Product designer and AI builder · New York

Serhii Borovykov

Product designer and AI builder · New York

Over the past twelve years I’ve founded a GPS tracking startup and led design, then product, at Smartcat, where I redesigned the platform around AI agents. Now I head design at Starbridge, where I design in code and build the tools: a prototype environment that replaced Figma for the design team, customer intelligence pipelines that read every call and email overnight, and an in-house content factory for marketing. Before my product career, eight years of timing car rallies taught me to stay calm under intense pressure and gave me my love of making things other people consider impossible.

$1M to $20M Starbridge’s ARR while I’ve led design

$0.5M to $15M Smartcat’s ARR while I led product and design

4x faster A full design cycle

Experience

Head of Design | AI Builder · Starbridge · New York · Oct 2025 – Present

An AI platform that helps companies win government and education contracts.

Starbridge’s ARR has grown from $1M to $20M while I’ve led design.
Within three months, redesigned and shipped the core of the product and created Starbridge’s first design system. Then simplified search setup, and the share of users who set up their own searches rose from 2% to 50%. Core product redesign and Starbridge’s first design system
Moved design into code by building a prototype environment with Claude Code. Design specs are written automatically from the prototype and drive automated UI tests, so the UI ships pixel-perfect with zero handoff errors, which was impossible before, and designing a feature is 4x faster. Prototype environment
Moved the 210-page marketing website off Webflow and rebuilt it with Claude Code in five days. In its first six weeks, marketing shipped 86 releases straight from Slack, with no tickets. Marketing website, run from Slack
Built customer intelligence pipelines that read every call and email overnight, delivering 20,000+ signals across 776 accounts and surfacing 1,300+ actionable problems for the roadmap. Customer intelligence pipelines
Built an in-house content factory for marketing, on a unified design system for every surface (website, slides, social posts), with an asset library of 1,136 assets and product graphics and animations generated from the product. Asset library and the marketing design system

Director of Product and Head of Design · Smartcat · Boston · Apr 2021 – Oct 2025

An AI translation platform for enterprises.

Smartcat’s ARR grew from $0.5M to $15M while I led product and design.
Designed and implemented a product-led growth funnel: activation rose from 7% to 85%, task completion from 55% to 98%, and self-subscription from 0% to 5%. Unified eleven separate use cases into one product. Eleven separate use cases became one product
In response to the rise of AI translation, redesigned the platform around AI agents and architected the file-based system they run on, adopted by 89% of clients (1,200 companies, including half of the Fortune 500). AI agents do the work, people check it
Owned the marketplace product connecting customers and translation agencies with 500,000 freelance linguists: job matching, ratings, invoicing and payouts worldwide.
As director of product, led 30 engineers and designers in five product teams. Built and ran a design team of seven, hiring and mentoring designers to help them grow, and empowering them to own their work with full accountability. Team, principles and philosophy

Founder · Uboro · Kyiv · 2014 – 2021

GPS fleet tracking.

Took rally tracking technology to the commercial fleet market, raised a $200k angel round, and scaled to 70,000 tracked objects. Rally to fleet tracking
Designed every product and built the web front end (HTML/CSS).
Uboro’s app carried a study of driver behavior among 4,000 cab drivers in Cairo, run with the University of Illinois and Uber.

Writing

Three weeks instead of three months (2026). The first of four parts on how I moved my design work from Figma into code.
Everyone agrees, nobody’s aligned (2026). Name things and draw how they connect before anyone designs a screen.
What a product launch looks like in an AI-pilled marketing org (2026). Marketing’s own website, a design system agents can use, and product graphics from the prototype.
Why I’ll never buy SaaS again (2025). How I turned customer calls into product insights: tested by hand on 400 calls, tried a dozen tools, then built our own pipeline.

Skills

Product Design & Product Management: Complex B2B SaaS, marketplace platforms, AI-driven products, and 0-to-1 products
Design Systems & Prototyping: Building in code, rapid prototyping, workflow automation, and zero handoff processes
AI Workflows: AI-powered workflows for design, product, and marketing teams; AI agent workflows; leveraging Claude Code, Claude skills, MCP servers, and automation tools
Growth & Delivery: Product-led growth (PLG) and product-led sales (PLS), funnel optimization, scaling teams, driving ARR, resolving bottlenecks, and launching new business lines
Leadership: Team hiring and mentorship, cross-functional leadership, stakeholder alignment, building processes that empower teams, remote team management, and change management
User Research & Data: Data-driven decision-making, user research, and translating insights into product improvements
Technical Tools: Figma, HTML/CSS/JS, Claude Code, Storybook, GitHub, n8n, Linear, Notion, Slack, Mixpanel, FullStory

Education and languages

Education: Master’s in Computer Science (research in computer networks) · Dnipro National University of Railway Transport, Dnipro, Ukraine · 2004 – 2007
Languages: English, Ukrainian, Russian
Beyond work: Swimming (world and European championships), squash (Pan American Masters Games), golf (handicap 15), pickleball (World Tour Series winner), gardening, and competitive Polytopia.