About
I started as a graphic designer. Over almost twenty years I moved through web design, UX, product design, product management, and business ownership. Not by planning a career path, but by consistently wanting to own more of the problem.
That is still how I work. I am most useful when a single discipline is not enough.
How I got here
The progression was never a straight line. Each shift happened because the work kept pointing to a bigger problem than the one I was hired to solve. A client needed wireframes, but the real issue was that nobody had agreed on what the product should do. A team needed a design system, but first someone had to understand the five legacy applications it needed to unify. A startup needed a product designer, but there was no go-to-market strategy, no brand, and no understanding of the customer.
I kept stepping into those gaps. Over time, the gaps became the work.
That pattern led me through long embedded engagements inside product teams, where I worked alongside founders, engineers, and product managers for months and years at a time. It led me through years of independent work as a freelancer and contractor, dealing directly with clients and business owners, with nobody between me and the decision. It led me through fintech, banking, insurance, e-commerce, payments infrastructure, and enterprise tools. And it led me to co-found and run two design agencies, which is where the work changed most.
Each phase builds on everything before it.
Building companies
Bell & Hurry
2016 to 2019
I co-founded a fintech and banking design agency with a former bank manager. We started from a single successful project, a new bank built from scratch in Kazakhstan, and turned it into a company. Over three years we grew to about twenty people and delivered banking and payments projects across multiple continents, including South Africa, India, Germany, and Croatia. The work was complex, regulated, and high-stakes, which is exactly where I wanted to be.
Running a company changed how I think about design work permanently. Hiring people, mentoring them, managing client expectations, negotiating contracts, calculating margins, building internal processes, pitching to boards. You stop seeing design as a discipline and start seeing it as one part of a business that needs to work.
Bell & Hurry was later acquired by Trask, a Czech enterprise IT solutions firm. I had left the company before the acquisition.
SDMK Design Czech
2021 to 2024
I joined a three-person web design studio as a designer-for-hire and gradually took on everything else. Hiring, team structure, quality standards, client development, budgeting, business strategy. I built the design team to about fifteen people and introduced proper UX processes, research, and design systems. The clients grew larger and more complex than anything the company had worked on before. Securing and keeping them came down to the quality of the work and how the team was run.
I bought a 9% stake because I believed in the mission, and earned a further 10% for what I built there. In 2024 the CEO and I came to see the company’s future differently, and I moved on.
Both companies taught me the same thing. When you run a business, you notice what is missing beyond your own scope. A client's marketing strategy has gaps. Their lead generation is not working. Their internal processes are slowing them down. Most designers do not see those things because they are not looking for them. I see them because I have been responsible for them.
That instinct, to look past the design problem and see the business problem, is what makes me a partner rather than a service provider.
What makes this different
I never stopped designing.
Through agency ownership, team leadership, and product management, I remained hands-on with the actual design work. Research, flows, wireframes, prototypes, interfaces, design systems. Most people at my career stage have moved entirely into management or strategy. I do both, and the work is better for it.
I design more than screens.
Interfaces and flows are the visible part. The same thinking goes into processes, systems, frameworks, and teams: how a product team works, how decisions get made, how work moves from idea to release. Building and leading design teams of fifteen to twenty people, and running the businesses around them, taught me to design the organisation around the product, not just the product.
I build things now, not just design them.
I use AI as a core part of how I work. Not as a novelty or a trend, but as a genuine capability. I can take a product concept from problem definition through working software. That changes the speed and fidelity of what I can deliver, and it changes the kind of conversations I can have with engineering teams. One example is Kampa, a whole product designed and built this way.
How I work with clients
Reliable and direct.
I communicate clearly, deliver on commitments, and say when something is not going to work. Bad news early is better than bad news late.
I bring structure to messy situations.
Unclear direction, a tangled system, a team that is stuck. I walk in, map what is actually going on, separate what is structural from what is surface, and turn it into decisions the team can act on. The mess is usually the reason I am there.
I work best over time, not in a single engagement.
Understanding a product, its team, and its constraints deeply is what makes the contribution genuinely useful, not just technically competent. So I keep to a small number of the right clients. Context and trust compound, and that is where the best work comes from.
