Modern Skill Stack
Real stories on how digital product professionals are keeping up with a constantly changing skills landscape. Hosted by Gene Kamenez, CEO of Uxcel.
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I’ve been in rooms where a designer did more than anyone else on the project, and still walked out of the performance review empty-handed. Not because their work was weak, but because nobody knew it was theirs.
Oleksii Tkachenko has lived that exact story. He’s spent the years since figuring out how it happens and, more importantly, what to do about it.
Most recently he’s worked as a Senior Content Designer at Perk, where he focused on AI-powered assistant experiences. Before that, three years at Klarna: one of the most demanding content environments in European fintech, with complex payment products, strict regulatory constraints, and six or eight payment methods to maintain simultaneously.
He’s also an instructor at Uxcel, where he co-created the course Building Content Design Systems. Which means he spends a lot of time watching designers at all levels repeat the same mistakes he once made.
The one mistake that shows up the most? Working incredibly hard while staying almost completely invisible.
When I asked him when he first understood that a senior title doesn’t automatically come with influence, he recalled a specific performance review he had. He’d been supporting every PM on the team, fielding urgent ad hoc requests, staying across every project. Naturally, he assumed that level of effort and hard work would get him at least some recognition and praise. It didn’t. His manager’s response was something like: “Sounds good, but I didn’t see much.”
That gap between what you’re doing and what anyone actually knows you’re doing is what this conversation kept coming back to.
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You’ll learn:
Why doing more work often means less influence, and the logic gap behind it
What the “ego trap” is, and why it keeps even experienced designers from being taken seriously
What real influence actually looks like inside a product team (it’s not about title)
The one workshop Oleksii runs every time he joins a new company
A two-step playbook to start building visibility today, even if you feel like you’re starting from zero
Why AI won’t replace your judgment, and why that’s the right thing to bet on
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:54 The importance of conversational design
04:50 Difference between conversational design and chatbot flows
07:34 Career journey from software engineering to content design
12:06 Robot vs. human design experience
14:44 How to get your first job in design
19:18 Understanding the gap between title and influence
27:35 Why emotional detachment is important for your career
32:24 What real influence looks like
37:01 Visibility and communication strategies
41:43 Playbook for building influence and visibility
46:39 Navigating the AI landscape in design
53:47 Promoting yourself and finding your advocates
55:45 Outro
My biggest takeaways
You can work yourself to exhaustion and still be invisible
Oleksii didn’t arrive at this through theory. He learned it during an actual performance cycle at Klarna covering multiple PMs, jumping on ad hoc requests, staying close to every product area. He assumed the hard work would speak for itself.
It didn’t.
In Oleksii’s words:
“There is this huge gap in logic, thinking that working so much means everyone knows you’re working so much. What happened to me. I didn’t have enough time to socialize anything. I didn’t have enough time to present anything or even document anything. It was mostly me knowing I do so much and then hoping that everyone automatically knows about this. But everyone was like, oh, really? What exactly did you do? People don’t know. And you don’t need to assume they do.”
There’s a second layer to it. Because he was constantly in execution mode, he started missing planning meetings. Skip one, and the pattern locks in fast. People stop expecting you there. Slowly, he became what he calls “an executioner”: someone carrying out decisions made by others instead of shaping them. Senior in title only.
The uncomfortable truth is simple: visibility isn’t a byproduct of hard work. It’s a separate function. Treat it like one, or your output fades into the background despite how good it is.
The ego trap: designers assume their value is obvious to everyone
Why do so many capable designers end up in this position? Oleksii traces it to something he calls the “ego trap”, a deeply held assumption that designers are the heroes of every project, and that everyone else already recognizes what they bring.
He references the book “Why Design Is Hard”, which he says pins this dynamic precisely. The frustration designers feel when they’re overlooked isn’t random, but comes from a specific false premise.
