Five years of running a grassroots community for Russian game developers — 50+ meet-ups across St. Petersburg, Moscow, Novosibirsk, and Perm; first game-studies track at DEVGAMM; and what community organising actually costs.
How Alternativa Games turned a revenue-share chain with Canyon and Prestigio into branded retail coverage across 30+ cities and a 12M-person reach — plus the partner stack that carried it (VK, Miniclip, Kongregate, Armor Games, Spilgames, OK.ru).
Cutting release cadence from four weeks to two at IT Park — and watching upsell conversion climb from 1–5% to 15–20%. How a shorter loop changed which bets we could actually run.
Switching 20+ people across three teams at IT Park from Kanban to Scrum — what broke in the first sprint, what we kept from Kanban, and why release cadence doubled.
The business case for separating Edvice from its parent analytics company — market fit, operating autonomy, and the cap-table mechanics of a strategic spin-off.
Relocating staff, rebuilding the business plan from scratch, and keeping an EdTech company alive under cross-border pressure. Decisions taken in the first three weeks and what actually held up.
What it takes to run four consecutive partner-funded projects back-to-back — requirements capture, timelines, and the habits that keep educational programs actually shippable.
Six game projects launched through the KBTU GameLab incubator, three shipping on Steam. Lessons on selection, mentorship, and keeping a pipeline moving through an academic calendar.
Notes on deploying AI-powered agents for applicants and staff at a university admissions office — what they handle, what they hand off, and why text-based inquiries dropped by about half.
How treating a university admissions funnel as a product — with data-governance standards, a centralised pipeline, and AI agents — cut document processing time by 30% and manual staff input by 70%.