Analytics and DnD: Boredom as a Signal to Grow

Rodion opens with a confession: when Alexander Polomodov wrote to him, he sat for a couple of minutes in disbelief, because while preparing for system design and architecture interviews he had seen Alexander on recordings more often than his own colleagues. He comes from Glazov in Udmurtia, moved to Moscow in 2010, entered a printing university and was thrown out after the first semester. Back home, around his eighteenth birthday, something clicked: he re-enrolled at the same place on a different major, quality management of printed production, picked purely for the fun of it — a principle that later becomes his main piece of advice. In his fourth year, to avoid taking a job just to get his internship signed off, he registered as a sole trader in printing and stamped his own paperwork; along the way he filled several urgent orders for an exhibition, subcontracted designers and earned well, then discovered he had to find 27,000 roubles of contributions.

Another thread is photography: Rodion keeps a 500px gallery with a few million views, and his photos on Google Maps, pinned to places such as Geneva, have probably collected more than ten million views. Alexander answers with a story of his own: about ten years ago, worn out as a head of development, he bought a camera and spent his evenings walking Moscow with a tripod to shoot light trails from cars. After university came a year as a sales consultant and a tiny unregistered online shop of historical items sold by pre-order, and in December 2015 Rodion joined the bank, then Tinkoff and now T-Bank, as a call-centre operator. Two years on the line took him to expert level, and the skill he carried out of it was talking to people who constantly want and demand something. In product work, he says, it still helps.

Rodion is blunt about his career engine: he gets bored the moment a process is fully understood. That is how he left the line for the quality control unit — his application was first turned down as a closed vacancy, fourteen days later he saw it open again, said so, and was hired; Alexander calls it a test of persistence. The job meant listening to calls picked by algorithms and checking whether the client had been advised correctly — a client promised a fee-free transfer who was then charged one, for instance. The hardest part was scoring yesterday's colleagues from the line. Automation gradually took the routine away — transcripts, indicators pointing at problem spots, and an in-house tool the participants call Quality Manager, which the company sells externally; once language models were plugged into it, calls no longer had to be dug through by hand. From there Rodion moved into analytics: a simple SQL exam, and mid-level in six months.

He compares work with an internal customer to the three amigos: you sit down, ask what they need, and brainstorm together. That is how he pitched a separate analytics team for quality control to management and came to lead it. The team digitised the unit's processes — not by dumping numbers onto a dashboard but by thinking through the logic and the sources — and built a consolidated board over all the quality tool's data marts that neighbouring units started using too, plus boards on customer complaints. Then there were three teams, the people grew up, he had nothing left to teach them, and Rodion deliberately stepped down a level to assemble a team forecasting the load on operators. A year ago a conversation over a hookah brought him into Proteus, the company's internal fork of Superset that replaces Tableau after its exit from Russia. Contractors were told to move 10% of the company's reports; about two thousand reports had to move in under a year, and a separate environment was set up for the contractors and cleared with security; the last report is being finished right now. The scale: seven to eight thousand dashboards and, by the guest's own cautious estimate, twelve to fourteen thousand users a month, while the most popular chart type collected six million views in thirty days.

The second half is about tabletop role-playing games: a community inside the company and at Central University, which Rodion treats as his second product, splitting himself fifty-fifty between it and Proteus. In October 2022 Rodion's play group fell apart: everyone was around thirty, with children and careers, and getting six hours together was impossible. He found a dormant company chat where someone posted once every three months, called for players, and five people answered — without them, he says, none of this would exist. They played one-shots, self-contained stories of about four hours, then he ran a campaign lasting several months and ended it in style: two rented country houses and a wood-fired cauldron big enough to bathe in. Demand outgrew what one game master could cover, so he built a team of masters, and announcements began filling up in twenty minutes. And then the growth curve, as with any product, flattened into a plateau.

The festival idea came from Dasha, who runs a tabletop community at another company; theirs was just games and pizza, and Rodion wanted more. A colleague from internal communications agreed to help, but November and December passed without news, so he went to the internal motivation team, which gave him money and a person to work with. Then he invited publishers, market stalls and clubs: a free pitch in exchange for sales and a performance for the guests. A week before the festival: 300 registrations against a target of 120–150, ten market stalls, sixteen or seventeen games running in meeting rooms, a quiz, a pecha kucha and Q&A sessions with bloggers, and a photo zone shaped as a big yellow gelatinous cube with film on both sides and real jelly inside. Alexander recalls a similar format at work: a troubleshooting interview for SRE engineers where the interviewer plays game master and the candidate fixes an incident through a junior's hands. Next the community plans team-building sessions for teams.