Role:

• Design manager of Design Systems team
• Design Manager of Marketing Design team
• Driver of the Design Ops function.

Achievements:

• Significantly improved the performance of the Marketing Design Team through process and tooling optimisations, as well as eliminating hindrances to efficiency. As a result, the team has been delivering high-quality materials at pace and scale.
• The design system initiative that I drove has saved over 33,845 hours of engineering time, which is the equivalent of £5m in savings for the company. The design system has been brought to a high maturity and adoption state, with customer satisfaction of 87,5% and NPS of 38.
• Drove positive change in the Design Team with various Design Ops initiatives (e.g. designer onboarding process, standardised project templates in Figma, guidelines on various aspects of design, etc.)
• Supported the creation of design team’s values and principles
• Initiated and drove the process of defining the overall design direction for Beamery. Introduced a cohesive visual language
as a foundation of the design system

Recognition:

• Was recognised along with 10 other employees for exemplifying Beamery's values & principles.

Achievements:

• As a design lead & acting product manager, drove the process of developing the design system from 0 to 1 and its rollout across the company. Drove the strategy, planning, KPI’s, reporting on ROI, cross-team collaboration and stakeholder management
• Initiated and drove the process of defining the overall design direction for Beamery. Introduced a cohesive visual language
as a foundation of the design system

Recognition:

• Received the outstanding contribution award for the initiatives around design systems and DesignOps

Brought the design system to high maturity and adoption:

• 50+ components, internal Figma plugins, Mac app
• Consistent increase in component usage in code and Figma
• Growing number of contributions to the system

Switched the design system to a federated mode:

• The system was managed without a centralised team
• 40+ days of engineering work saved during the trial
• 100% of designers have contributed to the system

Helped to improve the performance of Reporting product:

• 42.21% increase in report views with the launch of the new
  information architecture
• Number of customers churning because of the Reporting product dropped to zero
• Steady increase in weekly active customers

Drove various DesignOps and Designer Enablement initiatives:

• Launched several internal Figma plugins
• Developed a process for onboarding new designers
• Introduced an improvement to the design crit process

Responsibilities:

• Maintained company design system and interface guidelines.
• Senior product designer for "Mail" and other productivity services on desktop and mobile.

Achievements:

• Drove the design of the majority of "Mail" releases in 2017
• Initiated and led an active phase of work on a company design system.
• Helped to integrate design system on other Mail.Ru Group products (incl. infrastructure services).
• Consulted various Company departments as a mentor.
• Initiated variety of infrastructural improvements and work process optimisations (e.g. design crits, Jira planning, Photoshop to Sketch switch, etc.)
• Active role in organizational and public activity (e.g. conferences, contests, educational projects, articles, etc.)

Responsibilities:

• Design group lead (3 designers as reports) for a suite of productivity services: Mail, Calendar, b2b projects.
• Active role in the planning and control of the development team.
• Heavily involved in high-level product decision-making (strategic planning, brainstorming/ideation, communication with external teams).

Achievements:

• Initiated and led the Yandex.Mail redesign.
  Played active role in this process not only as a designer, but as a manager (developed an idea, planned and controlled the development team, worked with QA, etc.)
• ‎Gained several patents for innovations (incl. patent for the concept of future mail interface)

I and Kostya Zubanov discussed the evolution of Mail.Ru’s design system.
The transformation from a stale and unsupported system to a mature one, with a full-time team and well-defined processes. We discussed different models for managing a system and how the design team’s culture influences the system development.

I covered the lessons learned over almost 2 years at Intercom.

The processes and specialities of the company that impressed me the most. What I had to get used to, and what should be taken into service. Difficult nuances of working on an infrastructure project. The most vivid impressions of the design-driven company and the experience of emigration.

With a group of Russian design system evangelists, we discussed the present and the future of this sphere. How design systems have transformed over the past 5 years and where all that is heading.

Roundtable about design systems and the main questions about them.

The presentation about the Paradigm design system, that I’ve been a driver of in Mail.Ru.

The story of the design system, its principles and main features.

The roundtable about the implementation aspect of design systems.
How companies approach implementing and maintaining systems at scale.

How we created the calligraphic identity for Dribbble Meetup conference.

I describe our step-by-step process for adding new components to the design system at Beamery. This process gives clear guidance to contributors and ultimately helps us to evolve the system.

Long-lasting design systems need solid foundations. Sometimes this requires taking a step back.

It’s increasingly clear that the tools we use shape the work we do in all sorts of ways, so picking the right tool for your task is absolutely critical. And even more so when you’re trying to pick a tool to be used by a diverse team spread around the world.

The design industry speaks English. The articles we read, the tools we use, the conferences we attend: we all speak the same language when it comes to design.

An opinion has formed In the Russian design community and is increasingly being encountered, that the hype that emerged in recent years around design systems is nothing more than a bubble inflated around a long-standing topic, and the authors involved in this matter speculate on old concepts.

Mail.Ru Group design team has been updating and standardising products for several years. We have formed a robust design system for media projects, mobile web and partially productivity services, while other products are gradually being connected.

When working in a product team on one or several projects, we inevitably come to the need to organize a common process and workspace. Someone solves this issue by adding tools for collaboration, someone even builds their product around it. However, we turned to the experience of our closest fellows — engineers.

Many Russian companies showed their achievements in design systems recently. Yuri Vetrov and I have been working on design systems for a long time and decided to give an jump-start to their development in Russia – we launched the collection called Design Systems Club.