Tag
product-design
20 posts. All tags →
- Why AI Products Have Terrible UX Most AI products have terrible UX - not because the AI is bad, but because no one who understands both AI and design is building them. Here's what to fix.
- Why I Left My Role as Solo Product Designer at VALK I was the only designer at a $4B+ fintech platform for 5 years. Here's the real reason I left in 2025 and what I'm building now.
- When design stops being enough After 5 years as VALK's sole designer, I realized I want to build, not just design. On the gap between what I designed and what shipped - and what comes next.
- The unglamorous work that makes design real Five years into product design at a fintech, the majority of my work is documentation, edge cases, and maintenance. This is what senior design actually looks like.
- When your company pivots and your design work stops mattering After 4 years as VALK's sole designer, a major pivot taught me what happens when the product you built quietly gets deprecated - and how to stay.
- Agency vs product design - why I'm not going back After 2 years at a Moscow agency and 4 years as sole designer at a fintech, here's what actually changes when you go from agency to product design.
- Four years designing one product What four years as the sole designer on a fintech product teaches you about depth, restraint, and the trade-offs agency work never prepares you for.
- Accessibility in fintech is legally required, not optional Lessons from implementing WCAG 2.1 AA compliance in regulated financial software - data tables, chart contrast, focus management, and the institutional sales reality.
- Designing Merlin for 5 million Ledger Live users How I redesigned Merlin by VALK for the Ledger Live integration - two audiences, two design systems, and a compressed timeline.
- Moving doesn't fix your design problems I moved from Istanbul to LA and found the same Figma files waiting. Reflections on nomadic remote work, timezone pain, and why stability matters for design.
- Designing financial UI for 15+ countries What I learned designing VALK's platform across 15 countries - date formats, RTL, regulatory UI rules, and how to structure Figma for regional variants.
- Designing for users you cannot talk to Three years of enterprise B2B design at VALK with almost no user research access - and the proxy methods that replaced it.
- Why your design system probably does not work After 2 years maintaining a solo design system at VALK, I found the real problems are organizational - not technical. Here's what I got wrong.
- Designing DeFi for people who hate DeFi How I designed Merlin by VALK - a DeFi analytics tool built for traditional finance professionals who don't speak crypto-native language.
- Data tables are the hardest UI problem nobody talks about Lessons from designing financial data tables for institutional investors - density, sorting, accessibility, and why every table becomes a spreadsheet.
- Scaling a design system to 70+ institutions What breaks when your fintech design system grows from 7 clients to 70+ institutions fast - tokens, variants, documentation, and saying no.
- What seed funding does to design priorities After VALK closed its seed round in December 2020, everything I was working on suddenly changed. Here's what funding actually does to a startup's design work.
- Designing finance when you know nothing about finance 8 months into designing a fintech platform with zero financial background - how domain ignorance slows you down and unexpectedly helps you.
- Building a design system from zero at a fintech startup Six months into my first startup role, I rebuilt VALK's product from an engineer-built MVP. Here's what went wrong and what actually worked.
- Starting New Design Job During Global Pandemic I joined fintech startup as sole product designer right before COVID. Working remote from Bali during quarantine taught me things about design process I did not expect.