Making Products Since '08

Situation Quadcode was building one AI platform for coding, design and content creation, and the MVP needed a foundation for it: code and media agents in one place.

Task Design the entire product interface from scratch, build the visual identity, and make the agent workflows readable end to end.

Action I ran a UX audit and built the MVP brand. I designed the product interface, the design system behind it, and the workflows that put code and media agents in one environment.

Result Delivered the product design, core design system and branding for the MVP release: one environment where developers and creators run code and media agents. The platform is public and running — quadcode.ai.

Situation Activation, Retention, SUS and Perceived Ease of Use were all weak: users were thrust into trading straight after registration, without any real onboarding.

Task Market research and user studies pointed the same way: rebuild the path from registration to first trade around learning first, with engagement built up in stages.

Action Game-inspired architecture let us decompose the interface and separate it by screen type: a terminal per trading instrument, borrowing patterns from YouTube, TikTok and Spotify. The app teaches before it lets you trade.

Result Post-launch user research and analytics confirmed improvements across Activation, Retention, SUS, and Perceived Ease of Use — specific numbers are under NDA, but the direction was positive.

Situation I joined a Stealth AI Startup as Head of Design in a small, cross-functional team to build custom AI companion products.

Task The objective was to design both the B2C product (end-user companion) and the B2B platform (white-label system) with a design process built for speed.

Action I built all design processes from scratch, embedding AI into the workflow. This included content generation via custom node-based pipelines and Figma Weave, and asset generation via custom bash scripts that saved ~3 months of manual work. All competitor analysis, copywriting, mood boarding, persona/scenario creation, and hypothesis validation were AI-assisted. I also contributed to frontend development for the MVP.

Result Shipped the MVP with direct frontend contributions. The B2C companion reached 1M+ total traffic, 100K+ MAU and 40K+ DAU; the B2B white-label platform shipped to partners. Automated asset generation — ~3 months of manual design and engineering effort saved.

• Git-backed Truth: The entire project state (roles, process, history, budget) is in the repo. Clone the repo, and the whole project comes with it.
• Granular Cost Tracking: Costs are tracked per task, role, and release, exposing what was spent on work that produced nothing.
• Resilient Execution: A run that dies resumes from its state inventory instead of restarting. Applied work is never redone.
• Earned Autonomy: Trust and autonomy move based on evidence in run records. Agents never loosen their own gates.
• Honest Enforcement: every gate names what holds it — validator, hook, git host, or prose-only, listed by name. The rules that mattered were measured from 0/5 as prose to hard refusals as hooks.
• One Repo, Every Runtime: installs as a plugin into Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and more — the project travels with its repository, not with a tool.

Situation The brand update had long been planned, but it was postponed due to the lack of a suitable moment.

Task A sudden opportunity arose to promote the brand at Wimbledon.

Action We ran the brand update in one day, in hackathon mode.

Result The promo ran at Wimbledon with the new identity. Client feedback was positive, and brand perception, awareness, trust, social engagement and share of voice all moved up.

• Computed Output: Low-level building blocks rather than a fixed high-level scheme — you set the model, the tokens follow.
• Multi-Agent AI: A built-in AI chat with dedicated personas handles audits, proposals, and hands-on theme editing.
• Full Token Coverage: Computes every token in the model across light/dark modes, conditions and interaction states, including inverse tokens.
• Built-in Accessibility: Contrast ratios are part of the model, and vision filters simulate how the system appears to users with color vision deficiencies.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

In one day we built an admin panel for events — naming-convention rules, event type creation, parameter management — and an internal Figma plugin for annotating layouts with analytical events, wired straight into the admin panel.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

Situation The company was hesitant to touch the brand at all, in case an update did more harm than good.

Task To assess and mitigate risks associated with brand repositioning, with the target metrics named up front: internal brand alignment score, revision rate, approval rate, brand perception alignment, and message cohesion score.

Action Given tight timelines, I cut the process down to interviews: dozens of them, with stakeholders, employees and clients in different countries, to get a current read on the audience, their values and their needs.

Result A refreshed brand positioning that moved the metrics named above, one strategic direction for everyone to work from, and a knowledge base that is still maintained.

Challenge Give the new IQ Option brand a 3D illustration language competitors could not cheaply copy — neither by hand nor by buying something close on Shutterstock — while keeping it identifiable as IQ Option at a glance. The two halves pull against each other: the more conventional the metaphor, the more likely something near it is already for sale.

Action Built the visual principles and a set of candidate illustrations around unconventional metaphors, then let testing pick between them rather than taste: association tests, A/B testing against competitors, emotional response testing and visual benchmarking.

Result An illustration pack that held both halves of the brief — tested for copyability and for brand identification, and shipped as the language of the new brand.

