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.
When I joined the project, I had:
The deadline was fixed — 7 months, no room to maneuver. Every sprint was planned around it. The foundation was two interconnected systems. First — a FIFA-standard exercise database: structured, categorized, and searchable, with exercises adapted for every training phase. Second — a calendar with three view modes (week, month, year) supporting three event types: trainings, matches, and microcycles.
The hardest part of the calendar was microcycles — containers that group multiple sessions into a training block with a specific goal. Coaches build them directly from calendar events: dragging, nesting, adjusting. 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.
We rolled out immediately across the entire league: 24 clubs, from day one.
Training session planning time dropped 6x — from 30 minutes to 3–5 minutes. Calendar fill rate became the primary success metric: the first number analysts check when evaluating a coach's work.
With the foundation live and coaches planning digitally, the next question was: what else can we learn? The platform was collecting training data from coaches — but players were invisible. Post-session feedback existed, but only for one role, filled in through a web form after a long training day. The product needed more data, from more people, with less friction.
Players entered the platform as a full role: personal profiles, post-training reports, and daily wellness check-ins to track load balance and flag injury risks. Coaching staff got individual training plans per player and a progress timeline for each athlete.
To maximize response rates, all reports for all three roles — coach, analyst, player — moved to Telegram. After each training session, and every morning for wellness check-ins, the bot sends a notification and the user fills it in within seconds. No browser, no login, no friction.
Three months after launch, Telegram bot statistics for players alone:
Data collection grew exponentially — from a single role filling web forms to three roles reporting daily through Telegram.
More data meant more expectations. With coaches, analysts, and players all reporting daily, the platform had everything it needed to become a real performance tool — but the analytics layer wasn't there yet. Tactical schemes were still being drawn in expensive third-party tools. Camera footage and GPS data existed in isolation. And as the product stepped into the public eye — events, press, marketing campaigns — it was still wearing the parent league's visual identity.
The platform became a serious analytics hub. Smart cameras started streaming training and match footage directly into the platform. GPS tracker data — speed, distance, acceleration — was integrated per player. I designed a built-in tactical drawing editor with football-specific elements: field zones, arrows, player positions. No more external tools.
Reporting got significantly deeper: detailed match reports, multi-role player assessments, and a match plan feature — allowing coaches to map every game phase across zones and situations before stepping onto the field.
In parallel, I proposed and led a full rebrand: 10 coach interviews, a visual system rooted in their world — field markings, training equipment, tactical diagrams. The client accepted and rolled it out 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.
