About Olga Katzenelson

Olga Katzenelson, conflict management consultant

I’m Olga Katzenelson, a conflict management consultant. Before this, I spent almost 20 years in tech — as a developer, an architect and an R&D leader. Most of what I know about conflict at work, I learned there.

A story about how I work

When we opened a new office in Bucharest, we inherited a team of developers I hadn’t chosen. Frankly, I wouldn’t have hired any of them myself. But they were already there. I couldn’t fire them, and I had to work with them.

Our experienced developers in Ukraine were convinced the Romanian team had been brought in to replace them. So first I had to calm that fear. We divided responsibilities so the two teams wouldn’t have to compete. Then the training started — and the new team had no intention of learning. They sat watching YouTube. On the first day, most of them were more than an hour late.

I could have made a scene. Instead, I stopped explaining the engine and asked them to invent a simple game. They came up with a plot, and we started working out together how to build it on our engine.

From their point of view, they were playing. From mine, they were learning the system.

The next morning nobody was late. A week later they were still watching YouTube — but they closed it when I walked in, and started writing code. A month later they took their first real tasks. Slowly.

There’s no fairy-tale ending. I left the company two months later, so I don’t know whether they became a great team. But that’s how I see this work. You don’t always get to choose the people or teams you work with, and you can’t always replace them. What you can change is how you work with them.

Background

  • VP R&D at FINCOM, a compliance platform for U.S. banks: built the R&D organization from zero, supporting 30+ U.S. banks in production
  • Director of Architecture at Playtika, responsible for 200+ engineers across several countries
  • Earlier roles at Resident, Cyren and Tikal Knowledge
  • M.Sc. in Computer Science (bioinformatics, medical robotics, MRI/CT processing)

What I do now

I work with tech companies on team conflict, post-M&A integration and neuroinclusion, and with people who are having a hard time at work.

My work is about workplace conditions and working relationships; it is not therapy or clinical care.