Aleksei Makeev.
BUSINESS & SYSTEM ANALYSISLIMASSOL, CYPRUS — GMT+2● AT MAYFLOWER

Business system analyst with product and design experience

Nine years of it: payments and iGaming, banking, e-commerce, IoT, and now a live streaming platform with millions of users. The work is requirements engineering — the process in BPMN, the behaviour in UML, the integration as an API contract — for backends and mobile apps under real load. I have owned a product and designed its interface too, so you get one person who turns a vague ask into the process, the contract, the screens and a straight answer on what to build first.

9YEARS IN ANALYSIS
6INDUSTRIES
13PEOPLE LED AS PO
7PRODUCTS BUILT SOLO
SYSTEM ANALYSIS ✺ BPMN & UML ✺ API CONTRACTS ✺ PRODUCT OWNERSHIP ✺ PRODUCT DESIGN ✺ TRUST & SAFETY ✺ PAYMENTS ✺ AI AUTOMATION ✺ LIMASSOL GMT+2 ✺  SYSTEM ANALYSIS ✺ BPMN & UML ✺ API CONTRACTS ✺ PRODUCT OWNERSHIP ✺ PRODUCT DESIGN ✺ TRUST & SAFETY ✺ PAYMENTS ✺ AI AUTOMATION ✺ LIMASSOL GMT+2 ✺ 
WHAT I ACTUALLY DO(03)
/01

Requirements a developer can build from

The process in BPMN, the behaviour in UML, the integration as an OpenAPI contract, the data as a model with real field types. States, permissions and the edge cases nobody thinks to ask about get settled before the sprint, not in the middle of it. The team does not have to guess.

/02

Product calls, not just paperwork

I ran a team of thirteen as a product owner — developers, QA, analysts — and launched a new product line that brought in its own revenue. So I can tell you what to cut, what to ship first and what number would count as success.

/03

Design and AI on top

I design the screens in Figma myself, so requirements arrive with something to look at. The reading, drafting and checking runs through AI agents I set up, so a spec comes back in days instead of weeks, with a source under every claim.

EXPERIENCE(07)
DEC 2025 — NOW

Senior Business System Analyst Mayflower

LIMASSOL, CYPRUS · LIVE STREAMING PLATFORM, MILLIONS OF USERS

A live streaming platform with millions of viewers. I work on two of its parts: opening the product up to outside developers, and the tooling the moderation team sits in all day.

  • Lead analyst on the extension platform. I wrote the requirements for the whole path an outside developer takes: registering, submitting an add-on that runs inside a live broadcast, getting it reviewed, and releasing a new version without breaking the broadcasts still running the old one.
  • Specified how those add-ons take money from viewers and where those payments show up in the viewer's transaction history — so any payment can be traced back to who paid it and which add-on took it.
  • Wrote the requirements for the platform's own first add-ons — polls, a prize wheel, on-screen reactions, connected-device control. Writing them against our own SDK is how we found out what an outside developer would run into.
  • Reworked how a moderation decision is appealed: the second reviewer now sees exactly what the first moderator saw, in the state they saw it.
  • Turned anti-spam and account-abuse handling into settings the trust team changes themselves — blocked domains, suspicious phrases, penalty lengths and reasons — and specified the case data support needs carried through to Zendesk.
  • Moved my own analysis onto AI agents, which took the reading and drafting of a specification from weeks to days, and wrote the setup up so the other analysts could copy it.
EXTENSION PLATFORMTRUST & SAFETYADMIN TOOLINGSDKMODERATION
FEB 2025 — NOV 2025

Senior System Analyst Praxis

LIMASSOL, CYPRUS · PAYMENT ORCHESTRATION

Payment orchestration: the layer between a merchant and dozens of payment providers, which decides where each transaction is sent and what happens when one of them refuses it.

