Slava
Sakhnenko
Design
Directing
Hi! Ola! Привіт! I’m Slava, a passionate, user-obsessed product designer and design leader
Life
The journey
Kiev → Bronx → Toronto → Sao Paulo → Paraty, Brazil
Museio.org
Starting and running an open-source art history repository / app
Half-light Empires
Been writing my epic fantasy/sci-fi novel for the past four years
Dom Jardin
Currently working with architects, artisans and builders on a modern beach house in Paraty
Born in soviet Ukraine, I grew up in Kiev, living through Chernobyl and the fall of Soviet Union, when our family left the country.
I finished my middle school in Bronx and high-school in Toronto, where I went to UofT to get a degree in Computer Science, specializing in Human-Computer Interaction.
After cofounding a startup that got M&A’ed out of existence, I started a boutique, remote design agency which allowed me to spend more time in Brazil and escape the rough Canadian winters.
After 10 years living between Toronto & Sao Paulo, the pandemic hit, and the cities shut down. Using the downtime I started visiting a small costal town of Paraty in Rio de Janeiro, to have some fresh air and work on writing my sci-fi novel (“Half-light Empires”).
Cut to three years later, and now I’m living and working from Paraty and building a house for me and my family by the beach.
Work
Design director
Built a powerhouse design team at Mynd over the course of 7 years
Remote control
Specializing in building and working in remote teams since pre-pandemic
20+ years of design
Designing since when it was still called web-mastering
Founded 2 startups
One finished in an exit, and one in a (spectacular) crash
As an entrepreneurial product designer, I treat each design problem as an opportunity to one up the competition, find better product-market fit, reduce churn, increase efficiency, grow revenue and make the daily lives of our users happier and more productive. I obsess about measuring each step in the user-flow and designing elegant solutions to automate and optimize complex workflows, with a focus on craft, accessibility and usability.
In a leadership role, I focus on building lean, efficient product design squads to get you the most design bang for design buck. I will maximize the impact of your design investment by growing & mentoring a world-class team, architecting a cross-product design system, and rallying designers, business stakeholders, product, data, and engineering teams around a common design vision.
My specialty is building and working in remote teams, with the best talent across the world.
Love art?
Museio is a Collection of Slow Art Videos & Podcasts. Next time you’re in an art gallery, pause for a moment and use Museio to discover the stories behind the world’s greatest artworks.
Let’s work together
I’m available for freelance contracts as well as full-time IC and leadership roles. Send me an email or book a 30 minute chat, and let’s talk about how we can collaborate.
Some life
