From sole designer to Head of Design — building a team and the product

A B2B/B2C document flow platform: create, sign, send. 100,000+ monthly active users.

Company

Documentolog

Role

Product Designer → Head of Design

Timeline

Dec 2020 – Aug 2023 · 2.5 years

Scope

UX · UI · Design System · Leadership

TL;DR

The whole case in 30 seconds

The problem

A 120-person company with no design function — and a core flow quietly breaking: documents sent dropped 24% in six months, sending success fell 32%.

What I did

Joined as the first designer ever. Built the design practice, system, and research culture from zero, redesigned the core flows — then made the case for a team, hired it, mentored it, and became Head of Design.

The outcome

+27% product sales after the UX redesign, +14% documents sent, a 1→5 design team — and Employee of the Year, voted by both peers and management.

Want to dive in? ↓

Context

"I joined as a Product Designer — the first and only designer in a 120-person company. Two years later, I was running the department."

Documentolog is a B2B/B2C document exchange platform with 100K+ monthly active users. When I joined, there was no design function, no design system, and no culture of user research. I started as an individual contributor doing everything myself — and over 2.5 years built all of it.

When I arrived the company sold one product. By the time I left it sold three, plus the site that had to explain them. I was the design function for all of it.

The brief

One designer, four products, all at once

By 2021 the platform carried the whole company — on a dated design. DocuLite’s MVP, the site’s homepage and the first UI kit were all in flight at the same time; CV Hub joined them at the end of 2022. Nothing ran in sequence — four products were being designed and rebuilt in parallel, by one person. That arithmetic is what I took to management to argue for a design department. I got it.

What I designed

Four products, one system

DOCUMENTOLOG PLATFORM

The original product. Enterprise document flow — create, sign, send. Its sending flow is the deep dive below.

DOCULITE

Designed from zero. A stripped-down, self-serve version of the platform — the DocuSign-shaped product the company was missing.

CV HUB

Designed from zero. A job-search vertical whose real edge was signing the contract on the spot — wired straight into DocuLite and the platform.

DOCUMENTOLOG.COM

Rebuilt so a visitor could tell what the company actually sold. The old site cost leads by leaving that unclear.

The problem

Document sending was quietly breaking

Support tickets flagged document sending as the third most common issue. Digging into the data revealed the scale of the problem:

24%

Drop in documents sent over 6 months

32%

Decline in sending success rate

⅓

Of users getting stuck in the sending flow

Research

Users couldn't find the most basic action

Stakeholder interviews, user surveys, usability testing, and competitive analysis all pointed to the same root cause: the UI buried key actions and gave users no clear path forward.

7 / 12

Surveyed clients couldn't identify how to send documents via SMS or email — the product's core action

78%

Of test users completed sending tasks 40% faster with the redesigned interface vs. the original

Direction shift

Before → After

BEFORE

✗

Fragmented sending options

SMS, email, link, and directory contacts scattered across different parts of the UI.

✗

No document history

Users had no visibility into who received a document, when, or its current status.

✗

Misleading status indicators

Status badges looked clickable — users expected actions, found nothing.

✗

Unnecessary creation steps

The flow required steps that added friction without adding value.

AFTER

✓

Unified sending panel

All options — link, SMS, email, contacts — accessible from one place, in one step.

✓

Document history

Sender details, timestamps, and status progression visible at a glance.

✓

Clear, non-clickable statuses + action buttons

Status is status. Actions are buttons. No ambiguity.

✓

Streamlined flow

Unnecessary steps removed. Sending a document became fast and obvious.

Practice

What made it repeatable

DESIGN SYSTEM

40+ page system covering all scenarios and edge cases. Full component library, specs, tokens — used by developers daily.

UX RESEARCH

User interviews, surveys, usability testing, competitive analysis. Research became a first-class part of the process.

PROTOTYPES & TESTING

Comparative prototype testing with 30 participants validating design direction before development.

Leadership

Building the design culture from zero

After years of being the only designer, I made the case for growing the team — to a management that initially didn't believe design mattered for business. It took many discussions and presentations, but I earned the mandate: I ran the hiring process, conducted technical interviews with final say on selection, hired juniors, and mentored them into strong mid-level designers.

The investment paid off in delivery, not just design quality: with a real team, a design system, and established workflows in place, development speed on our projects roughly doubled — design stopped being the bottleneck.

"One of those designers is now a team lead. Another is a mid-level at a major fitness brand. The third took over my Head of Design position when I left."

I was voted Employee of the Year by both colleagues and management — and became part of the company's core team. The goal throughout: raise the UX maturity of the entire organization.

Recommendation

What a colleague says

Aigerim Kanafina

CHRO, Documentolog

"Alina joined my team at Documentolog in December 2020 as a Product Designer. Over the next 3.5 years, she grew into the role of Head of Design, successfully building and uniting a team around her.

Throughout her time at the company, Alina consistently demonstrated professionalism, responsibility, and attention to detail. What distinguishes her is her ability to think beyond interfaces. She takes the time to understand business goals, user needs, and product strategy. In addition to her strong product thinking, Alina has excellent design judgment and a refined aesthetic sense.

I believe Alina would be a valuable addition to any organization looking for a design leader who combines hands-on expertise and a deep understanding of product development."

LinkedIn recommendation

The design function kept running without me.

Four designers hired and mentored from scratch; one of them took the Head of Design seat when I left. The system, the specs and the research practice I introduced stayed in daily use.