20+ years of experience

My first corporate-level job, whilst I was still at university, was to develop a database management system for Hermes Finance, one of largest Russian financial holding companies at the time. I was responsible for share certificate operations, share disposal processes, and the user interface.

After that, I decided that design appealed to me more than industrial programming. After all, there was a reason I went to art college. The role of product designer didn’t exist back then, so I started working as a designer in advertising agencies and worked my way up to the position of art director at the international advertising agencies Young & Rubicam and Wunderman. There, I headed up the communication design and web design.

In this photo, I’m with Lester Wunderman, the creator of modern-day direct marketing, and the rest of the team at the Y&R office:

Having gained experience in designing not only websites but also entire online shops and e-learning platforms, I switched to product design for desktop and smartphone devices. As the senior product designer in Acronis, I was responsible for the Acronis’ flagship product – True Image for Windows, for 4 releases.

During my work, I established close ties with the localization, R&D, QA, and technical support departments, which was a novelty for our design department. I have also drafted several documents that facilitate understanding between colleagues from different professions. I believe that I have made a significant contribution to improving the processes and atmosphere within the company.

I am proud to have introduced the practice of user testing at Acronis: not only did I create interactive prototypes and implement user testing myself, but I also engaged a research company for wider coverage of audience.

Later, I led the development of small products not only as a designer, but also as a product manager, setting tasks for other departments and controlling the result.

At Open Investments, I was involved not only in design and research, but also in product philosophy, goal setting and planning, and introduced the practice of documenting the history of decision making.

The design decisions I made increased conversion by 750% in the main product I was responsible for. This was possible thanks to the culture of experimentation that I shared and supported together with the talented PM and CPO.

I took prototyping in the company to a new level - first by pushing the boundaries of Figma, then by using the new ProtoPie tool. Thanks to detailed prototypes, the understanding between designers and programmers improved. Developers trusted me so much that they invited me to discuss the code and look for better solutions together.

I consider my greatest contribution to be creating a comfortable, trusting and safe working environment not only inside but also outside the design department. High culture is the first word that comes to mind when I talk about working at Open Investments. Special thanks for this to our design director.

As I said goodbye to Open Investments, I received an endless amount of warmth, gratitude and best wishes. Colleagues said they would be happy to see me in the role of design director or product owner.

I joined the company at the very beginning of mobile app development, so I was able to build efficient processes. In the design department, I introduced the practice of morning briefings and took it upon myself to review mockups before sending them out for development. I also established a practice of short on-demand calls with developers to make product decisions quickly. We were on the same page with CPO, so I informed him about the decisions already made and discussed the future of the product. So, CPO was able to offload some of the management and focus on the business goals and product vision. I was also involved in setting goals for designers and developers, team building and hiring.

Working on design tasks, I studied market research, formed hypotheses in collaboration with an analyst, experimented with new interface ideas, supervised designers, created interactive prototypes, and conducted user testing. I also compiled a glossary of terms, trained marketing copywriters on UI text, created an interactive UI Kit and described component behavior, and conducted product reviews.

Working at Ingos Investments taught me how to plan the entire development process and how to manage a mixed team.

As a design team lead and principal product designer at InvestEngine, the UK-based financial company, I reworked the team's cadence to almost double productivity, and reshaped the week so focused work and ceremonies stopped fighting each other. I've automated the processes, hired 6 new team members and fostered a culture of creativity, loyalty to the company and accountability for results.

As a playing coach I took the hardest tasks myself and used them as teaching material for the team – the two-factor authentication flows with their security gotchas, the content builders that let marketers self-serve in Figma, complex components of the design system, etc.

Made AI a part of the workflow. 5 years at the AI department of Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics lets me read what a model actually does. I hired an AI specialist for communication design, wrote brand-book rules for generative imagery and voiceovers, and defined a UX-audit method (AI drafts, seniors decide).

Here is what the design team has achieved under my leadership: Presentation.

In between my roles at various companies, I designed apps and services for Yandex, WeavePay, Unlimit and others.