and GSOM alumni to sanity-check findings and refine methodology.

Deliverables

• A structured market database covering brands, retailers, production locations, and available financials, built for market-share analysis by brand, retailer, product type, and region.
• Competitor deep-dives on international players including Bakkavor Group, HelloFresh, Greencore Group, and the Asian manufacturers Sanquan Food and Anjoy Foods.
• Executive pitch decks and a consolidated research report with market-size estimates and strategic recommendations.

Outcome

The work informed the client's international expansion planning and supported a strategic investment round. I also identified and corrected data-entry errors in the client's own source spreadsheet, which changed several regional conclusions.

Situation

When I took ownership, the product suite was in critical condition. Server crashes, major security holes, and obsolete apps were actively being sold. We were losing deals, customer churn was high, and the company's reputation was at risk. There was no product roadmap, no QA process, and no clear path forward.

Discovery and diagnosis

I ran in-depth interviews with key enterprise customers across the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, then combined that feedback with marketing and financial evidence — including a reassessment of churn that accounted for customer size. The analysis exposed systemic problems spanning the server software, the Windows and macOS desktop apps, and the Android and iOS clients: reliability, security, scalability, usability, quality assurance, and the way work was prioritized.

Objective

My mission was to spearhead a complete overhaul, repositioning the product for the enterprise market. The core objectives were stability, security and scalability.

How I prioritized

I replaced reactive prioritization — previously driven by whichever request was loudest or which customer was largest — with quarterly roadmaps built around reliability, security, scalability, and ease of use. Systemic risk reduction and the blockers standing in the way of enterprise adoption took precedence over isolated feature requests.

My scope

I joined as a Junior Product Manager and was promoted within two months, after the CPO left, to sole Product Manager reporting directly to the CEO. I owned product vision, discovery, the quarterly roadmap, the backlog, PRDs, acceptance criteria, UAT, executive alignment, and sales enablement. Engineering retained ownership of detailed technical design and implementation.

Decisions and execution

• Secured investment & built the team: Crafted a new product vision and financial model, pitching it to secure an $85,000 investment to hire core QA, development and support engineers.
• Spearheaded the security and scalability overhaul: Aligned the platform with OWASP ASVS L1 requirements and replaced legacy polling with WebSockets, raising concurrent user capacity from 5,000 to 20,000+.
• Drove radical efficiency: Unified four native codebases across C++, Swift, Java, and Objective-C into a single C# stack (.NET 7 & .NET MAUI), cutting monthly operating expenses by 69%.

Results

• Business impact: Drove 16% ARR growth, enabled enterprise deals up to $100k, and built a $155k sales pipeline.
• Security as a selling point: The security overhaul protected and won $300k+ in enterprise ARR from clients like Banque Saudi Fransi and Etisalat.
• Product & customer impact: NPS increased by 40% among high-value customers; technical groundwork laid for SOC2 readiness.

Strategic takeaway

Treating foundational elements like security and stability as core product features — not costs — turns a struggling product into a trusted enterprise solution and unlocks significant revenue growth.

Market-entry problem

DiDi was entering Moscow and St. Petersburg against entrenched local competitors. Product decisions made for other markets did not transfer cleanly: driver economics, fleet structures, and day-to-day operational habits differed enough to invalidate several starting assumptions.

Research synthesis

I ran product research with over 1,200 fleet managers and 6,000 taxi drivers to validate hypotheses and gather requirements, then synthesized the findings into the pain points that actually blocked adoption rather than the ones that were merely most frequently voiced.

Requirements and prototypes

I wrote comprehensive PRDs that carried financial impact analysis and strategic rationale alongside the specifications, and built interactive Axure RP prototypes for the Fleet Management System and the Android driver app so that stakeholders could react to something concrete before engineering committed.

Product impact

The research drove requirements and prototypes across four strategically essential modules, with regular feedback loops built in for continuous improvement. Driver NPS rose 13% over the period. I also worked with the chief security and strategy managers on the wider market-entry approach and presented the analysis to senior leadership.

The brief and its assumptions

The founder wanted a pitch deck built around e-commerce distribution in Estonia. Two of his premises rested on intuition rather than evidence: that his bottle design was clearly superior, and that no significant European competitors existed. Reliable data on the Estonian soap market — particularly consumer appetite for reusable packaging — was hard to come by, and the Startup Visa deadline was fixed.

Challenging the assumptions

I worked the European soap category through Passport GMID / Euromonitor, Thomson Reuters, competitor sites, and industry reports. The competitive claim fell first: several European companies were already operating in the space. The channel claim fell next — hypermarkets dominate soap distribution across Europe, which made an e-commerce-only entry a weak bet for a physical consumer good.

The revised go-to-market

• Multichannel distribution: retailer partnerships, vegan shops, and vending as routes to widen reach beyond direct online sales.
• Two adoption journeys: separate customer journeys and marketing tactics for "visionaries" (early adopters, scarcity-led) and "pragmatists" (mainstream, social-proof-led).
• A partnership ecosystem: government agencies, NGOs, and certification bodies for credibility and funding — including the Estonian Environmental Investment Centre as a funding route and Ecolabel certification.

Result

The client secured the Estonian Startup Visa with our team's help and relocated to Estonia. Alongside the deck I delivered a standalone research document to support the founder's later decisions. By drawing on prior Startup Visa decks and investor expectations, I upsold additional analysis sections, increasing the project's budget and my employer's revenue on it by 2.5x.

About the client

• ReDaily is no longer trading. Its Facebook and Instagram profiles remain online as a record of the product.
• The engagement ran from January to March 2020, and the outcomes above describe that period rather than the company's later history.