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From Code to Product Strategy: Growing with Finnplay


Evgeniia Bugaeva
Senior Product Manager


What motivates me is being useful and seeing the result of what we create. When something looks clean, simple and works the way it should, I’m over the moon.

Personal Journey at Finnplay

My journey at Finnplay started back in 2014, and somewhat unexpectedly. A former colleague, who was also my university groupmate, had been approached about a position at Finnplay. It wasn’t the right fit for him, but he thought it might be for me. At the time, I was living in Petropavlovsk, Kazakhstan, and I decided to take the opportunity.

I started as a Frontend Developer, working directly on customer requests. Later, I joined our core Frontend development team, where the focus shifted towards building functionality for the platform itself. From there, I gradually moved into a Product Owner role. Instead of writing the code myself, I was increasingly guiding the team on how features and functionality should work.

After moving to Finland, I became a Product Manager and expanded my responsibilities beyond Frontend to include a major Back Office refactoring project. Following my second maternity leave, I moved from the Development team into the Product team, and today I’m a Senior Product Manager focusing on Frontend, CMS and Back Office. My role has evolved from building individual features to helping define product strategy and making sure what we build is both useful and high quality.

There are two projects I’m especially proud of. The first was moving from separate desktop and mobile sites to a unified React-based web application, a major milestone for us at the time. The second was being part of a complete Back Office redesign. We spent a lot of time working with designers to create the foundation for a new version. The project evolved significantly afterwards, but I still think of that original concept as my “baby” project.

The journey hasn’t always been straightforward. I’ve had moments when doing the same things repeatedly became a challenge in itself, and changing roles gave me something new to learn. Becoming a Senior Product Manager has brought a whole new set of questions: how to work with different stakeholders, negotiate priorities and turn ideas into something that can actually be delivered. I’m still learning, and having a manager who supports and challenges me makes a big difference.


Life at Finnplay

A typical day? Answering approximately 100 500 questions. 😄 After more than a decade at Finnplay, I know a lot about how the platform works, so helping colleagues understand different parts of it has naturally become part of my day. And because the platform never stops developing, the questions never really stop either.

These days, I also work closely with our designers on Frontend and CMS development, and that’s one of my favourite parts of the job. We discuss new features, define requirements and look for ways to improve the UI and UX for both our operators and end users. I especially enjoy the moment when our collaboration turns into a solution that looks clean and simple while still meeting all the necessary requirements.

What I appreciate most about Finnplay is the people. I’m surrounded by professionals who know their areas incredibly well, and there’s always someone to learn from.

Over the years, I’ve also had to pick up skills I never expected. When I was a developer, for example, we didn’t have a dedicated DevOps team, so configuring Apache and digging through logs simply became part of the job. That willingness to figure things out has stayed with me as my role has changed.

Beyond Work

Being useful and having my contribution recognised are big motivators for me, but work is only one part of my life. I have two small children, and they make it very easy to remember when it’s time to close the laptop. Spending time with them is much more important than working beyond my working hours, and that perspective helps me maintain a healthy boundary between the two.

When I want to slow down, I like reading, doing puzzles, playing board games like Catan, Everdell and Small World, or crocheting. Crocheting is a relatively new hobby, but I really enjoy that at the end there’s something physical I can actually hold, a finished toy rather than something living somewhere inside a platform or a Figma file.

And while I wouldn’t necessarily want to switch jobs with anyone at Finnplay, I wouldn’t mind shadowing a Scrum Master for a couple of days. I’m still curious to find out what they’re doing when there isn’t a Scrum event happening. 😁