Was steht auf Deiner Visitenkarte?

Artem Bykov, Product Manager at Dreamz Media

Worum geht es in Deinem Job?

The scene is the DD2 champions league, that’s an international DD2 tournament. We have teams all over the world participating, fighting for the great price pool. The tournament has online stage and online finals. I’m doing the management tasks, communicating with our partners, sponsors, casters and players. I’m also organizing the tournament’s scale. The Jack of all trades so to say, that’s what a product manager does. My typical week is like, I work freelance and basically most of our team are working as freelancer. On Monday, we always have a call, with all my colleagues in the companies in the morning, around 10. We’re talking about the tasks for the upcoming week. Then putting them into our task manager online, and then usually on Monday I send out all the emails, some fresh updates to casters, sponsors, etc. and then doing the work.

Wie sieht Dein Werdegang aus?

My education background is, I have a BA degree in mechanical engineering and I'm also studying business informatics. I started doing eSports at age of 15-16, it was just like a fun project with my friends. We opened up a website, dedicated to Battlefield series, doing Battlefield tournaments, nothing really special and extraordinary. After this, Starcraft 2 released, and I started to play this game, a lot. I was playing in a pretty big Russian team, maybe for half a year. But after that I decided I wanted to leave Russia for some time, to study in Europe and I picked Germany. To do that I needed to study German language a lot. And that's when I dropped my player career, but I instantly got an offer from a team to be their team manager. The person, who have experience as the player, knows how players think, how players work, train. That’s how I worked for the next two or almost 2 and half year. After that our team is disbanded, after Starcraft 2 started to go down slowly but steadily. That’s when I got offered to working with Dota 2. That's probably one of the biggest problems in eSports, that the games rotating and it's really hard to stay in one game for pretty long. I was doing Starcraft for three years and the past year I’m doing Dota.

Ginge es auch ohne Deinem Werdegang?

No, I’d say no. First of all, you need a lot of experience in this scene, in this community. The community of gamers and the eSports community is a really unique scene. You can’t really pick some positions, like some manager, team management and tournament organization. You really have to know, how the things works. So I’d say the experience is the most important quality. Beside that you need to be very flexible, because the gaming industry is really new, really fresh and things are changing all the time, constantly. So you really need to be flexible and try to always be informed about tendencies on the scene. These are the most important qualities in my opinion.

Was ist das coolste an Deinem Job?

Traveling a lot. I'm really happy that eSports game opportunities makes us to travel and to visit a lot of countries and cities. I’ve traveled a lot with my team and I’m also traveling now business-wise, talking with our partners, team participating in tournaments, so I’m always traveling around from tournament to tournament. That’s pretty cool I think.

Welche Einschränkungen bringt Dein Job mit sich?

The biggest limitation is the scene is really fresh and really young. So the gaming industry born like 30, 40 years ago and the eSports segment is even younger like 15 years old. Because of this, we meet all the problems, a young industry can meet. The people who are staying on the scene for quite a lot and the most experienced people have been here only for like for 10-15 years and that’s nothing. The lack of experience is one of the biggest problem I’d say.

Drei Ratschläge an Dein 14jähriges Ich!

Learn more and spend more time learning play games. Sometimes I think I was playing too much maybe. But I'm still very thankful to games because I got a great chance to enjoy my time playing the game and also improving myself as a personality and getting into the scene. Right now I'm not playing a lot to be honest, only a few hours a day when I'm lucky, but I'm still staying in the scene and that’s great and amazing.