Yury Vetrov
Community
I co-organized two of the biggest design conferences in Russia (Fintech Design Conf; earlier — Mail Design Conf / Dribbble Meetup, Russian Design Cup) with 1000 offline and 20,000 online attendees. I run the oldest design digest, publish on Smashing Magazine, UXmatters, and UX Collective
Education
I published a book on design management (20,000 copies sold; 1000+ design managers have already finished a supplementary 4-month online course). I curated Future London Academy course in London, gave lectures in British Higher School of Arts & Design, and collaborated with many educational platforms
I lead brand and product design, UX research, copywriting, and design systems teams up to 100 people. These teams served up to 400 mln users at Tochka Bank, Muse Group (Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity), Raiffeisen Bank & Mail.ru Group. I had a small UX agency earlier
Management Experience
2025–2026
Brand & product design teams
2022–2025
Brand & product design teams
2019-2022
Brand & product design teams
2011–2019
Brand & product design teams
2006–2011
UX consultancy
Management Experience in Details
Company
Achievement
Tochka Bank
I found people at Tochka Bank who care about the same problem I'm trying to solve myself — bringing brand and user interfaces closer. We worked together to ensure the brand looks, works, and feels holistic across all touchpoints. To achieve this goal, we focused on four key pillars:
Brand. My focus was on helping to grow brand awareness (so it drives CAC down) and improve consideration from new customer segments. First, my team focused on strengthening existing brand cues and adding new ones: a symbol in the logo (there was none), photo style, illustration evolution, logo system for sub-brands and products, fixing the mascot, and preparing sonic branding groundwork. Second, we laid the foundation for brand identity evolution: a bridge from brand platform to the visual territory; then, a new identity concept that evolves existing brand cues for new target brand perception. We also ensured that all visual languages for sub-brands and products are holistic.
User Interfaces. The greatest thing here was helping to found a Customer Experience Center. Its goal is to reduce customer requests through better CX, improving the bottom line. Using several pilot projects, we’ve built a new approach for designing customer journeys. These pilots have proven the approach actually reduces customer requests and saves money. Another company’s bet was about ecosystem — it should increase usage of multiple products per user and drive new business account registrations. So, we were looking for user interface hypotheses for that.
Org capability. It’s a pretty mature company with a solid design team (110 people), so you must think harder about bringing value to it. So, I focused on things that weren’t addressed before. First, we refined the org design: untangling the brand design team (the most complex in my career to date), making targeted improvements in the product design community (so it moves even faster), and making brand & product designers work closer. To help them grow professionally, I built a new skill-knowledge matrix for brand design — the team includes lots of specialized areas (e.g., physical branding, events, motion design). I was also helping to drive design system adoption and design review process refinement — it’s a critical way of keeping the quality bar high for ~70 product designers.
AI. This transformation went in two tracks. In brand design, it’s mostly for producing brand assets — Tochka Bank’s brand is about craft and human touch, so you must be careful with AI generation. It included complex node-based pipelines for photos, a presentation generator, as well as explorations for banners, social media, and landing pages. In product design, it was about rethinking the discovery process: design system adaptation, prototyping environment, co-design process, and SLAs for what is “fast”. Overall, it’s an exciting moment, but it brings lots of tensions between designers and product owners. So, we were refining this new way of working together, and I closely interacted with product teams to make it work.
Muse Group (Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, etc.)
My work & hobby came together in a mission to build an emotional brand that looks, works, and feels in a holistic way. So 400 mln amateur musicians can play to enjoy. To achieve this goal, we focused on three key pillars:
Brand. My team created a new brand identity together with Collins (one of the best branding agencies in the world) to reach key goals: it’s distinctive, holistic across all touchpoints, and expresses an “Inspire the artist. Unleash their sound” brand role. It’s rolled out to most communications and partially rolled out in products (see a video snapshot with some highlights). Foundational work included brand platform definition, emotional layer in journey maps, brand health tracking, tone of voice guidelines and improvements, and audio branding framework. Another important piece of this puzzle was about increasing design system adoption in two flagship products: MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar. Aside from business outcomes, we won Bronze at the oldest design award ADC Awards for this project.
