The Art of Strategy | Meet JetBrains VP of Strategy Anastasia Zemskova
In a Nutshell
JetBrains VP of Strategy Anastasia Zemskova's role centers on creating alignment across autonomous teams through translation, facilitation, and relationship-building rather than top-down mandates. Strategic success requires iterative stakeholder engagement and trust-building, as teams will only execute what they genuinely believe is correct. The key quality for strategy work is "restlessness"—continuously questioning assumptions and adapting to changing conditions, especially in the AI era.
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Anastasia Zamkova is VP of Strategy at JetBrains. Her role involves ensuring all teams are aligned around a shared logic of success so they can make decisions independently in their daily work.
Her daily activities center on listening, understanding, and facilitation. She translates between different functional languages—engineering teams discussing engineering, product teams discussing product, and business teams discussing business—to align terminology and ensure everyone understands that goals are unified, enabling optimal choices focused on what matters most.
Alignment cannot be rushed. Creating a slide deck or document labeled as strategy is insufficient. The process requires careful curation and sequencing so that stakeholders gain new insights through iterative examination. This zoom-in and zoom-out approach prevents strategy from remaining a static document that fails during execution.
The personal quality bar maintained is restlessness—never settling. This aligns with ongoing adaptation needs as the world changes, particularly in the AI era where customer needs evolve continuously. JetBrains must evolve accordingly, requiring strategy to evolve as well. This involves uncomfortable conversations when alignment breaks down and requires willingness to question one's own assumptions and framing.
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