Skip to case studies

Senior Product Designer

10+ years on data-dense products · Porto · authorised to work in Portugal

Available for senior product design roles

Projects below

Where the domain was the hard part.

Freight Client Portal

2019 — 2023

Freight portal at Russian Railways on web, iOS and Android. Planning ran on spreadsheets and disconnected systems; the work moved into one operational system.

~250 web and ~150 mobile screens · ~50 operations · 58-FTE department

end-to-end shipment cycle
30 → 14 days
satisfaction, 10,000 companies
85%
unique monthly users
33k

Role: Senior Product Manager & Design Lead, leading 4 designers

Request this case study
The freight platform on a laptop and phone at a rail yard: a route on the map with priced delivery options, and wagon tracking with consignment counts on the phone.

EmbryoNet AI Technologies

2023 — present

AI platform for drug discovery and toxicology, screening how compounds affect embryonic development — work biologists did by eye, frame by frame.

Published in Nature Methods · Method of the Year 2023 · ERC PoC and Nebius grants

to process one experimental run
8h → 30min
from zero to live experiments
9 months
screens for 3 user roles
40

Role: CPO & Product Designer

Request this case study
The platform on a laptop in a lab: a zebrafish run graded well by well into lethal, sub-lethal and tolerated, beside dose-response and lethality analytics.

Mortgage Retention Decisioning

2024 — 2025

Decisioning product for mortgage retention at a US fintech. Advisors assembled the morning call list by hand across several systems; now it arrives prioritised.

25 screens · design system built from scratch · ~100 advisors working from it

of manual work removed, daily
~1 hour
more clients per advisor, daily
~30%
from kickoff to MVP in production
7 months

Role: Product Designer & UX Researcher

Request this case study
The retention dashboard on a laptop: recapture offers with the number of eligible borrowers and total equity, a choropleth of customers by state, a loan product breakdown and a payoff trend chart.

Ursa School

2023 — present

Online Serbian language school, built end to end. The largest of the independent products, and the one where the funnel was mine to move.

Marketing site · level-assessment test · LMS · CRM integration

trial-to-paid conversion
30 → 55%
trial-lesson attendance
55 → 82%
of new sales are repeat
0 → 45%

Role: Independent Product Designer, end to end

Read the case study
The school's site on a laptop in a library: “Serbian language school”, a results guarantee, a free-lesson button and the Ursa Major constellation across the screen.

Conference Platform

2021 — 2023

Conference product at Russian Railways, shipped alongside the freight portal.

~40 web and ~50 mobile screens · live slide translation, polls, speaker Q&A, venue map

events a year run on it
20+
web and mobile screens
~90
invitation to on-site logistics
end to end

Role: Senior Product Manager & Design Lead

Request this case study
The events app held at a conference: a live event with its organiser, dates and venue, above a tab bar.

For ten years the job has been the same three decisions.

What to build

Discovery and domain research in industries where the rules are not intuitive, turned into requirements a team can commit to.

  • Product discovery and framing
  • Domain research in regulated and operational fields
  • Requirements and specification
  • Stakeholder alignment across ops, engineering and leadership

How it should work

Information architecture and interface design for products carrying more data than a screen politely holds.

  • Information architecture for dense domains
  • Data-dense interface and dashboard design
  • Design systems and tokens
  • Accessibility as a working constraint

How it gets made

Working with engineering through delivery, and prototyping fast enough that the argument happens over something real.

  • AI-assisted prototyping
  • Design-to-engineering handoff and QA
  • Team leadership and mentoring
  • Cross-functional delivery

Top 50 of 1,300 entrants — Designflows 2025, Bending Spoons — international product design competition.

Sites I made outside the day job.

Small products for friends, family businesses and people whose work I like. No dashboards, no decisioning — just the whole thing, end to end.

Available for new senior product design roles.

Based in Porto, Portugal. If a case study here is close to what you are hiring for, write and I will walk you through the decisions behind it.

startsev.scouts@gmail.comDownload CV(PDF)