Rebooting the Management and Customer Experience Model in the IT Business (Ecosystem Case Study)

Naumen Group - https://www.naumen.com/en/

By Ivan Smagin interviewing Igor Kirichenko, President
Guest Blog | August 2025

Congratulations to Naumen Group for their nomination at the 2025 Haier ZeroDX Awards! Naumen Group was recognized for their Open Innovation Ecosystem driving circularity in the built environment.

As part of our collaboration with the Haier Model Institute (HMI), we proudly supported the 2025 Haier ZeroDistance Excellence Awards by nominating outstanding organizations, individuals, and case studies from around the world. We want to extend our deepest recognition to all participants, who are true pioneers in embracing new management models and fostering ZeroDistance with their customers, suppliers, and communities. Your innovative spirit is shaping the future of business!

I’m incredibly proud of Igor and Naumen Group, one of our partners and nominees by the LAP Alliance, has truly earned this recognition through their progressive work!

Discover more about Naumen Group and their Ecosystem Success Story through an insightful interview with their CEO Sem.

If you’re new to Ecosystems and the New Economical Engine read the linked blog post first.

0. Company Information

Founded: 2001

Headquarters: Yekaterinburg, Russia. Naumen operates internationally, with business activities in Kazakhstan, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

Employees: 1300+

Leader: Igor Kirichenko, President of Naumen Group (ex-CEO of Naumen)

2. When Everything Changed

Naumen’s transformation began in 2017, when Igor Kirichenko took over as CEO and steered the company from a traditional software vendor toward a customer-driven enterprise built on autonomous, empowered teams. By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, the shift to a more flexible, decentralized structure was well underway. COVID-19 didn’t halt operations; it became a stress test the company passed, moving its entire workforce to remote work in a single day with no interruption to operations.

Geopolitical shifts in 2022 added a new layer of complexity and urgency. Yet the same questions continued to guide the company’s evolution: How do we ensure resilience in a volatile world? How do we empower teams to make decisions quickly and effectively, without waiting for top-down approval? In response, Naumen deepened its transformation, focusing even more on flexibility, team autonomy, and direct customer connection. The outcome of this ongoing process is a network of autonomous teams, each responsible for core processes and products.

Over the past 15 years, the company has sustained average annual revenue growth of more than 30% — a performance closely tied to its organizational model. Only later did it become clear that this approach was closely aligned with the principles of RenDanHeYi and the Zero Distance concept.

3. A New Management Optic

Igor Kirichenko entered the IT industry in the late 1990s. He joined Naumen as a sales manager and, over the years, rose to become President of the Naumen Group. Today, he leads the company and remains closely involved in its ongoing transformation. While the idea of empowering teams was originally embedded by Naumen’s founders, Igor has fully embraced this philosophy, centering his leadership on enabling teams rather than controlling them.

"It was never about holding control," Kirichenko explains. "What mattered was creating an architecture where decisions are made as close as possible to where the action is." He adds, "This wasn’t my personal transformation. It was a collective shift — by teams, top management, and shareholders alike."

4. The Context That Demanded Change

For the IT sector in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the past few years have been a crash course in adaptability. First came the pandemic, then sweeping geopolitical upheavals in 2022 that rewrote the rules of the game. Traditional vendors exited, supply chains broke down, and familiar technology benchmarks disappeared almost overnight. Many companies realized their old management models could no longer deliver results in such conditions. Naumen, however, responded by rethinking how it delivered value, introducing new formats and solutions that helped clients not just weather the storm, but strengthen their own businesses.

By the time these shocks arrived, the company had already been building a culture and structure focused on speed, accountability, and customer proximity. The external crises just proved that Naumen’s organizational model could function effectively even in rapidly changing market conditions.

5. A New Business Architecture

When Naumen began its transformation, it didn’t set out to follow any specific management model. The task was purely practical: to design a structure that would allow teams to make decisions closer to the customer, and stay tightly aligned with business outcomes.

Popular frameworks, even highly supported in the IT-sector Agile methodology, didn't solve these problems at scale. They worked well within development teams but didn’t touch the deeper architecture of how a company is run.

ImageSource: Naumen Group

The model Naumen ultimately built — with autonomous teams, distributed P&L ownership, and a focus on customer value — was shaped  as a direct response to internal and external pressures.

6. Architecture Over Hierarchy

Naumen’s transformation began with a redesign of its organizational architecture. The company moved away from a vertical hierarchy in favor of a flexible structure where each product operates as an autonomous entrepreneurial unit — an approach that echoed the path Haier had pioneered in the early 2000s. Today, the company’s portfolio includes more than 40 such products. Within each product, teams can split, merge, change focus, or launch new initiatives — all without the need for lengthy central approvals.

