FFManager is a B2B platform that helps youth football academies manage training, player development, and analytics in one place. I designed the entire product from 0→1 as the sole IC designer — 10 user roles, 400+ user scenarios, across 24 clubs, from initial concept through brand identity.
The project set out to solve a fundamental problem: everything in youth football management happened offline. The work unfolded in three stages.
To understand how coaches actually work — and design around their real mental model, not an assumed one.
The research phase involved weekly meetings with the client's analytics team and direct input from coaches to map 100+ user stories into actionable design decisions.
Setting up the workflow
No process existed when I joined. I set up a weekly rhythm within two-week sprints:
The foundation was two interconnected systems: a FIFA-standard exercise database (structured, categorized, searchable, adapted for every training phase) and a calendar with three view modes — week, month, year — supporting three event types: trainings, matches, and microcycles.
The hardest part was microcycles — containers that group multiple sessions into a training block with a specific goal. The year view was equally complex: it had to show load distribution and calendar fill rate at a glance, so coordinators and analysts could evaluate a coach's planning discipline without opening individual sessions.
Result: session planning time dropped 6x — from 30 minutes to 3–5 minutes. Calendar fill rate became the league's primary success metric.
Players entered the platform as a full role: personal profiles, post-training reports, daily wellness check-ins. All reports for all three roles — coach, analyst, player — moved to Telegram. After each session, and every morning for wellness check-ins, the bot sends a notification. No browser, no login, no friction.
As of today:
Smart cameras started streaming footage directly into the platform. GPS tracker data — speed, distance, acceleration — integrated per player. I designed a built-in tactical drawing editor with football-specific elements: field zones, arrows, player positions. Reporting deepened: detailed match reports, multi-role player assessments, match plan feature for mapping every game phase before stepping onto the field.
In parallel — a self-initiated rebrand: 10 coach interviews, identity rooted in their world. Client accepted, deployed across product, marketing, and merch.
FFManager started as a blank canvas and grew into a full analytics platform used across 24 clubs, with 400+ user scenarios across 10 user roles — 6 shipped in MVP, 4 added in subsequent phases.
The numbers tell part of the story: thousands of daily reports, training session planning time reduced 6x, many players developed through the league's system are now appearing for the Kazakhstan national team and signing with professional clubs across Europe.
In early 2025, 16-year-old Dastan Satpayev — a QJ League academy product — was signed by Chelsea for €4M, the most expensive transfer in Kazakhstan's history. That's the metric no dashboard can capture: a youth tournament becoming a genuine stepping stone to professional football.
16 international awards in the first year — 13 Tagline Awards 2024, 1st place Complex Services & Portals at Workspace Digital Awards 2025, 3rd place G8 Creative Awards Web & App.
Yuriy Voropaev, CPO QJ League
I'd skip Ant Design and build a custom modular system from day one. Choosing a ready-made library felt like the right call under time pressure — but the savings at the start were paid back later, with interest. Around 40% of components had to be built from scratch anyway because football-specific UI simply didn't exist in Ant Design. Mixing custom code with the library meant no clean UI kit, and getting Storybook into a coherent state required weeks of refactoring. The final blow came with AI-assisted prototyping: the chaotic component structure broke prompts and slowed iteration at exactly the moment when speed mattered most. A clean, modular foundation would have paid off many times over.
