Essays
Long pieces about products, organizations, games, interfaces, and AI. I write them in Russian first; English translations roll out one by one. The full Russian archive lives at lance.ru.
In English
In the translation queue
Not translated yet — each title links to the Russian original. Subscribe below to get each translation as it lands.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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 Development with an External Team
Everyone claims to do product development these days (yes, us too). Let’s be honest about how it differs from outsourcing and outstaffing, how contracts on this market are actually assembled, and who is responsible for what.
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 with feedback. That is what separates an art director from a designer.
My Business Heuristics
Varya came to me asking how to choose a market for a business. We talked for forty minutes and she took notes. Then I asked ChatGPT which other business heuristics it remembered me formulating — and ended up rewriting the whole thing.
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Questions worth thinking through about products, organizations, games, and AI.
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