You’re Hired Because You Know What to Do | Meet JetBrains Head of Marketing Ilya Petrov
In a Nutshell
Ilya Petrov describes JetBrains as a place where you're hired to take full ownership: freedom to act comes with responsibility to the business and an extremely critical developer audience. Change happens through patient, deliberate advocacy rather than rushing, and the focus is on building repeatable processes that turn lessons into scalable excellence. His background in retail showed him that developers are driven by the same human motivations as any audience, and his passion lies in shaping how software—and therefore the world—evolves with AI.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Hello, my name is Ilia. I'm responsible for marketing of Jet Brains ideas.
Outsiders completely underestimate the freedom at JetBrains. You're hired because you know what to do then do your thing. But this freedom of course comes with responsibility. You are responsible to the business. You're responsible to the developers. And this is an audience that will debug every single line that you will ship to them. So be aware.
Driving change is something that could be done faster, but the choice is made not to rush it. There are a lot of things that can be done better and differently, both from the outcome and the process perspective, but at the same time, change takes time. As a pizza needs time for maturity, not just fermentation. Same with decisions and same with certain actions. They just need time to develop the right advocacy within the organization to land it with the team to bring people on board with you and with the decision. And that's the only way how change actually can grow and really impact the direction of the company rather than being another crazy idea that will be gone by tomorrow.
Last year some creativity was introduced into the way materials are produced, and the plan is to push it further this year, not just with the format, but with the stories and what goes into them as they are being told.
Every time, literally right now, there are things that aren't good enough yet. A lot of things can be done better. But as a marketing leader, the question is what should be done about this. It's not about pushing for perfection or not shipping until it's done. It's just about recognizing the fact that there is a difference between if someone knows and can do great, and then the marketing organizations that can ship great on a scale every single time. When seeing something gone wrong, the approach is to turn it into lessons but then into processes and making sure that everyone in the organization understands it and learns from everything that is being done.
There is developer experience personally, but then after 22 years switched to marketing and never regretted a single moment. At the same time, there is a belief that software runs the world. Everything around us is influenced and controlled by some software and the quality of this software defines both the reliability of the world for us but then the comfort, daily things like money transfers or paying for your train ride. It's all starts with how good is the software and especially today with AI coming into our world software is where it's born. But then it's the first industry that feels the impact. Being on this frontier, learning about this as we go and trying to adapt and predict what it means for our world, for everyone in general, is fascinating.
From the retail background, the learning is that software development and developers are perceived as some geeky creatures with completely out of this world ways of thinking and seeing things. But after working with Jet Brains for a while, the realization is that we are all human beings and the same advertising that makes some brands great works with developers. Developers have feelings as well and between running community and the JavaScript community there are much more similarities than there are differences.
Ownership is first an orientation towards results. The result is what really matters and the way how we get it. If we come to a hurdle or a bump on our road, we just need to find the way to overcome it. It's about going there until we get there step by step, learning, improving, solving problems, and not giving up in the middle. It's not like, "Hey, I did my job. It's 8, so see you tomorrow."
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