Welcome to the first in the series where UK Uplander finds out a bit more about the guys behind the scenes at Upland. These are the people that make the magic happen so let's find out a bit more about them. We hear from the Founders quite a bit but now it's time to hear from the ones doing the real work and are implementing and supporting the Metaverse that is Upland. First 'Up', we have:

Pavel Kirilovskiy, Product lead

Tell us a bit about yourself, what do you do when you aren’t grafting away for Idan and Dirk and Mani?

When I’m not grafting away for my 3 founders, I'm grafting away for my 3 beautiful girls: wife and 2 daughters . We love to do family biking and chilling at the beach. When I’m not grafting for my 3 girls, usually I read books (latest was ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand), do sports (boxing). Recently I’ve discovered chess for myself and almost hit 1200 rating on chess.com

What part of the game do you work on – front/back end etc.?

As a product lead I'm touching nearly every aspect of the game and one of my main responsibilities is to make sure that we execute and deliver as a team.

So what’s your background – are you interested in Gaming and/or Crypto?

Yeah, I’m interested in both actually. Couple years ago I had hands on experience with investing into different coins on Binance. As a part of my due diligence before investment I was carefully reading through every whitepaper - that is how I got acknowledged with EOS btw and made it a part of my portfolio in early days of EOS. As for gaming, I consider myself as a casual gamer. I love Blizzard stuff (WoW, Diablo) , competitive shooters (Overwatch, BF5) and also good old RTS strategies and tycoons (Age of Empires, Sim City). I'm also into mobile gaming - love all the stuff that Supercell does (just hit 11k trophies in Brawlstars, which my 4th grade daughter brags about in front of her classmates).

Brilliant! Tell us a little bit how you work as a team – do you use Agile methodologies?

Yes, we are Agile. We use mix of tools from Scrum and Kanban methodologies that helps us to ‘steer the ship’. But whatever tools are used, communication is the key. I think good communication within the team plus execution is what allows us to deliver.

Where have you worked other than Upland? Any interesting projects you’ve worked on?

I used to work in one global fintech company which worked in gaming niche. And there was an internal startup within the company which allowed game developers to distribute and monetize their games globally via marketplace (ala Steam) without worrying about local taxes / VAT handling. Quite an interesting project, where I've tried different hats on: product manager, content manager, accountant, tax/vat researcher, QA, recruiter.

Gaming within Fintech, sounds pretty niche but quite interesting actually. The accountant and tax part, not so interesting (I'm a Part Qualified accountant myself, I'm allowed to say that!). What’s your favourite part about Upland? What excites you about the game?

Complexity is my favourite part. Most of the problems that we are solving haven’t been solved before by anybody, (And stack overflow doesn't help in most cases) so we have to do a lot of R&D, prototyping and brainstorming - real Llama Labs . What excites me? - a blue ocean of possibilities and features that could be implemented within Upland metaverse.

Nice. There really are some exciting possibilities with Upland, I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Finally, what parts of the roadmap are you most looking forward to seeing being delivered?

Dark mode - I want it very bad! But can’t persuade Idan to invest some time into it . To be serious, I can’t point out my most anticipated feature. If it was in my power - I would gladly deliver all of it in one release. But the reality is that we need to juggle with priorities and pick carefully what to deliver with every product increment.

Thank you so much for your time Pavel, it's great to get an understanding of the people behind the scenes of this amazing project. 

New players: As always - learn the mechanics of Upland - areas, Treasure Hunts, Collections, Minted/Unminted properties and get a general feel for the game. There are interesting parts that don’t necessarily cost you.

Immerse yourself in the community. Ask questions, read the interactions, talk to people watch out for competitions. The more players there are in Upland, the better it is for ALL of the players and there are so many in the community willing to help out. If you want to get a head start in the game, sign up via this link and receive a 50% bonus on your first purchase. 

If you get the chance, Pay It Forward.

Please comment below if you have any questions.

Thanks all and I hope you enjoyed reading! 

Gawbie.

https://www.publish0x.com/upland-uk/upland-ive-started-now-how-do-i-progress-xwnmqrz 

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https://www.publish0x.com/upland-uk/latest-rumours-fiat-out-in-upland-coming-very-very-soon-xoljzpl 

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