OkayCMS founder, product PM
Vitalii Vladov (Ukrainian: Віталій Владов; born 22 July 1989) is a Ukrainian product delivery manager. He founded OkayCMS, an open-source content management system for online stores, and later moved into product roles at travel-technology companies.[1][2][5]
He was chief executive of OkayCMS from 2015 until 2023 and previously ran the Dnipro web studio SimplaMarket.[1][4] He has written for DOU, Netpeak Journal, and MC.today, and has spoken on HURMA and DOU webinars.[9][16][18] Since September 2023 he has been a product delivery manager at Maklai.[1]
Vladov was born on 22 July 1989 in Kharkiv.[2] From 2006 to 2012 he studied finance and banking at the Dnipropetrovsk National University of Railway Transport named after Academician V. Lazaryan (DIIT), and completed a master's degree.[2][3] He served as deputy head of his student group and finished third in the group by academic performance, with a grade of 82.[2]
From the end of his second year he worked at PrivatBank, first part-time and then on night shifts while finishing the degree.[2] His LinkedIn profile lists an economist role there from June 2008 to December 2011 in Dnipro.[1] He then spent nine months as an analyst at LLC Olanvo, working on equipment-purchase analysis and company websites, before joining the web studio Shiftreset as a project manager in September 2012.[1][4]
At Shiftreset he worked as a project manager until April 2014.[1] In a 2024 DOU essay he wrote that he arrived there as a project manager in 2012, became a co-owner in 2014, and later the owner of SimplaMarket, a studio that built online stores.[4] LinkedIn records a co-founder and project-manager title at SimplaMarket only from April 2014 to December 2015; the same essay describes him running the studio in parallel with OkayCMS until he sold both businesses.[1][4] A DOU event listing for a June 2024 webinar called him a former owner of Shiftreset and Simplamarket.[18]
He later wrote that web studios on the Ukrainian market more often resemble self-employment than companies that can run without the owner's daily work, and that he sold the studio after building sites for a client who then hired him as chief operating officer.[4]
OkayCMS is a PHP content management system aimed at online stores, with a marketplace of modules and templates.[8] An OkayCMS GitHub organization was created on 2 December 2015; a later hosting-industry review dates the first public release to December 2015 and names Vladov as the system's creator.[7][6] LinkedIn lists him as chief executive from December 2015 to March 2023.[1]
In a Freelancehunt interview he said the product began with two owners, that he bought out his partner, and that the studio's cash funded development without outside investment.[5] Early versions were sold as licences. Cityhost later wrote that a Pro licence cost 295 US dollars per domain; in 2021 the fourth version made the core software free, with revenue from paid add-ons and support.[6][5] The public download on the product site in September 2026 was version 4.5.2, released under the GNU LGPL.[8][7]
On 1 March 2022, according to a later Cityhost review, the project published a statement titled "OkayCMS Sanctions for Russians" in which Vladov condemned the invasion of Ukraine and said the company would stop sales and support for users in the Russian Federation.[6] The next day he wrote on LinkedIn that administrators of more than 2,000 OkayCMS sites on Russian domains were being redirected from the admin panel to the Telegram channel "Ищи своих".[25]
In August 2024 he wrote on DOU that he had sold both SimplaMarket and OkayCMS a little more than a year earlier.[4] That timing sits close to the March 2023 end date on LinkedIn. The buyer was not named in those sources.