In Oleksii’s words:
“We as designers very often have this strong ego trap in our mind, thinking that the designer is usually the hero. Basically the most important person who comes in and saves the project. We automatically assume that everyone understands our value. But it’s funny to assume that, because we have fewer designers in the world than product managers and other roles.”
A COO who never explained their contributions would be invisible too, regardless of their impact. Same logic applies to a senior designer.
It’d be wrong to say this is just ego. Think of it more as a structural blind spot: designers spend years in places where design’s value is assumed. Then they join organizations where it is not, and then be surprised when their work does not get recognized.
The fix isn’t to become someone who performs self-promotion constantly, but accepting that communicating your value is part of the job. Not a game of politics on top of the work. Part of the actual work.
Real influence starts before the work begins
When Oleksii strips away title and politics, his definition of real influence comes down to one question: are you in the room when the initial decision gets made?
Not the room where someone hands you a brief. The room where the brief gets written.
In Oleksii’s words:
“Number one (and it really is number one) is being involved when the initial decision is made about a project. Being part of the planning is part of your influence, because that’s where you can push through a project you’ve been thinking about, or question a project that has no real design support. The scary part is that you have to take responsibility. You have to say, “Yes, we need to do this because of this and this.” That’s where you become senior. That’s where you act as a senior.”
The second dimension is relationships across disciplines. Oleksii says he understood this too late: designers need to build genuine working relationships with PMs and engineers, not just other designers. That will help you speak in planning conversations about what’s technically feasible in a realistic timeline. That skill compounds over time and turns you into someone people consult.
The third dimension is team growth. Be the person who educates the broader organization about design. Run internal sessions. Help PMs grasp what they’re actually getting when a designer is involved. When your team’s value is understood across the org, that understanding attaches to you personally.
As Oleksii puts it: “Influence is about trust. If you have trust from a certain group of people, you have influence over whatever they’re making.”
Visibility is about business impact, not effort
Designers who know they should be more visible often still get it wrong. They show up to the all-hands, walk through every step of their process, explain how difficult the content system was to build and leave people impressed but unclear on why any of it mattered.
That’s the distinction Oleksii draws between activity-based visibility and impact-based visibility.
In Oleksii’s words:
“The right visibility is about making sure that when you present what you’ve done, you explain why you did it and what benefit it brings to the company in terms of money or how it helps other teams be more productive. When we built the email system at Klarna, one obvious benefit was consistency in how we spoke to customers. But the bigger win was for the operations team. Instead of writing new content every time Klarna launched in a new country, they could take the ready-made templates, handle any local regulatory requirements, and go. They spent less time on it. That’s what I presented: good for the business, and less work for you.”
Notice the reframe: not “here’s what I built and why it was technically demanding.” But “here’s what changed for you because this exists.”
Even if your project doesn’t have measurable outcomes yet, you still need to speak up. Don’t invent impact. Share a realistic estimate of how it will help the business or other teams. When PMs hear it framed that way, they stop thinking about your task list and start thinking: I want that person on my project.
The practical playbook: be in the room, speak the language, protect your time
Oleksii’s playbook for building visibility and influence comes down to three moves.
The first one he does at every new company without exception. He starts by running a “ways of working” workshop with his team.
In Oleksii’s words:
“The top thing I do when I join a new company is run a ‘ways of working’ workshop. We talk about how they previously worked with content design. Maybe they never did. How do they understand the role? At what stage do they think I should be included? And when they say they think I should be included somewhere after planning, I say: “Can you include me here instead? This is why, and here I can impact the product much better.” That workshop helps you actually be at the right place at the right time.”
This works because it makes the inclusion conversation explicit from day one. People aren’t leaving you out maliciously. They genuinely don’t know how or when you need to be involved. This approaches teaches them, before the pattern of exclusion has a chance to set in.