  • Designed the routing rules and allocation logic that pick a provider for each transaction, and what happens when one of them declines: the payment goes to the next provider that will take it, and the shop keeps the sale.
  • Adapted and extended the existing transaction flows so merchants with very different needs run on the same platform, instead of a separate build for each of them.
  • Specified and reviewed the APIs merchants integrate against, with the load limits and the compliance rules written into the contract from the start.
  • Worked on the admin UI so that complicated behaviour — routing, limits, provider settings — is something support configures for themselves instead of a release ticket.
  • Produced the documentation and models that kept product, engineering and marketing describing the same system. In payments the same word often means three different things to three teams, and that usually comes out in production.
ROUTING RULESHIGH LOADAPI REVIEWCOMPLIANCE
OCT 2022 — JAN 2025

Senior BSA → Product Owner & Designer ToYou

LIMASSOL, CYPRUS · E-COMMERCE AND DELIVERY

An online shop and delivery service. I came in as the analyst on payments and left owning a product line and designing it.

  • Defined and delivered the technical solution for the pay-later and fintech features — Tabby, Tamara, subscriptions, loyalty, wallet — across the backend and both mobile apps. Most of that work is the unhappy path: who is owed what when an instalment fails weeks after the order arrived.
  • Designed and documented the REST APIs in OpenAPI, so new integrations were built from the contract and did not drift away from the business rules release by release.
  • Led a cross-functional team of thirteen — developers, QA, analysts — and drove delivery from idea through to release.
  • Prioritised the backlog with RICE, weighing what each item was worth against how soon it would pay off.
  • Spearheaded the launch of a new digital product line, which opened a revenue stream the company did not have before.
  • Kept stakeholders, UX and engineering working from the same picture of the product — and once the line was mine, designed its screens myself.
BNPLWALLETOPENAPIRICETEAM OF 13
JAN 2022 — SEP 2022

Team Leader & Senior BSA MTS Digital

SAINT PETERSBURG · SMART HOME

A smart-home app: hardware made by other companies, one app to control it, and camera video that has to arrive without stutter.

  • Delivered the IoT integrations with the Tuya and Yeelight APIs, so devices from other manufacturers could be controlled inside our app — including what the app should say when a device is unreachable or the manufacturer's cloud is down.
  • Designed and maintained the microservice architecture behind real-time video streaming from home cameras.
  • Ran backlog reviews and sprint planning as the team's lead, keeping product, development and QA pointed at the same release.
  • Defined the technical requirements and wrote the system-level documentation for each new feature rollout.
IOTMICROSERVICESVIDEO STREAMINGTEAM LEAD
MAY 2021 — DEC 2021

Senior System Analyst Sber

SAINT PETERSBURG · BANKING APP

Insurance and financial services inside a banking app with 50 million monthly active users at the time.

  • Defined the functional and non-functional requirements for insurance and financial products across the backend systems and the mobile apps: what the customer agrees to, where the money moves, and what happens when a policy ends early.
  • Created the system artefacts the teams built from — use case diagrams, sequence flows, ER models — for banking workflows that cross several core systems in a single tap.
  • Aligned business requirements with the technical implementation, working directly with QA, developers and UI/UX rather than over a document.
  • Supported system integration testing by clarifying the edge cases and business rules the specification had left open to interpretation, which is where a banking release usually slips.
BANKINGINSURANCEUMLNFR
JAN 2020 — APR 2021

System Analyst → Lead System Analyst e-Legion

SAINT PETERSBURG · E-COMMERCE, AGENCY WORK

Agency work on other companies' products: a new client, a new domain and a new codebase every few months.

  • Led a team of four analysts — mentoring the juniors and reviewing every specification, so quality and wording stayed consistent no matter which of us wrote it.
  • Defined the API integration logic and prepared the technical documentation the backend teams built from.
  • Created and maintained the business rules, use cases and sequence diagrams for web and mobile products, so someone joining a project midway could find out how it worked without interrupting whoever built it.
  • Bridged business stakeholders and technical teams, so both sides had agreed the implementation plan before the work started.
LEAD OF 4INTEGRATIONSSPEC REVIEW
DEC 2017 — DEC 2019

Business Analyst IAC

SAINT PETERSBURG · GOVERNMENT CONSTRUCTION SYSTEM

A state system for construction approvals, where the route a document takes between government bodies is the product. This is where the BPMN habit comes from.

