Who is this guy

The Essays
of Aleksey
Kulakv

I help founders design products, organizations, and human–AI collaboration.

Product strategy, discovery, and organizational design for teams building complex digital products.

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Here are all my texts. I write about:

Nine Principles for Working with Silicon Colleagues

I wrote an instruction manual for myself: how to get value out of AI without losing yourself and the meaning of what you do. It's a list of the principles I follow when working with AI on a team. More and more we have to work in hybrid teams made up of people and robots, and that called for some rules of interaction hygiene.

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How to Split the Pie When There Is No Pie Yet

A step-by-step plan: from valuing human capital to setting up a regular rhythm of check-ins. So that everyone understands what they are getting their share for.

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Seven Theses on How the Designer's Profession Will Change

We talked about how to teach designers in '26. And along the way we formulated it.

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From Features to Users: How My Approach to Prioritization Changed

I was editing an article about prioritization I wrote three years ago and realized a lot has changed. Sharing an updated view.

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How to Delegate Responsibility

I always thought delegation was a fairly simple topic. I never used to talk about it, because setting a task is the bare hygienic minimum every manager should be able to do. But every time I walk into a new project, I discover that the most elementary things about how one person hands another a task simply aren't being done.

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Games, Business, and Interfaces

This article is assembled from my lecture «Designing Experience in Live Games», which I gave at an event for Sberbank designers and later to my own staff at JetStyle. It's about experience design understood more broadly than in interfaces.

Management as a Game

About fifteen years ago I noticed that multiplayer computer games are full of good metaphors for what happens to us in real life. That's how a concept called the Hexagrammaton was born.

How Designers Give and Receive Feedback

About fifteen years ago I realized that an art director — a person who creates design through other people — does it through feedback. That's exactly what makes an art director different from a designer, and ever since it's been the central topic I care about.

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Product Development with an External Team

Everywhere you look, everyone is doing product and digital-service development (yes, us too), but let's sort it out honestly: how product development differs from outsourcing and outstaffing, what parts the various contracts on the custom-development market are assembled from, who is responsible for what, and what is more profitable for the client and for the team.

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Product Prioritization: Models, Trade-offs, and Decisions

Prioritization is the product manager's main practical tool. Its purpose is to help the manager point the team's resources at developing the product and reaching the main goals while avoiding local optimization. Prioritization is often just called "focus".

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How the Hell Do You Formulate Value Properly

If you make a product and you don't want the client looking at you like a hot-air salesman — this article is for you. After it you'll be able to turn a vague "we need to raise efficiency" into a precise "we'll cut downtime by forty percent".

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AI for a LARP Game Master's Tasks

Today I'm going to talk about how to apply AI to a game master's tasks, and about what quality you can get and how. I'll share the ideas that have piled up and try to show how you can work with this.

Are You a Bush or a Pine? Or, What Kind of Tree Does Your Business Architecture Look Like

How do you tell whether a product has good organizational architecture? Try looking at it as a value delivery chain. Let's work through the details with a metaphor about trees.

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My Business Heuristics

Varya came to me with a question: how do you pick a market for a business? We talked for 40 minutes, and out of that conversation I put together this list of heuristics I derived from my own mistakes — whenever I break them, I regret it later.

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How to Teach Employees Independence. Part 1

In this article I'll explain why and how to teach employees independence, how people master something new, and which tasks can be delegated at which level of responsibility.

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How to Teach Employees Independence. Part 2

In the first part of this article I described how to teach employees independence, which tasks to hand out at which stage of development, and what a manager has to do so the team can take on tasks of high complexity. In this part we deal with synchronizing goals, feedback and firing people.

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Designers: a user manual. Motivation, problems, solutions

I studied industrial design at the Architectural Academy and wanted to work in book graphics. Then those plans went belly up, I accidentally became one of the first three web designers in Yekaterinburg, and my world turned upside down.

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Augmented Reality Interfaces — Nobody Prepared Us for This

We have all lived through a revolution in how we perceive information. The internet appeared, but it took some 10 years before it began to dawn on us — society, business, the professionals of a newly emerging industry — that the internet was not quite brochures on a screen, nor television where the links work.

8 Key Questions About Metaverses: How to Live and Work There, What to Pay With and What For — and Why All of This at All?

What do we know about metaverses? What will their arrival give each of us? Is the concept worth the hype that has been raised around it? Which competencies will the market be after? And will there be room for creativity in multiverses?

Following up on my lecture for University 20.35: what an MVP is and why you need one

In 2020 I gave a lecture to students of the University 20.35 online intensive. We worked through what an MVP actually is, how to formulate one, and why we consider it first and foremost a machine tool for testing hypotheses. We also talked about how to identify the barriers that stand in the way of changing user behavior, and how to break them with an MVP.

How Do You Find Inspiration for Work in an Unconventional Way?

About why laughing a lot is the norm at the companies where I'm the director. And what other unconventional ways there are to draw inspiration for work and stay creative and productive.

JetStyle's Unit Economics Calculator: Why You Need It and How to Use It

Ten years ago two things happened to me almost at once: I was asked to design a board game about unit economics, and I became product director at Rideró and started using unit economics in practice. It's the most effective tool there is.

How to Manage a Product Portfolio

A product portfolio is a way of splitting one big company goal into fragments and managing risk. How portfolio goals differ from the goals of a single product, how the BCG matrix helps you decide what to do with each one, and why the hardest decision is stopping investment.

Start with the Cherry! Identifying the Main Process in a New Product or Business: the Search Principle, Methods, Examples. Part 1

So, you have an idea for a business or a product. What do you do next? Find the main process that sets your idea apart from the others, and automate it.

Start with the Cherry! Identifying the Main Process in a New Product or Business: the Search Principle, Methods, Examples. Part 2

We're carrying on the conversation about launching a new business or product. You have a vision and your interpretation of it. But how do you find the main process, the one that sets your idea apart from the others?

Product vs Project: Tested by Freedom

Over several years of working as the director of a production studio and as head of product at a startup at the same time, I felt the difference between a product business and a project business firsthand. I told the story of my conclusions a few times at various IT gatherings, and this article came out of that.

What Product Development by an External Team Is, and Why It Is Not Just Outstaffing or Outsourcing

This longread is about how product development differs from outsourcing and outstaffing, why do it at all, and what the main difficulties are. My experience runs both ways, so there will be a lot of conclusions — and therefore a lot of text.

How to Choose a Contractor for IT Development and Get a Result That Will Benefit the Business? A JetStyle Guide

If you're about to order outsourced development, this article will help you figure out: which IT outsourcing scenario suits you? what to look at when choosing a contractor? in what logic to run the development process? and how not to get the choice wrong?

Moving an Offline Business Online: The Modeling Method

On how to reinvent an offline business for online, and what questions to ask yourself in order to successfully reassemble your business or product.

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Designers and automation: who the robots will replace and how to avoid it

Many people still think designers are the ones who make pretty pictures. But in fact they are people who design experience, and they don't necessarily know how to draw. So what do designers actually do, what is unique about their role, and which skills can't be replaced by automation, which is now everywhere.

Who You Can Be in an IT Product: Career Strategies for Every Occasion

I gave a lecture on the topic of this article to students at IRIT-RtF, Ural Federal University — the material is especially useful for beginners facing the choice of how to build a career. We'll talk about what a product team is and how it connects to your potential career, why you need to think about the product, what sources of competence exist inside a product, and which roles you can play there.

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