From September 2021 to May 2022 he was a product manager at Planet of Hotels, a hotel-search and booking site, then chief operating officer until July 2023.[1] LinkedIn work notes from that period describe a relaunch of a flights product and the launch of an activities product, with links to those pages on planetofhotels.com.[1]
Maklai is a Ukrainian product company that builds travel websites. Its public site names Luxury Hotels, 1Map, and Tophotels, and states that its services are used by more than 9 million people a month across 150 countries and 30-plus languages, as of the copy retrieved in September 2026.[14] The same page says the team has more than 150 people. The legal entity ТОВ «МАКЛАІ» (EDRPOU 35305263) was registered on 3 August 2007; Opendatabot's extract of the Ukrainian register listed 44 employees for 2025, 30 for 2024, and 16 for 2023.[15]
Vladov joined in September 2023. LinkedIn and the September 2026 biographical note give the title product delivery manager from that date.[1][2] A DOU calendar listing in June 2024 identified him as a project coordinator at Maklai.[18]
In a January 2025 LinkedIn post he wrote that he had set up a product guild at the company after talking to the HR director and product leads, gave the first talk himself, and planned topics for the next eight meetings.[24] For this site he said he founded the guild, is one of its regular speakers, and that more than 30 meetings have been held.[2]
In February 2025 he published an Experiments Hub note on DOU describing A/B work on booked.net, which he called Maklai's hotel-booking product. About 6 percent of gallery visitors used a new "Get Prices" control, according to that write-up, while conversion into availability checks rose less than the team had expected.[13]
LinkedIn lists professional courses taken after university. IAMPM's Advance Jira Course is dated July 2022. Campster issued an Intermediate Excel certificate in July 2023. Projector Institute issued a certificate for a two-day A/B testing workshop on 3-4 February 2024.[1][22]
Two LinkedIn Learning certificates follow: Complex Project Tips and Tricks (December 2024) and Product Management First Steps (January 2025). In 2026 the same profile lists Google's «ШІ для бізнесу» certificate (January), the Great Manager programme at APT Human Potential Investment Agency (April), Bulgarian A1 with Сдружение ЕНЕРДЖИ (May), and TwoCo's leadership development programme (June).[1][23] A separate courses row names Hard SEO with Devaka and Business Analyst in IT at genius.space, without dates.[1]
Published pieces return to a few practical themes. The 2017 Netpeak Journal guest post argued that SEO audits often pad reports with glossaries, keyword dumps, and advice that ignores the site's CMS.[9] The 2023 DOU essay on building a Slack activity bot with ChatGPT is framed as a way for non-engineers to learn constraints, prompting, and small-product decisions; he wrote there that he had never written code himself before that project.[11] The 2024 studio essay treats reuse of working solutions as the main source of studio margin, and warns against turning every client request into a new platform.[4] The booked.net experiment is offered as a case where a smoother path did not move the conversion number that justified the work.[13]
Freelancehunt interviewed him in 2021 when OkayCMS dropped licence fees, treating the change as a news event in the Ukrainian freelance market.[5] Netpeak Journal ran his SEO-audit column as a guest post, with an editorial note that guest views need not match the agency's.[9] DOU has carried three of his longer posts, including the Experiments Hub series.[4][11][13]
A 2026 Cityhost review of OkayCMS still names him as the system's creator, describes a December 2015 launch, and then argues that public development had slowed after late 2024: the last numbered release cited there is 4.5.2 (19 December 2024).[6] That review is of the product after the sale he described in 2024, not a profile of his later Maklai work.
On 31 October 2024 he spoke on the HURMA webinar "Як доносити свої ідеї ТОП-ам" ("How to get your ideas to executives"). A recording is on the HURMA YouTube channel; an October 2024 HURMA events round-up listed the same title for that date.[16][17]
On 1 June 2024 he gave a webinar, listed on the DOU calendar, on running a web studio. The listing named him as speaker and summarized a six-part agenda covering competition, finance, clients, and staff.[18] He announced the session on LinkedIn the same day.[21]
MC.today published a column under his name, as director of OkayCMS, on Facebook comment patterns after the Good Wine and Stylus reputation cases.[10] GitHub hosts a 2023 personal project, slack-activity-bot, matching the DOU bot essay.[12]
He was born in Kharkiv and is a Ukrainian national.[2] LinkedIn lists native proficiency in Ukrainian and Russian.[1] An EF SET certificate dated 19 August 2023 gives an overall score of 70 out of 100, described as C1 Advanced.[19][2] LinkedIn also lists a Bulgarian A1 certificate issued in May 2026.[1] He publishes under the handle lavvod on Instagram, Facebook, and Telegram, and as Vitaliy2207 on YouTube.[2][20]
Topics: Ukrainian product managers Ukrainian company founders E-commerce CMS OkayCMS Travel technology DOU authors Dnipro IT Maklai