About Ilia Kovalev

Gold Apple is one of the biggest beauty retailers in its region, and I led the design of its loyalty program. It taught me how much emotion a loyalty program can hold. My team and I rebuilt it from scratch and turned it into something people enjoyed coming back to, not just a discount card.

Every new piece had to fit a fast-growing ecosystem without breaking it. I spent as much time aligning product, engineering, and business as I did designing. Taking the product to the Gulf and China showed me how differently people shop, gift, and read a screen.

Avito is one of the world's largest classifieds platforms, best known for used goods. I worked on a hard question: how do you make a flea market feel trustworthy enough to buy something new? It was one of Avito's key growth bets, a new direction inside a mature platform.

My role was to balance how people behaved, what the business wanted, and what operations could support. I helped build a dedicated space for new items from verified sellers and gave it a look of its own. I also designed tools that helped sellers price their items fairly.

VK was my first time building a team from the ground up. I brought designers from different disciplines together around several large media platforms and set the standards we worked by.

We made content easier to discover and simplified the tools editors used every day. We also brought generative AI into editorial and ad production as a practical tool rather than a gimmick. That meant aligning creative, legal, and business teams around something none of them had done before.

After the promotion, my job shifted from designing screens to creating the conditions for good design. I mentored designers, set clearer processes and quality standards, and worked more closely with product and engineering leads. I also led accessibility, making products usable for people who are often left out. Over time, design became a stronger voice in how the business made decisions.

At MTS, a large telecom, I designed a task manager for freelancers and small businesses. It started as a rough first version, and I took it to a full product, from the brand to every screen of the app and website. The goal was never to add features. It was to make their daily work feel manageable. That's where I learned how much logic can hide behind a simple interface.