• Closed-Loop Conveyor: A dedicated conductor runs every stage — discovery, design, parallel review gates, shipping, measuring — instead of stopping at a merge.
• Cost & Governance: Every release writes an itemised cost ledger — tokens, time and list-price dollars, per agent and per feature — from the platform's own counters, so "what did this cost" has an answer instead of a feeling. A declared budget shapes what gets proposed, not just what gets refused — and spending is one of four kinds that always route to you for a yes, however long the track record.
• Long-term Resilience: Session-limit recovery, health checks across the whole conveyor, and git-backed plugin & skill upgrades.
• Honest by Construction: Every rule states what actually enforces it — a request, a validator, branch protection, the platform, or prose-only, which means nothing does — and the prose-only rules are listed by name. Behaviour is measured against stratified scenarios, each release publishes its run record including what failed, and a coverage map says which scenarios are unmeasured rather than implying all of them pass.
• Autonomous Staffing: A built-in role-builder researches crafts, drafts skills, and hires specialized agents (or invites human teammates) to grow the team.

Challenge The platform had shown its global reach with the same flat world map for years. Replacing it meant something that still read as the brand at a glance, and was expensive enough to reproduce that a competitor would not bother.

Result An interactive 3D globe built in Three.js, embedded in the product and running on the website.

The neobank's identity was done with very low quality, so when updating the application and brand, we concluded that everything needed to be put in order.

Acqalma is the first food delivery service in Azerbaijan.

Bughunter is the other side of it, where testers pick up assignments and file reports.

Challenge We needed a new mobile application for testers to receive assignments and submit bug reports, under a time-to-market constraint.

Action The design process included market analysis, user research, and behavioral metrics analysis, weighed against time-to-market.

Result Prototype testing measured a 92% task completion rate, an error rate of 0.3 per task, and a SUS score of 77.

Happy Mama is a social network for mothers and expecting women across the CIS — the community app of the pair, with Be Mom as the tracker beside it.

This is a product by Baby.ru — winner of the "Runet Prize–2015" in the "Health. Medicine. Recreation" category, recipient of the "Award for increasing the attractiveness of motherhood and contribution to the demographic situation in the country" award.

The full product design cycle, researched with the network's own users at every step — from the app icon to the flows people actually walk. A community product is judged by whether its members recognise themselves in it, so the research was the work rather than a stage of it.

Acqalma is the first food delivery service in Azerbaijan.

The project was completed within 24 hours, and the instrument launched on the trading platform.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

The design process included market analysis, user research, customer development, and behavioral analytics, weighed against time-to-market.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

The design process included market analysis, user research, customer development, and behavioral analytics, weighed against time-to-market.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

Bughunter is the other side of it, where testers pick up assignments and file reports.

The two logos share their geometry: a shield and mascots built on the same proportions.

Be Mom is a mobile app that helps women track a pregnancy and prepare for childbirth. It exists as a companion to Happy Mama, for the women who wanted the tracker without the social network around it.

This is a product by Baby.ru — winner of the "Runet Prize–2015" in the "Health. Medicine. Recreation" category, recipient of the "Award for increasing the attractiveness of motherhood and contribution to the demographic situation in the country" award.

We ran research with the social network users, from app icons to user flows.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

The design process included market analysis, user research, customer development, and behavioral analytics, weighed against time-to-market.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

Designed based on user feedback and usage analytics, balanced with time-to-market requirements.

Bughunter is the other side of it, where testers pick up assignments and file reports.

The design process included market analysis, user research, customer development, and behavioral analytics, weighed against time-to-market.

Market analysis, user research, customer development and behavioral analytics — all of it cut to fit the time-to-market window.

Numbers frames and pages so a spec or a deck keeps its order — and keeps it after something is inserted in the middle, which is when hand-numbering falls apart.

10.8k people use it — the most-used of my Figma plugins. It also works in Figma Slides.

People do not remember film titles. They remember a red-haired girl. Research pointed the same way every time, so the search was rebuilt around the query people actually type — a description instead of a name — rather than around the one the index prefers.

Values that already exist in a stylesheet get retyped by hand on the design side. FromCSS reads the CSS and applies it as Figma styles, so the two sides start from the same numbers instead of converging on them. Useful too for shadows built in generators like neumorphism.io or brumm.af/shadows, which produce CSS and nothing else.

8.9k people use the Figma plugin, including teams at SimilarWeb and Podhero.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

Bughunter is the other side of it, where testers pick up assignments and file reports. Two products, one illustration language — drawn so a tester and a product owner recognise the same brand from opposite sides of the marketplace.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

The design process included market analysis, user research, customer development, and behavioral analytics, weighed against time-to-market.

