First in consultancies, starting at Epam in Lviv, where I turned up as the first designer in the office and figured out the job while doing it, and later at SoftServe, mostly on enterprise systems for US and UK clients. That was one kind of school: you design for whatever domain walks through the door, which is uncomfortable at first and genuinely useful later.
Then product companies. RingCentral, on the SMB side of a cloud communications platform that competed with the likes of Slack and Teams. OpenVPN, where I led design through a design system overhaul and a slow shift away from opinion-driven decisions toward ones with actual evidence behind them. That was the other kind of school: you live with the thing after you ship it, which is humbling in ways consultancy work rarely prepares you for.
Now running Tau, an independent practice, mostly with early-stage founders and product leads. The move came after a deliberate sabbatical, on the working theory that the work gets more interesting once you can choose it. Alongside client work there's Ø3II, a small ambient/psychedelic techno label; the thinking stays sharper when some of it happens away from the day job.
Early, mostly. Before a team has fully committed to a direction, while the problem still has room to change shape, while subtraction is still cheap. Zero-to-one with founders. Interim or fractional design leadership for teams that need a steady hand for a while, including the parts nobody writes into the job spec: hiring, mentoring, getting design reviews to actually review things, getting design out of its own way. Turnaround on products that have quietly drifted somewhere nobody meant to go.
Less useful on pure execution inside large, settled teams with a confident direction and a worked-out backlog. I've done plenty of that and can still do it, but it isn't where I do my best thinking, and there are people better suited to it.
zalygaiev@icloud.comIf your project sounds like a fit, I'll say so. If it doesn't, I'll say that too, usually faster.