Product development direction is set by the CPO of each product line, together with a company-wide Product Committee. This approach, on the one hand, ensures flexibility and autonomy, and on the other, keeps products within a unified ecosystem and avoids reinventing what already exists.

This level of agility would be impossible without a clear redistribution of responsibility. Teams not only make product decisions but also take part in annual and quarterly budgeting and are accountable for their own P&L. Financial metrics are embedded in daily operations.

Significant emphasis is placed on bottom-up initiatives. Up to 50% of all ideas for improving products and processes come directly from employees. These ideas are discussed with company leadership during regular Performance Reviews. If an idea is approved, it goes to the Investment Committee and then moves into the Naumen Incubator. The Naumen Incubator is responsible for validating these ideas and guiding them through all stages, up to the development of an MVP and bringing the finished product to market. This is not just an idea collection exercise, but a structured, sustainable process with real impact on the business.

Between 2021 and 2023, the company invested over $11 million in the development and enhancement of its products, solutions, and technologies.

Customer centricity is another pillar of the new operating model. Each team is oriented toward a specific customer or segment. They communicate directly with users, gather and integrate feedback, and treat customer lifetime value (CLTV) as a core performance metric. Employees are empowered to solve customer issues on the spot, building mutual trust along the way.

Creating an environment where employees continuously learn and grow has become another cornerstone of Naumen’s transformation. The company places significant emphasis on knowledge-sharing across teams:

-       Within the Investment Committee, teams discuss both the successes and barriers faced by new product directions.

-       At the internal NauConf conference, which covers every step of producing and delivering value to the customer, employees lead and attend workshops, roundtables, and presentations, all designed by employees for employees.

-       During Performance Reviews, colleagues develop individual growth plans, select appropriate development tools, and, when necessary, the company covers the cost of additional training.

This knowledge-sharing culture ensures that when teams launch new products, they can build on the expertise and experience accumulated by others. In addition, there are well-developed mentoring and coaching programs that foster experience exchange and professional growth.

ImageSource: Naumen Group

In practice, no resilient model exists in a vacuum. Naumen works closely with IT companies, universities, and system integrators, growing not only through internal resources but also by leveraging shared capacity — and in the process, sharing its own principles of autonomy, customer focus, and rapid decision-making with partners.

7. Transformation Outcomes

Tangible Impact

Naumen is committed to staying a company, capable of adapting, scaling, and launching new products without relying on top-down control. The number of teams grows by up to 20% annually. Naumen also maintains exceptionally high employee loyalty, with an eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) of 90 — an outstanding benchmark for the IT sector. This reflects a culture where people feel deeply engaged, valued, and motivated to contribute to the company’s success.

Naumen is consistently ranked among the top employers, holding a triple “gold” status in the Forbes ranking. Employee engagement directly drives business results: high customer satisfaction, a steady rise in joint initiatives, and Naumen’s continued leadership in software for customer experience and IT service management.

These cultural and operational changes have paid off: over the past 15 years, Naumen has achieved an average annual revenue growth of more than 30%.

This transformation didn’t just fine-tune internal mechanics, it is safe to say now that it brought the company to a whole new level of organizational maturity, built on trust, ownership, and entrepreneurial thinking across teams.

8. Reflection 

The Meaning Behind It

ImageSource: Naumen Group

“It’s crucial that everyone has clarity — why they’re here and where they fit in the company architecture. When that happens, people don’t wait to be told what to do, they take initiative on their own,” says Igor Kirichenko.

When employees understand their role, are empowered to act, and see the end user behind their work, the gap between task and value for customers disappears. That’s how Zero Distance comes to life at Naumen.

Looking ahead, Igor Kirichenko sees Naumen’s future as the continued evolution of a flexible, people-centric organization where lasting relationships with both clients and employees remain the company’s greatest asset.

A key priority is deepening the company’s client engagement model, where each customer is supported by a dedicated manager and receives personalized solutions that go beyond the core product. Naumen also intends to expand its product portfolio, not only by enhancing existing solutions but also through partnerships and the growth of corporate startups within the Naumen Incubator. Another strategic direction is the shift from simply delivering code to providing data-driven and AI-powered services.

Igor Kirichenko notes that the main challenges lie in staying adaptive to a constantly changing external landscape and the pace of the digital economy. As business cycles accelerate, traditional hierarchical models are proving less effective. Competing successfully now requires not only technological leadership but also an exceptional quality of interaction with both customers and employees — and a deep understanding of what truly motivates and drives them. That’s how Zero Distance comes to life at Naumen.

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