Bughunter is the other side of it, where testers pick up assignments and file reports. Filing a bug meant leaving the site under test, finding the report form and describing from memory what had just happened. The extension moves the form to where the bug is: report from any page, without losing the context you were in.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

The color system was developed taking into account accessibility standards and so that switching modes (dark/light) preserved every priority on the page, as well as color naming. Inside Figma, this was implemented through swap on the shared architecture.

This work moved product metrics including: Time to Value, NPS, CSAT, Brand Consistency, Team Efficiency, Design to Development Handoff Time, Technical Debt, and Test Automation Coverage.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

This work moved product metrics including: Time to Value, NPS, CSAT, Brand Consistency, Team Efficiency, Design to Development Handoff Time, Technical Debt, and Test Automation Coverage.

Buglance sells testing on demand: product owners hire testers to check their product.

This work moved product metrics including: Time to Value, NPS, CSAT, Brand Consistency, Team Efficiency, Design to Development Handoff Time, Technical Debt, and Test Automation Coverage.

HSL treats lightness as arithmetic rather than as something the eye agrees with: two colours on the same L can look nothing alike in brightness, which is why palettes built in HSL need hand-correcting. HSLuv is the perceptually even alternative, and this plugin brings it into Figma.

3.9k people use it.

Leonardo generates colour themes from contrast ratios rather than from picked values. Getting one into Figma meant copying colours across one at a time; this plugin imports the theme whole.

3.2k people use the Figma plugin, including teams at TripAdvisor and Harvard University.

My version of the Leonardo Color tool, built for the parts I kept working around: lightness stops on a bezier curve instead of even steps, templates to start from, HEX import, and share links that survive being shared.

Preview typography behavior in the interface, export CSS, and share settings via a link — one source for design and development, fallbacks included. Fluid type systems scale without jumps, keeping type legible at every viewport.

7.1k people use the Figma plugin.

A grid tool for design systems: design grid behavior in the interface, export to CSS & Figma, and share settings via a link. It supports fluid-sized grids that hold their behaviour at any viewport.

6.4k people use the Figma plugin, including Hiroco and Javan Digital Agency.

Preview how a numeric system behaves in the interface, export CSS, and share settings via a link — one source for design and development.

Fluid size systems scale without jumps, keeping numbers legible and predictable at any viewport.

878 people use the Figma plugin.

Acqalma is the first food delivery service in Azerbaijan.

No medals - honorary headwear and certificates instead. No hearts - khinkali on a decorated plate instead.

Activity at general meetings increased more than 4 times, the number of enabled cameras more than doubled, and people started competing for khinkali.

A matrix of individual skills within the design team, used for career planning and identifying growth areas.

The first designers' meetup at Quadcode wasn't a coincidence. After joining the company, we conducted surveys to understand how other product development team members and stakeholders perceived designers, their processes, and responsibilities.

As a result, we established a recurring event. The design team awarded participants with medals - real coconuts on strings - for the best questions.

I went through approaches to typography systems and their trade-offs. We worked through examples and the parts that are hard to get right.

I talked about examples of design language from brands and from whole countries. We discussed the main features of design language and how to apply them in practice.

Explained the advantages and disadvantages of SVG animation, filters that few people know about and which have poor support in tools like Figma, as well as Keyshape app.

I talked about standard approaches in development and design, and also how to apply them in Figma.

Story points are estimated for the work and then paid for everything around it — an unfamiliar area, a dependency, someone who is only half on the task. The calculator takes those factors as explicit inputs instead of leaving them in somebody's head.

The problem was that employees didn't see value in time tracking and considered it bureaucracy.

When logging time, employees are prompted to say why they spent their time that way.

Extraweb is one of the first digital agencies in Azerbaijan.

Jobok is a job search app for finding work in your area.

Built a framework for Framer Studio (this was long before Framer's pivots) — the largest prototype made with that product, with a database and state management.

• Regulated flows designed end to end: uranium trading and national voting — domains where every state transition answers to law, and the interface has to make the legal state legible.
• A PoC validation framework that turned hypotheses into demonstrable concepts in days, which is what a partnership conversation actually needs.
• Design systems, brand identities and a crypto wallet delivered as the platform's own product surface.
• Partnerships supported: Visa, Maersk and Bentley — the three names the platform was measured by.

• Express24 MVP in 4 months — a stalled initiative restarted and shipped; ~30% of daily retail transactions moved from branches to digital channels.
• 150+ corporate clients onboarded to manage employee salary projects themselves, through the RBAC module built for it.
• Teller transaction time down ~40% — a custom browser extension for receipt printing, found by watching the branch floor rather than reading process docs.
• ExpressPay opened a new revenue line; 0 critical data breaches.
• Five pillars unified: Expressbank, ExpressPay, Express24, ExpressClub and Expresso cards — one product design language and one brand architecture.