Aksinia Chumachenko is a Team Lead Product Analyst at Simpals. Simpals is a Moldovan company with projects in media, e-commerce, sports, education, and technology. It operates Point.md and Știri.md, with around 7M and 1.5M monthly visits respectively, being the largest news platforms in the country, as well as Afisha, Moldova’s leading ticketing platform for concerts and events.
Aksinia ensures that all analytical efforts within the company align with the broader strategic objectives. She is responsible for building analytics from scratch in six Simpals’s products including two largest media resources in Moldova, two ticket booking services, and two hardware products for swimmers.
Her skills and experience have been recognized internationally. She judged the UN United Nations BigData Datathon in 2023 and 2024, as well as the 2024 GNEC Hackathon and other competitions. She also is a mentor in Women in Tech and Technovation girls where she helps girls and women from around the globe to build a successful career in IT.
Q: Let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get into product analytics?
Aksinia Chumachenko: It started at Sberbank CIB. I was supporting automation for corporate lending processes. That’s where I saw how data can drive not just business logic but entire workflows. From there, I moved into more product-focused roles at Ozon Fintech and later BCS Investments, where I built analytics systems from scratch. Over time, I realized my strength is in setting up scalable, structured analytics in fast-moving environments.
Q: You’re currently leading analytics at Simpals, Moldova’s largest digital company. What does your role involve?
Aksinia Chumachenko: I lead analytics for multiple products across Simpals, including 999.md, Moldova’s top online marketplace, attracting over 4,2M visitors per month. I also oversee analytics across six more products — from news platforms like Point.md and Stiri.md to event ticketing, sporting apps, and even IoT products with global reach.
My core responsibilities include creating unified analytics strategies across products, setting up tracking, reporting, and testing infrastructure, and driving decision-making with experimentation and research.
Aksinia Chumachenko
Q: 999.md is a massive platform. What were some of the biggest challenges when you first joined?
Aksinia Chumachenko: When I joined in late 2021, there was no dedicated product analytics function. The platform was generating millions of events daily, but there was no structured system for tracking product performance or validating feature impact. I basically had to build the data analytics department from scratch.
I started by defining key business and product metrics. Without that, you can’t set up a successful system. Then I started building PowerBI dashboards for real-time monitoring and established an experimentation culture through A/B testing.
Over time, we evolved from reactive analysis to a structured experimentation model, which helped boost conversions, revenue, and user retention. My work clearly demonstrated that analytics was useful for business growth and helps to boost vital metrics.
As a leader, I motivate the entire analytics team to conduct regular research, facilitate hypothesis generation sessions for research topics, and organize prioritization exercises among product managers to select the most valuable research areas.
I’ve also designed and documented the research workflow to create a standardized process that was adopted across the company. The research program now delivers measurable product improvements, including a 1.25% increase in total product revenue, 7% product card view increase, and 5% revenue growth for one of our paid services and increases in other important metrics.
Working as a team lead at Simpals, I’ve also led the rollout of the GrowthBook A/B testing platform for both our web and mobile apps after Google Optimize announced it was shutting down.
I set up our key metrics in GrowthBook, designed how we would store the data, built the necessary fact tables, and defined user parameters for more precise targeting.
The results were strong: we doubled the conversion rate from listing pages to promotion services (1.48% to 2.9%), doubled the conversion rate from user accounts to promotion services (6% to 12%), and boosted Pro subscription conversions by 25%.
Q: Let’s talk about your leadership work. How do you build and scale analytics teams?
Aksinia Chumachenko: I don’t just grow teams in terms of numbers. I pay a lot of attention to the professional growth of my teammates. This is why I also volunteer my time as a mentor ― it’s very rewarding to see people grow.
Every person in my team has a personal development plan that we review every quarter. We plan what they would like to learn and at the end of the quarter evaluate the progress.
I approach each person individually. For example, if they’re interested in machine learning, I usually provide such an opportunity. Together we look at where ML could be useful in the current projects.
Q: How do you measure success in your analytics work?
Aksinia Chumachenko: Success for me means impact. That could be a measurable lift in KPIs, cost savings and even faster decision-making cycles (through dashboards or standardized reporting. For example, one research project at Simpals led to a 1.25% increase in overall revenue by optimizing promotion packages, as well as other key metrics. Tangible business results don’t appear from thin air — they come from research and strategic implementation.
Ultimately, analytics should find insights and promote changes based on those insights— not just generate reports.
Aksinia Chumachenko
Q: You’ve also mentioned that your mentor women in tech. Why is that important to you?
Aksinia Chumachenko: I love helping people, and girls in particular, in their careers. There is a lot of prejudice in society towards girls in technical professions, and I want it to become less common.
Moreover, I sincerely love helping people grow. Watching your mentee get a new job, a promotion, or understand a new topic for themselves ― that’s very rewarding and that’s why I’m mentoring.
I also believe that it is necessary to empower girls from childhood, so one of the mentoring programs I participate in is Technovation girls. Right now I work with mentees who are in their last year of school.
Q: Looking ahead — how will the profession of data analyst look in the future, considering the AI disruption and rapid acceleration of tech?
Aksinia Chumachenko: The role of data analysts is gradually changing and becoming more multifaceted. Increasingly, analysts are expected to possess product management skills. It’s no longer sufficient to have a deep understanding of data — strong product knowledge is also essential for making informed decisions.
For example, there are now positions such as Data Product Manager, which combine the skill set of a traditional product manager with deep data expertise. This type of product manager performs the same core functions — helping to develop and launch products — but with data integrated into every stage of the product lifecycle. Their responsibilities typically include:
- Using real-time data to support decision-making;
- Building and maintaining data processing pipelines;
- Conducting both qualitative and quantitative data analysis;
- Extracting insights from data, defining key metrics, and monitoring product success.
We are already seeing a trend toward the further specialization of roles within analytics. For instance, BI Analyst has emerged as a highly sought-after specialization in recent years. In the future, we may see even more branches evolve from traditional data or product analytics roles.
The emergence of these new roles reflects how the analytics profession is transforming. Data analysis is no longer just about processing numbers — analysts now play a critical role in business decision-making. They are expected to have not only technical expertise but also a strong understanding of how businesses operate.
This shift opens up new career opportunities, but it also presents a challenge: analysts must continuously develop their skills and adapt to changing demands.
Aksinia Chumachenko
Q: Any advice for aspiring analysts looking to make an impact?
Aksinia Chumachenko: Start by learning to ask good questions. Metrics are only meaningful if they connect to a business goal. Learn SQL, Python, experiment design — but don’t lose sight of product thinking.
Q: Last one — what drives you?
Aksinia Chumachenko: I am driven by growth:
- growth of my team ― seeing how my teammates grow professionally and take on new tasks;
- my growth as a professional. I love the feeling when I don’t know or can’t do something. That means that soon I will gain new knowledge and will be more experienced;
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growth of the business I work with. For example, when I see positive changes that have occurred with the help of analytics, such as growth of metrics, launch of new products, explorations of new markets.
