I joined VALK in November last year. Small fintech company from UK, building platform for institutional investors to tokenize and manage private assets. When I say small I mean it, I am the only designer.
Before this I was lead designer at agency in Moscow. Spacecode. We had team of five designers and we shipped maybe 50 apps in two years. Banking apps, loyalty programs, event platforms. Fast work, different client every few weeks. I loved speed of it but I was tired of never seeing my designs actually live for more than launch day.
So when VALK offered me remote position to build their product from ground up, I said yes. I packed my bag and went to Thailand with my partner. Then Vietnam. Then back to Thailand. I was designing fintech platform from beach in Phuket and it felt like I figured out life.
Then COVID happened.
Stuck in Bali with Figma
March 2020. We were in Bali when everything started closing. Flights cancelled. Borders closed. My partner and I got stuck in small apartment in Canggu and suddenly “remote work from paradise” became “quarantine in place you cannot leave.”
The strange thing is, my work did not change at all. I was already fully remote. My team was in London, I was wherever I happened to be. We used Slack for communication, Figma for design, Asana for tasks. The CEO would send me brief or we discuss on call, I design, I post in Slack, dev team implements. Simple.
But everything around work changed. The anxiety of not knowing when I can go home. Reading news every morning instead of designing. My partner stressed. Friends back in Russia confused. And somehow I still need to design clean, professional interfaces for people who manage millions of dollars.
The MVP Was Ugly
I need to be honest about what I walked into. When I joined, VALK had existing product but it was… not good visually. Functional, yes. Engineers built it and it worked. But the interface was what you get when backend developers make design decisions. Grey boxes, inconsistent spacing, buttons that look different on every page.
My first month I just studied. Opened every screen, every flow, every edge case. Tried to understand what this product actually does. Asset tokenization is not simple concept, especially when your previous work was designing food delivery app for Russian bank.
I made mistake of trying to redesign everything at once. Created beautiful mockups, new design language, modern components. Showed to CEO on our weekly call. He liked it but said we cannot rebuild everything, we have clients using current version. Real clients. Investment banks.
That was first lesson. Agency design and product design is completely different thing. At agency you start from zero, make it beautiful, ship it, move on. At product company you inherit mess and you fix it piece by piece while people are still using it.
Learning Finance by Designing Finance
Nobody teaches you about cap tables in design school. Or what “deal origination” means. Or why investor needs to see IRR calculation in specific format that looks ugly to you but is actually industry standard.
First two months I was searching everything. Reading about private equity. Watching YouTube videos about how tokenization works. Asking our CEO basic questions that probably made me look stupid. “What is data room?” “Why do investors need to sign this document before they can see the deal?”
But here is the thing, not understanding domain is actually advantage for designer sometimes. I would look at screen full of financial data and ask “does user really need all of this at once?” And answer was usually no. The engineers built it to show everything because they could. My job was to figure out what matters right now for this specific user in this specific moment.
I redesigned the deal presentation page first. Original was wall of text with legal documents listed in table. I turned it into something that looks more like product page, key metrics visible immediately, documents organized by type, progress indicator showing where deal is in lifecycle. Nothing revolutionary. Just basic information hierarchy that nobody applied before because nobody with design background touched it.
Remote Process That Actually Works
People keep asking me how I manage design process remotely, especially now with COVID when everyone suddenly working from home. So here is what works for me.
I do not do long meetings. I have one call per week with CEO where we discuss priorities. Everything else is async. I design in Figma, I leave detailed comments explaining my decisions, I post screenshots in Slack with context. If dev team has question they message me. If I have question I message them.
The key thing, and I think many designers miss this, is that your Figma file IS your communication. Every frame should be self-explanatory. I name layers properly. I add notes. I create flow diagrams next to screens so developer can see how user gets from point A to point B without asking me.
At Spacecode we had meetings every day. Stand-ups, reviews, presentations. I spent maybe 30% of my time in meetings. Now I spend zero time in meetings except that one weekly call. And I ship more work than I did before.
Is it lonely? Sometimes. I miss having other designers to bounce ideas off. When I worked at agency I could walk to next desk and say “does this interaction make sense?” Now I am alone with my decisions. I started using Principle to prototype interactions and record them as video to send to team, because showing is better than explaining, especially when your English is not perfect.
What I Learned So Far
It has been only five months but I already see how different this is from agency work. At agency, design is the product. Client pays for design. At startup, design is tool to make product work. Nobody cares if your spacing is perfect if the feature does not solve user problem.
I also learned that financial products have much stricter requirements than consumer apps. You cannot just move button because it looks better. Compliance team needs to approve changes. Audit trail matters. Some things look ugly because regulation requires them to be that way.
Writing this from Bali, or what is left of normal life in Bali right now. Beaches are empty, restaurants closed. But Figma works same everywhere and I have good wifi. Tomorrow I will keep working on the portfolio management redesign while world figures out what is happening.
Maybe when this is over I will write more about specific design challenges in fintech. For now I am just grateful I have interesting work to do during very strange time.
Originally published on kargaev.me. Imported to blog.deeflect.com archive.