Who is this guy

The Essays
of Aleksey
Kulakov

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

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

What founders bring me

Usually not a task. A knot.

“We have three product directions and no honest way to choose between them.”
“The team ships features every sprint, but there is no strategy they add up to.”
“Nobody in the company can explain the product’s value in one paragraph. Including us.”
“Every decision still goes through the founder. Including this one.”
“Everyone agrees we should use AI somehow. Nobody can say where it would actually pay off.”
“The org chart says one thing. The way work actually happens says another.”

If one of these sounds like your Tuesday — let’s talk.

Selected essays

Where the thinking lives

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.

Organizations as Interactive Systems

How the Hell Do You Formulate Value Properly

If you build a product and don’t want customers to look at you like a seller of hot air — this one is for you. It turns a vague “we need to improve efficiency” into a concrete “we’ll cut downtime by forty percent.”

Product Strategy and Value RU · translation coming

Nine Principles for Working with Silicon Colleagues

An instruction I wrote for myself: how to get real use out of AI without losing yourself or the point of your work. We increasingly work in hybrid teams of people and robots — and those teams need hygiene principles.

Human–AI Collaboration RU · translation coming

How to Delegate Responsibility

I always thought delegation was a simple topic — the basic hygiene any manager should have. Yet every time I join a new project, I find the most elementary things missing.

Organizations as Interactive Systems RU · translation coming

Games, Business, and Interfaces

Based on my lecture on experience design in live games — first given to Sberbank’s designers, then to my own team at JetStyle. It’s about experience design understood more broadly than interfaces.

Experience Design Beyond Interfaces RU · translation coming

Product Prioritization: Models, Trade-offs, and Decisions

Prioritization is a product manager’s main practical tool. Its job is to point the team’s resources at what actually grows the product — and to avoid local optimization. People often just call it “focus.”

Product Strategy and Value RU · translation coming

All essays →

Core ideas

Four territories, one discipline

Product Strategy and Value

A product earns its keep when someone can state its value in one concrete sentence. Most strategy work is getting to that sentence — and having the discipline to act on it.

Organizations as Interactive Systems

A company is a game people play together: roles, rules, resources, feedback. If you can read the game, you can change it.

Experience Design Beyond Interfaces

Interfaces, games, services, and organizations are one craft: designing what a person experiences and does inside a system.

Human–AI Collaboration

AI joined the team. The question is the same as with people: who is responsible for what, and how do we know the work is good.

Experience

Where this comes from

  • CEO of JetStyle — a product design and development company: digital products, web development, UX/UI, performance marketing.
  • Co-founder and ex-CPO of Ridero — a self-publishing platform for independent authors, operating in Russia and Poland.
  • JetXR — an AR/VR/XR studio, currently building its own product for BIM models.
  • Lead tracker (startup coach) at the corporate accelerator of Kontur.
  • Designing human experience in interactive environments since 1992: interfaces, digital products, and live games.
  • Teaches product management, product strategy, and team leadership.

Testimonials and international case studies for this English site are on their way. For now, the essays are the best evidence of how I think.

When thinking needs building

I help you understand what to build and how to organize the work. When the project needs a full product team — design, engineering, marketing — I can bring in JetStyle, the company I run. That part is optional and comes up only when it genuinely fits.

Working on something hard to formulate?

That is usually where I am useful. Tell me what you are working on.