User Interfaces. I was focused on improving user engagement via removing friction and fixing the biggest NPS problems, starting with flagship products in terms of user base and revenue — MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar. Together with revenue and growth teams we reduced friction and dark patterns, as it affected brand perception and user retention. A major part of this area was supporting product teams with UX research at all stages from discovery to delivery. It raised the bar of everything we ship to users; increased chances for user adoption of more complex features; and saved resources by discarding some of the hypotheses that wouldn't work. Foundational work included user needs research and journey mapping, transactional NPS measurement, friction log analysis, and research repository governance.
Org capability. I helped to build a new org structure for design (product, revenue, growth, comms, design system), research, and copywriting. It became a combined team/community with a shared goal to build that emotional brand. Some of these were scaled from “lonely heroes” to proper sub-teams (UX research and copywriting) that work closely with product teams; others were strengthened (product design, design system), reformed (creative team), or built from scratch (localization). Muse was always working in a startup mode, so the team size was about 30 people, but they were all top-notch professionals. Numerous methods & processes were introduced (e.g., professional development with skill-knowledge matrix, friction logs, design hackathons) or improved (e.g., design crits).
Raiffeisen Bank
My ambitious goal was to push the brand forward and align its digital and physical presence in a holistic way: from branches to mobile apps, from TV ads to landing pages and SMSes. We believe that a great brand is how it looks, works, and feels. To achieve this goal, we focused on three key pillars:
Brand. My team created a new brand identity with Design Studio (one of the best branding agencies in the world) & LINII Group to reach key goals: it’s distinctive, holistic across all touchpoints, and expresses a “stress-free” brand role. In addition to guidelines, we made an illustration constructor, a Cyrillic version of the typeface & a massive icon pack that fits it, logo refresh, 3D/motion design language, and numerous guidelines. We also tweaked the brand platform and started systematic work on non-visual layers: voice & tone and audio. The rollout started from branches & offices, ATMs, and newsletters.
User Interfaces. We created a system of metrics to benchmark our digital channels against competitors — it was one of my first goals. It’s branded as “Instant & Easy” to fit the business mission (the most recommended bank by 2025) & brand platform (we work in a simple, precise, and competent way to remove the stress out of finances) — we calculate completion time and the number of taps/clicks for top user needs. It was put into yearly goals for every team in the retail business unit, which resulted in an even more user-centric culture. We redesigned the key mobile app to reach this goal and started to rethink all other user interfaces in this way.
Org capability. I helped to upscale product design capability (introduce design leads to all teams & level-up hiring of designers), created UX writing capability from scratch (together with our chief editor), helped to reform UX research capability (from centralized to embedded), and grew in-house brand team (it fully relied on agencies before). I invested a lot of my time into professional development (we re-launched the skill-knowledge matrix), team processes & capabilities (so design leads are equipped with the best methods & practices), and an ambitious vision that connects all these wonderful people together (design leads cascaded overall brand & design strategy to their business segments). We made our employer brand stronger with a massive design conference (it became one of the 3 biggest in Russia) and other activities. The team size is ~50 product designers, ~10 UX writers, ~10 UX researchers (they report to another manager), and ~5 brand designers. Product designers and UX writers are embedded into 5 business segments (retail, investments, SME, corporate, and internal services), the brand team is centralized, while UX researchers have a mixed approach.
Mail.ru Group
My team shipped 275 major product updates and launches in 8 years. Here's what we changed in design capabilities at Mail.ru Group:
The team. We gathered 30 great or promising designers who work in 5 teams: Email & Cloud, B2B, Media, Search & Browser, and Brand. It would be impossible to do any solid product work and ship it without that basic capability. We have good employee retention and professional growth.
Product updates All 25 products in our business unit were updated at least once, some of them went through several update cycles. Designers became better integrated into product teams; they became proactive and brought more measurable value to the company. We gradually migrated from a centralized approach to embedded, closer to the product — it was a hard way and I was wary sometimes, but it's inevitable.
