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About
Hello, I am Olga, a Lead Product Designer with the strong UX focus and more than 18 years of experience, based in London. I've worked on the projects requiring end-to-end design support from 0 to launch, as well as developing new features for existing products and migrating products to new technologies.
My experience as a designer commenced back in 2007 when I started my second degree in graphic and web design and joined an agency to learn the skills. Since then I’ve been working with the small start ups as well as top class world-renowned brands such as big corporations Shell, Vanguard, FT, Google, Shazam. I love combining qualitative research with data driven insights to achieve success in solving design and business problems. Best environment for me is Agile with integrated lean UX practice. I believe that user-centred design techniques bring massive value to the businesses and I am a strong evangelist of applying them.
Olga is known for her creative, organisational and problem-solving skills. She is recognised by getting things done and finding win-win solutions for users, business and environment. Olga is concerned about health and well-being of herself, humanity, animal, plants and the planet we live on. -
CPD training Recently I've been learning about artificial intelligence, various types of models and "behind the scenes" insights with IBM.
I also completed 5 modules with the Nielsen Norman Group to deepen my expertise in UX management, service design and producing UX roadmaps.
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Design process Even though there are frameworks for best practices in design such as user-centred design from the Nielsen Norman Group and "Double diamond" from the Design Council, each project has its own unique set up and challenges. And so it's difficult to follow the process prescribed by the book, while the product manager and engineering team is under pressure to deliver a feature to production.
My design process is based on the "Double diamond" framework, where for big features with a lot of unknowns I start by asking the business what is the problem statement definition from them, looking at existing research (internal or external) and going wide in analysing the context of the problem. By the end of this phase it might turn out that the problem definion given by the business in inaccurate or the problem the team actually needs to solve is different. With all stakeholders involved we need to agree on the problem. Then we've got the second diamond where once we know what we're solving, I can run sketching sessions, collaborative workshops, run additional research activities if I need to, create prototype variations, that is going into the divergent phase again. Through research and A/B testing we're going to find out which solutions work better than others, and it's going to bring the team to the final point - an effective solution that could be shipped to production.
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Mentoring
I've mentored and supported 50+ designers of various levels of seniority inside and outside my teams and inspired a few to change their careers and move to a Product design role.
Read an interview with my colleague at the FT
Future Leaders: Jonathon Milnes, Product Designer
Public speaking
I am practising to be a good public speaker and so far I did a 10-minute lightning talk at the ‘UX in the City’ conference in Manchester in 2018 and 1 hour hands-on workshop at the ‘Agile in the City’ conference in London in 2019. At ‘Agile in the City’ I met in person Jeff Gothelf who wrote amazing books ‘Lean UX’ (that is a Bible for UXers these days) and ‘Sense & Respond’ which I highly recommend to read. 
Olga and Jeff Gothelf, the co-author of "Lean UX" and "Sense & Respond"