  • Gathered and documented the business requirements for the Unified System of the Construction Complex — a paper approval chain running between several government bodies, turned into one system.
  • Modelled the end-to-end business processes in BPMN, which made the approval route visible to everyone in it and took manual steps out of the middle.
  • Facilitated workshops with government stakeholders to validate what was actually needed and simplify the approval logic, rather than encoding the paper process as it stood.
  • Delivered the use cases and user stories the cross-functional development teams worked from.
BPMNPUBLIC SECTORWORKSHOPS
AI IN THE WORK(NOW)

Most of my analysis now runs through AI agents

Not a demo and not a hobby — this is how my specs get written at work. An agent reads Slack, Confluence, Jira and the product's own source code, then drafts. I decide and approve. Nothing reaches a live page without me saying so.

01 · Scaffold

Every task opens a work package from a fixed template, so a spec has the same structure and its own place from the first minute.

02 · Evidence

The agent reads the repos, the mirrored Confluence pages and the Jira history. Every claim carries a source and the date it was checked.

03 · Draft

One template per document type, in plain English, because the readers are developers and moderators in four countries.

04 · Validate & stop

A script checks structure, links and traceability. Then it stops and shows me the exact change. Publishing to Confluence or Jira needs my yes.

What it changed

Reading is the part of analysis that eats the week — old pages, tickets from two years ago, code nobody remembers writing. It now takes a fraction of the time, and it turns up details nobody in the company remembered any more — including people who have been here for years. Less of my time goes on producing the documentation, and what comes out has the same structure and the same level of detail every time.

What the team gets out of it

The setup is not mine to keep — I write it up and hand it to the other analysts, so the whole department gets faster at it and not just me. Developers notice the prototypes most: we now assemble real interfaces with AI on top of the company’s own design system, so a discussion starts from a screen someone can click instead of a paragraph everyone reads differently.

MY OWN PRODUCTS(03)

Built outside work, alone, end to end — analysis, design, code, payments, deploys. I did every part of them myself, so I know what it costs to build what a requirement asks for.

01Yasu IOS + ANDROID · ON-DEVICE TTS→ 02Paws of Cyprus 3 APPS · DONATIONS · 3 LOCALES→ 03By The Fire E-COMMERCE · SHOPIFY → NEXT.JS→

Also: a Python pipeline that cuts highlight reels out of long game recordings, and chat bots for Telegram, VK and WhatsApp.

TOOLBOX(06)

Analysis & modelling

BPMNUMLUSE CASESSEQUENCEER MODELSDFDBRD / SRSUSER STORIES

Integration & APIs

RESTgRPCSOAPWEBSOCKETSGRAPHQLOPENAPIOAUTH 2.0JWTKAFKARABBITMQ

Data

SQLPOSTGRESQLMYSQLMONGODBREDISCASSANDRAINDEXINGETL

Product

RICEBACKLOGA/B TESTINGMIXPANELFIREBASEGATABLEAUPOWER BI

Design & build

FIGMAMIRONEXT.JSREACT NATIVEPYTHONSUPABASESTRIPEVERCEL

AI & tooling

CLAUDE CODEMCP SERVERSAGENT WORKFLOWSJIRACONFLUENCEGITPOSTMANPLANTUML
Aleksei Makeev

I live in Limassol and work here. Russian is my first language, my English is working-level and it is the language my documentation is written in — plain enough that a developer in one country and a moderator in another read it the same way.

EDUCATION

Bachelor's and Master's degrees, National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), 2015 and 2017.

COURSES

Data-Based Product Management, GoPractice (2024). UML for Business Analysts, Maged Koshty (2023). BPMN for Business Analysts, Zbigniew Misiak (2023).

MAYFLOWER · PRAXIS · TOYOU · MTS DIGITAL · E-LEGION · IAC