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Progress

03 — Studio

The studio

Progress started in 2018 as two people in a 14-square-metre room. There are now 11 of us, we have delivered 84 projects, and we maintain 18 of them on an ongoing basis.

Numbers

0
years in business

since 2018

0
projects delivered

18 still under maintenance

0
people on staff

no subcontracting

0
clients

21 came back for a second project

01 — History

Eight years, year by year

  1. 2018

    Two people and one client

    Igor and Alexey left a product company and rented a 14-square-metre room. For the first year they built websites and small web services between the two of them, learning as they went.

  2. 2019

    Design moved in-house

    Until then design went to freelancers and every project looked different. When Evgenia joined, design became ours — and with it came the first internal component library.

  3. 2020

    First project over six figures

    A customer portal for a leasing company. That was when we understood you cannot build this kind of thing without an analyst: the client could not articulate half the requirements themselves. Natalia became the studio's first analyst.

  4. 2021

    Mobile practice

    Dmitry joined and assembled the mobile team. The first app was a tool for couriers — a hard project with offline sync, on which we learned a great deal at our own expense.

  5. 2022

    Switched to dedicated teams

    We abandoned the model where one engineer covers three projects at once. Since then every project has its own team for its full duration. We take on fewer projects a year; we almost never miss a deadline.

  6. 2023

    Maintenance became its own practice

    Thirty projects needed looking after post-launch, and product teams could no longer absorb that. We split out a dedicated group and introduced formal response times.

  7. 2024

    First projects with language models

    We started on internal tasks, then built the support bot for a bank. That was also when we formulated the rule: the model does not answer where a mistake costs the client money.

  8. 2026

    11 people, 84 projects

    Four practices, our own design system, 18 projects under ongoing maintenance. Half of new work now arrives through referrals from past clients.

02 — Team

Who will work on your project

Management · 2

  • Igor Novak

    Founder, Managing Partner

    Started the studio with Alexey in 2018 and wrote code himself for the first two years. Now decides which projects we take and which we turn down. Personally runs the first call on every enquiry above $25,000.

    2018

  • Svetlana Yurchenko

    Senior Project Manager

    Runs three or four projects at once. The kind of manager who tells a client "we are going to be late" two weeks before the deadline rather than on the day. In five years none of her projects has slipped by more than two weeks.

    2020

Analysis · 2

  • Natalia Korneeva

    Lead Analyst

    The person who goes to the client's office and sits next to their staff for a week before we design anything. Two projects in our portfolio changed direction because of her work at that stage, and both times it saved the client months.

    2020

  • Alina Gafarova

    Analyst

    Documents processes and turns them into requirements. Spent three years as a business analyst in logistics before the studio, which shows on warehouse and delivery projects.

    2023

Design · 3

  • Evgenia Polyakova

    Art Director

    Came from a bank's product team, where she spent seven years on interfaces for back-office staff. That makes her strongest on dense interfaces with tables and roles, rather than on landing pages.

    2019

  • Ksenia Abramova

    Product Designer

    Designs interfaces people sit in for eight hours a day. Insists on drawing empty states and errors before the main screens, on the grounds that this is where the real work lives.

    2021

  • Darya Shevtsova

    Interface Designer

    Joined as an intern in her second year of university and was leading design on a whole project twelve months later. Works on mobile interfaces and makes sure iOS and Android layouts do not collapse into the same screen.

    2023

Engineering · 7

  • Alexey Shumilov

    Technical Director

    Co-founder. Decides which stack a project is built on and carries that decision three years later. His rule: no technology reaches a client project until we have shipped something internal on it.

    2018

  • Dmitry Basov

    Head of Mobile

    Built the mobile practice from nothing: when he joined we had zero apps in the stores, now there are 9. Has been through around forty Apple reviews and knows the rejection reasons by heart.

    2021

  • Pavel Ermakov

    Senior Front-end Engineer

    Owns the front-end on our heaviest projects. Maintains the internal component library that our interfaces are assembled from — it makes standard screens three times faster to build.

    2019

  • Timur Khairullin

    Back-end Engineer, Go

    Works on the things that have to hold under load. Rewrote the integration layer of the leasing portal in Go, taking response times from 1.8 seconds to 120 milliseconds.

    2022

  • Roman Zinoviev

    Front-end Engineer

    Specialises in performance. Took the property developer site from an LCP of 4.3 seconds to 0.9. The only person in the studio who enjoys reading Lighthouse reports.

    2022

  • Mark Levitan

    Mobile Engineer

    React Native and Swift. Solved the offline synchronisation in the courier app — the hardest problem we have taken on in mobile.

    2022

  • Viktor Samoilov

    DevOps Engineer

    Responsible for making deployment boring. Sets up releases, monitoring and backups across every project, including the ones we inherited from other contractors.

    2021

03 — Principles

How we work

01

We argue at the estimate, not mid-project

If we think you are asking for something that will not solve your problem, we say so before the contract is signed. Four of the projects in our portfolio changed direction at exactly that point. Agreeing to everything and then rebuilding at the client's expense is not how we work.

02

Our own team, no subcontracting

11 people on staff. We do not take projects we cannot deliver ourselves, and we do not resell the work to freelancers. If something falls outside what we do, we say so and recommend colleagues.

03

We build on an open stack

Next.js, PostgreSQL, Go — everything we work with is open and widely used. We have no proprietary CMS or framework that would leave you unable to hire anyone else. Changing contractor is a hiring question, not a matter of buying a technology back from us.

04

Fixed estimates, stage by stage

The estimate is broken down by stage and we do not exceed it unless the requirements changed. When you add something new, we price it separately and show you before the work starts, not on the invoice afterwards.

05

Documentation written as we go

Not in the last week before handover. The data schema, API documentation and deployment instructions exist from the moment the first code does. Because of that, handing a project to your team takes days rather than months.

06

Success is a project that never needed rewriting

Our oldest running project is 5 years old and still being developed without a ground-up rebuild. That is the horizon we design against, not the delivery date.

04 — Company details

Legal information

Legal name
Progress LLC
Tax ID (INN)
7720562115
Registration (OGRN)
1387703066928
KPP
770001001
Address
Office 101, 23 Kirpichnye Vyemki St., Moscow 123456, Russia
Phone
+7 (988) 823-70-86
Email
support@progress-studio.ru

TODO: these company details are placeholders — replace with real ones.

05 — Contact

Let's talk about your project

Describe the problem in a couple of sentences. We'll reply within one business day and suggest a time to talk.

Hours
Mon–Fri, 10:00–19:00 (UTC+3)
Or reach us directly: @adadba