# Alex Zhovnir

**Senior / Lead Product Designer & Design Engineer**

Salerno, Italy

+380 (63) 625 20 74 | [alex@zhovnir.com](mailto:alex@zhovnir.com) | [alex.zhovnir.com](https://alex.zhovnir.com)

## Summary

Product designer, design engineer, and team lead with 15+ years of experience across B2B SaaS, fintech, mobile apps, e-commerce, and self-service products. Strong background in product discovery (JTBD, Design Thinking), UX strategy, interaction design, tokenized design systems, and conversion rate optimization (CRO). Led cross-functional design work for web, iOS, and Android products, and managed hiring, mentoring, and AI-accelerated design processes for growing teams.

## Core Strengths

- Product discovery, JTBD, and UX strategy
- User research, interviews, personas, journey mapping
- Information architecture, wireframing, interactive prototyping
- Usability testing and evidence-based iteration
- Multi-brand design systems, UI kits, W3C design tokens
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO), analytics, and experimentation
- Cross-platform product design for web, iOS, and Android
- Production design engineering (HTML/CSS/JS, React, WebGL shaders)
- Team leadership, hiring, coaching, and stakeholder facilitation
- AI-Driven Design Ops 2.0 (3-5x prototyping velocity)

## Experience

### SaldoApps - Design Team Lead
Los Angeles, USA | Dec 2022 - Jan 2025

- Led design consistency across a suite of SMB products on web, iOS, and Android.
- Built a token-based design system from scratch and aligned it with product and engineering workflows.
- Redesigned the invoice creation experience and other core flows with a focus on clarity, speed, and conversion.
- Facilitated design decision sessions and introduced team processes, career development plans, regular 1:1s, and hiring support.

### upSWOT - Design Team Lead
Charlotte, USA | Mar 2021 - Dec 2022

- Led discovery and product design for a fintech platform working with major U.S. banks.
- Ran competitor research, customer interviews, personas, journey mapping, information architecture, and usability testing.
- Created a token-based design system and redesigned the administration panel.
- Designed a B2C marketing website and managed client-specific styling across products.
- Designed a credit score improvement feature that received a U.S. patent.

### Auther.ai - Product Designer / Team Lead
Kyiv, Ukraine | Nov 2019 - Mar 2021

- Owned end-to-end product design for a face recognition SaaS product.
- Created personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and tested critical user flows.
- Built the UI kit in Figma from scratch and improved design consistency across the product.
- Designed and launched a new marketing website in Webflow.

### SmartExpert - Product Designer
Kyiv, Ukraine | Dec 2018 - Aug 2019

- Redesigned the company's learning management system from scratch.
- Developed personas, customer journeys, information architecture, wireframes, and prototypes.
- Ran usability testing and created a reusable UI kit for the product team.

### Uvoteam - Product Designer / Team Lead / Product Owner
Limassol, Cyprus | Sep 2016 - Sep 2018

- Led UX/UI design for conversion-focused web and mobile experiences.
- Owned research, information architecture, wireframes, interactive prototypes, usability testing, and experimentation.
- Improved product and marketing flows in close partnership with stakeholders.
- Took on Product Owner responsibilities during the final year and coordinated a 10-person team.

## Earlier Experience

**NT.Payments, Unicheck, BODO Ukraine, ITOGO, Globalware**

Product Designer / UX/UI Designer | 2010 - 2016

Worked on payment terminals, plagiarism detection, e-commerce, retail POS interfaces, self-service systems, and antivirus products. Focus areas included interaction design, prototyping, usability testing, CRO, and visual design for both digital products and marketing surfaces.

## Tools & Tech Stack

Figma, Tokens Studio, FigJam, Miro, Webflow, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro, Jira, Google Analytics, Hotjar. HTML5, CSS3/SASS, JavaScript, React, Three.js GLSL, TailwindCSS, Cursor, Copilot, v0, Gemini API.

## Education

**Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute**

Specialist degree in Computer Engineering