Brand refresh. Product updates improve brand image, but you should update the brand itself too. Last year, we rebranded the Mail.ru product brand and Mail.ru Group corporate brand. It's the next step to managing the brand image.
Design culture change. It's important to show the value of good design to every product manager, engineer, QA engineer, and marketer. All team members should understand it to bring design quality to the next level. What helped us? Product updates, co-design, evangelism, and teaching non-designers the basics of good design.
Modern design process and tools. It could be a long read with the list of enhancements and implementations to launch better products faster. We always fought major challenges, being early adopters of many design management methods: product designers instead of separate interaction and visual designers back in 2011-2012, component-based design system at the end of 2012, skill-knowledge matrix as a tool in 2016-2017, an in-house brand studio in 2017 (a rising trend), etc. We launched a systematic approach to implement new methods in 2017.
Employer brand. It was painful to hire good designers when we started. The best way to fight the legacy is to update products, but it's a slow process. That's why we tried to highlight strong professionals on the team. Our activities in the professional community helped here: conferences, meetups, competitions, etc. The outcome was stunning with a nice side effect — it helped to improve the local industry and community. Accidentally, our product design conference became one of the largest in Russia (1000 attendees, 20,000 online viewers).
UI Modeling Company
I co-founded and led a small UX consultancy (5 people) with my parent company, Artics Internet Solutions. I did a full spectrum of work here: business development, sales and marketing, project and team management, and UX fieldwork. We made projects for some of the biggest Russian companies, including Megafon, Audi, Yandex, and many banks and media outlets.
EPAM Systems
The biggest outsourcing company in Eastern Europe. I did UX fieldwork on international projects with clients like British Telecom, London Stock Exchange, Blue Cross Blue Shield, SAP, etc.
Earlier Experience
UX and front-end fieldwork at Red Graphic Systems (one of the best Belarusian design studios); design and front-end at iGorod (a small design consultancy I co-founded with my university friend); freelance projects as a one-man orchestra: graphic design for websites, front-end coding, and PHP programming.
Design Management Patterns Project Timeline
Year
Achievement
2026
I launched my own learning platform. This is the foundation for the new generation of the course and the book.
2025
16,000 books printed. This is 1.5 times more than my initial expectations. 7 additional print runs were made on demand with some tweaks and bug fixes. I've never seen such a buzz around a quite niche, highly specialized book. But hey, I'm not complaining :)
2024
9000 books printed. Exact sales numbers are lagging. However, the publishing house makes additional print runs of 2000–3000 copies on demand. Thus, the real sales number is not that far.
2023
Preparing for print and, by the end of the year, finally starting pre-sales. Right before the holidays, so some people got it as a New Year's present. The first trial print run (1000 copies) was sold in 3 weeks.
2022
Moving to InDesign and making endless updates to have an organic result: text, illustrations, approvals to use images from other authors, website updates to add link index, etc. I would give up if not for Vlad Golovach's help.
2021
Editing corrections for the book draft, drawing and translating a couple of hundred diagrams, re-recording the online course in Russian, and starting an online workshop for Smashing Magazine in English. It was a hardcore — 10,000 minor and major corrections in the first round of editing corrections with Alpina publisher, leading to more iterations like that.
2020
In Spring I spent 3 months sorting my endless notes for 7 years and updated the chapter structure. I started this series in Mail.ru Group, several years after I joined the company; when I moved to Raiffeisen Bank, I looked at the framework with fresh eyes, as a new person in a company — it enriched the material. 75% ready.
In Summer I finished the final draft of the book. True hardcore stuff. 96% ready.
In Autumn I worked with illustrations and proofreading. It led to being 100% ready.
2019
An online course. Pattern description format was shaped up, homework templates were added, the framework itself took off. 70% ready.
2017
A book draft based on the article series — I set up a new structure around patterns. 30% ready.
2013-2017
Series of articles about UX Strategy for UXmatters. The idea of a maturity model and a framework around it is born.
Newsletter
Updates about the book & the course
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