Ahhu.ru — Cheap Tour Marketplace for Russia (ru)
A travel platform for discovering and booking affordable, curated tours across Russia, where I led project coordination and oversaw design and development processes.
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About project
Ahhu.ru is a marketplace that showcases budget-friendly and author-led tours throughout Russia, offering transparent pricing, straightforward online booking, and a variety of travel experiences across diverse regions and destinations. The platform aggregates unique trip opportunities and inspiration for short trips, seasonal adventures, and cultural itineraries, making travel exploration more accessible across the country. Although I did not lead the visual design myself, I acted as project manager — assembling the team, coordinating design and development efforts, and ensuring the product met both user and business needs. My role included supervising the process, shaping feature priorities, and keeping production aligned with the project vision.
Project Process
Step 1: Project Discovery & Vision Alignment
The work began with defining the core idea of the platform together with the project owner (Mark Eremin) — a service for finding and booking affordable tours across Russia. We clarified the business goals, target audience, and the type of travel experiences the product should highlight. This stage helped shape the overall product direction and feature priorities.
Step 2: Team Building & Workflow Setup
Since the project required both design and development execution, I supported the team-building process by helping assemble the right specialists. I also established a clear workflow for collaboration, communication, and delivery to ensure that design and engineering efforts stayed aligned throughout the project.
Step 3: Requirements & Feature Planning
Next, we identified the key functionality needed for the first release: tour discovery, destination browsing, tour detail pages, and a simple booking flow. I helped structure the requirements, prioritize features, and maintain focus on an MVP that could be launched quickly while still delivering value to users.
Step 4: Design Supervision & Product Consistency
Although I was not responsible for hands-on UI design, I oversaw the design process to ensure the platform remained user-friendly, visually consistent, and aligned with the project vision. I reviewed key screens, provided feedback, and helped the team make decisions that balanced usability, branding, and development constraints.
Step 5: Development Coordination & Delivery Control
During implementation, I coordinated the development process, tracked progress, and supported communication between designers and engineers. My role was to ensure smooth delivery, resolve blockers, and keep the project moving toward release.
Step 5: Launch Preparation & Final Review
Before launch, I helped with final product review, checking that core user flows worked correctly and that the platform experience was cohesive. This included validating content structure, functional completeness, and overall readiness for real users.
Outcome
As a result, Ahhu.ru was delivered as a functional travel marketplace that helps users discover curated, budget-friendly tours across Russia. The project successfully brought together a small team, a clear product vision, and an efficient production process to launch a user-facing platform in the travel space.
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This case study highlights the core process and outcomes.
I’ll be glad to dive deeper into the project during an intro call and talk through decisions, challenges, and learnings in more detail.
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