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Prompt-Driven Operations: COO’s Playbook

How a tech COO uses prompt engineering to run financials, manage teams, and scale operations with clarity.

I’ll share practical use cases of prompt engineering from inside Epicmax, a growing dev agency. I’ll walk through how I use LLMs for:

- Financial reporting, forecasting, and margin control

- Managing team capacity and delivery risks

- Tracking KPIs and creating short-term and long-term strategy

- Sales proposals, launching new products, finding market fit

- Open source products management

- Communicating with the company owner, pitching and validating ideas

You’ll get real prompts, workflows, and decision-making strategies to make AI a true part of your leadership toolkit - not just another tool on the shelf.

This talk has been presented at TechLead Conference 2025: AI in Orgs, check out the latest edition of this Tech Conference.

FAQ

Anastasia Zmiengorodzka is the co-founder and chief operating officer at EpicMax and has over 13 years of experience in front-end development and project management. She started her technical journey at 17 in the Linux community.

GPT can be used as a creativity booster by serving as a sparring partner for communication and a personal intern. It can help discuss problems and generate ideas, enhancing creative processes.

The 'five questions game' involves asking GPT to pretend to be an expert in a certain field and pose five questions repeatedly until you say stop. This helps gather information and develop a structured action plan.

GPT can assist in business decision-making by helping think through and prepare for scenarios. It can compare scenarios, like immediate actions versus delayed actions, and assess impacts on clients, revenue, and team workload.

Understanding seasonal patterns helps businesses plan better for low seasons, optimize workloads, and make informed decisions on marketing and development strategies during these times.

GPT can help in career growth planning by assisting in crafting a dream CV for the future, comparing it with the current CV, and developing a 12-week growth plan to achieve career goals.

Communication and feedback are crucial for technical leaders as they help in effectively explaining ideas, giving constructive feedback, and improving interactions with non-technical stakeholders.

Key takeaways include using GPT to think, prepare, practice safely, and enhance creativity. It emphasizes connecting decisions to money, people, and business strategy, rather than just focusing on technical aspects.

GPT can help improve communication skills by providing a platform to practice explaining technical concepts clearly to non-technical people and giving feedback on clarity and tone.

team productivity

Anastasiia Zvenigorodskaia

23 min

18 Sep, 2025

Comments

Video Summary and Transcription

Anastasia Zmiengorodzka discusses using GPT as a strategic partner, leveraging her tech background at EpicMax. She outlines enhancing tech leadership skills with GPT, emphasizing clear communication, trend identification, and business integration.

Available in Español: Operaciones impulsadas por prompts: Manual del COO

1. Utilizing GPT for Strategic Development

Short description:

Anastasia Zmiengorodzka introduces using GPT as a strategic partner and shares her background in tech and role at EpicMax.

Hi everyone, thank you for coming. I'm Anastasia Zmiengorodzka, and today I want to show you how to use GPT, not just a technical tool, but as a real partner in strategy, operations, and personal growth. I will use GPT for all examples, but the same applies to other models, so feel free to use everything that you like. So let's start. Most technical leads I talk use AI for coding and documentation, that's great, but GPT can do more. It's a creativity booster, sparring partner for communication, and your personal intern. Yes, sometimes wrong, but never sleeping. And a bit of information about me, I started my technical journey at 17 in the Linux community, and I spent more than 13 years in front-end development and project management. And now I'm co-founder and chief operating officer at EpicMax, where we build and support commercial and open source applications with Vue.js. And I also consult technical founders on finance and strategy. These are my usernames, you can connect with me using this QR code, it's going to my LinkedIn. If you have any questions, if you have some ideas and recommendations for improving my presentation, please send it to me, I will be super happy.

2. Enhancing Tech Leadership Skills

Short description:

Practical examples of using GPT to enhance tech leadership skills, including clear communication, spotting low seasons, and integrating business perspectives.

And what we will cover today? I want to show you five practical examples of how to use GPT, like your personal assistant, to make yourself a more valuable tech leader. I will show you how to use your brain as the data source with GPT, how to speak business language without an MBA, how to spot low seasons and plan your team's workload better, how to build your really career of your dream, and how to practice clear communication and feedback skills. These are so important skills for technical leaders.

And first example, you can use GPT like a rubber duck, I believe we all have. I have my own here, like always with me, but for now I use GPT for everything that I need to discuss, and you know that it's really better when you have some problem or some issue you need to discuss with some colleague, and you always can use GPT for it. But I really love this pattern and I want to share it with you. Please, if you can just catch only one idea from my presentation, have this one. It's like five question game.

A second example, all decisions in business it's always about money. Business is always in-house, we depend on markets, clients, people. GPT will not give you the secret key of everything, but it helps you think, prepare and test some scenarios before you commit for something. And as a technical lead you might think only about technology side, but in business every decision earns money or costs money. And if you start seeing both sides you will be a more valuable partner and really you can be like one top person of engineers in the world because many technical leaders still stay on their technical side, but if you're a leader you need to understand more in business than technology, but it will be your big focus.

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