Hi. My name is Kit.
I am a human experience designer.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve been a design leader, a speaker, a writer, a product designer, an inventor, a UX-interaction-something-something designer, a consultant, a dad (twice), and a cautious optimist for this exciting tech-ridden time we all live in. I care a lot about design cultures at large scale, design ethics, and computational design.
I like finding elegant potential solutions to incredibly complex problems. I’ve been successful running product teams at financial institutions as well as consulting large federal and commercial clients to help them succeed with digital and design transformation by focusing on human experiences and value to our society.
Big problems require lots of diverse opinions, and I never solve problems alone. As a design leader, I get to be a coach, a manager, and a champion of human-centered design at my company—all at the same time. Here’s how.
My leadership approach
Coach
I love sharing the things I’ve learned about design with my team and empower everyone to reach their best potential as designers. I always try to find an individual approach to every team member and help develop their skills according to their own aspirations.
Manager
My management principles are honesty, kindness and results. I protect my team and shield them from distractions as much as possible, so they could focus on delivering the best results. I help my team find the right direction, then let them shine and do their best work.
Champion
I believe that everyone in my company is a designer. Every partner, stakeholder or client, everyone who’s making decisions impacting our work is ultimately a designer. And I do my best to educate, evangelize, and share my passion for making human lives better.
It sounds trivial, but what being a leader comes down to is caring about people—as amazing individuals, not resources—and helping them be the best version of themselves on daily basis. I try different tools for connecting with my team: regular 10:10 one-on-ones (each one of us gets 10 minutes to share candid feedback on one another), and weekly 8:7 team meetings focused on storytelling (8 minutes to tell your story, then 7 minutes to answer questions).
Here are some of the projects I’ve worked on in the leadership roles—as a team manager, or as a senior strategic adviser.
Branch Transformation Project
An omni-channel award-winning ecosystem of products and services for retail bank spaces.
One Design System and Brand
An enterprise-wide design system and a brand for its owner, the design organization as a whole.
USPS mobile app
A reimagined servicing experience for 25+ million customers of the United States Postal Service.
As a leader, I’m happily sharing my experiences with other designers and technologists. I frequently speak at design and tech conferences, and I write articles about design, management, philosophy and ethics.
While I am happy to lead others, I am accustomed to contributing myself—as a strategic consultant, or simply as a fellow designer. To me, being a human experience designer means caring deeply about people and using my skills to make their lives better, help my company grow, and develop our society as the whole. Here’s how.
My design approach
I’m a systems thinker.
My brain works in frameworks, journey maps, and complex integrated systems at large scale. I excel at navigating various zoom levels of a design project—from huge enterprise ecosystems and data streams to small UI components and design patterns. It all matters to me, and I love how those things fit together in a product or service I’m designing.
I start with “why”.
I start every design project by clearly defining a problem we’re trying to solve for the people, as well as the business objectives this project is trying to achieve. I’m also thoughtful about the design ethics, and the impact this project might have on the sustainability of our human society as a whole.
I blaze trails.
I love starting from scratch, and I love working on some big hairy problems. I don’t like to move fast and break things, but I sure love to learn fast. I prototype something quickly to get collaborative insights and validate the idea as soon as possible, then iterate on the solution.
I’ve spent five years as an independent consultant, running my own design company. It was an amazing time of my life, I’ve learned so much working for hundreds of clients from all sorts of different industries from around the globe.
I had a distributed fully remote team of designers, researchers, front-end developers, back-end engineers and product managers to tackle some really challenging problems and deliver all kinds solutions—from enterprise apps and POS systems to branding and marketing websites—on time and on budget.
You can see many more examples of those consulting projects on my Dribbble and Tumblr portfolios.
That’s my story.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out anytime, I’m always looking for new and exciting opportunities! Email me at kit.oliynyk@gmail.com or send me a message on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Kit Oliynyk 