The second move is speaking in business language consistently. Not design language. Language that connects your work to outcomes other people care about delivered in formats that is familiar to them. Slack updates after releases. A standing slot at the Friday all-hands. A one-pager for the PM who prefers to get information that way. The goal is to become a regular, expected signal, not a one-off presentation.
The third move is protecting time to track your own impact. It’s the first thing that gets dropped when things get busy. If you never go back and check what your last release actually did, you have nothing concrete next time. You end up, as Oleksii puts it, “really busy but very disconnected from the product.”
Two steps to start building influence today
When I asked Oleksii what someone who feels competent but invisible should do first (not next quarter or after the next review, but today), he said: self-promotion and finding an advocate.
In Oleksii’s words on self-promotion:
“Start small. Make a Slack post about what you just released and why it matters. Sometimes even your own content design team doesn’t know what you did. So start there. Then post in the broader design channel. Then go to the design all-hands. Build outward from there. The key is making it a repeatable experience, not a one-off, so people come to expect your updates.”
And on finding your first advocate:
“The second thing is my favorite, because when I give this advice it always works. Find the people who will be your first advocates. Don’t go to work tomorrow trying to make everyone understand and respect you all at once. Start with one PM, perhaps someone who already sees some value in content design but isn’t fully sure yet. Work closely with them. Explain your value. Then communicate publicly: ‘Me and this PM did this, and here are the business outcomes.’ The more advocates like that you build (especially PMs, because they’re part of planning), the more you’ll have people saying, “We need a content designer in the room.” Those people become your biggest allies.”
Both steps share the same logic: start small, build outward, let the effect compound. You’re not on a mission to change the entire organization’s understanding of design in one presentation. You’re on a mission to find one person who gets it (or is at least close to it), work on something together, and use that as a foundation.
The PM detail matters specifically. Oleksii isn’t saying find a friend. He’s saying find someone who sits in planning, and whose endorsement puts you in the conversations that decide what gets built. That’s where influence lives.
AI will take part of your job, but not the part that matters most
Oleksii has a more personal stake in this question than most. He’s been directly affected as he lost his job because of AI. So when he said he’s not worried, it brought some relief.
His argument is that AI is already taking parts of the job. In some cases, that includes writing tasks that designers truly enjoyed. But what it leaves behind is the judgment, the evaluation, and the ability to recognize that an output is or isn’t good. And that is precisely what years of real-world experience and studying builds.
In Oleksii’s words:
“AI will never substitute your judgment. People use AI and say, “Look, I’m a designer now” or “I’m a filmmaker.” But those people haven’t gone through the process of learning in university or real experience in tech companies. They don’t have the same judgment. That’s why they show a trailer and say, “Look at this great thing I did.” But if you had judgment built on real experience, you would recognize that the output isn’t really that great. Judgment is our thing. For a really, really long time, that part belongs to us.”
He also makes a point specific to content designers: prompting is writing. The people who can give AI the clearest, most precise instructions are the same people who’ve spent years thinking carefully about language. And in an AI-augmented workflow, that’s not nothing.
His vision for the junior content designer of the near future isn’t someone replaced, but someone AI-native who will handle more strategic UX work while AI offloads execution tasks that used to consume most of their day.
A note from Gene
The skills that make you good at your craft and the skills that make you visible inside an organization are two different skill sets.
What Oleksii described is a common trap in product careers: working hard, staying helpful, then realizing nobody noticed. His solution is to do the second half of the job, the part most people don’t even realize is part of the job.
If you want to work on communicating your value, connecting work to business outcomes, and operating effectively across disciplines, start by learning skills to support that.
We have 40+ courses across UX, PM, and AI skills, including Oleksii’s own course on Building Content Design Systems. Lessons are short and fit your working day. Track your progress, get certified and build skills your team will notice.
Start for free at uxcel.com.
Resources and tools mentioned
Books:
Why Design Is Hard by Scott Berkun with Bryan Zug: scottberkun.com/why-design-is-hard/
Tools:
ChatGPT: chatgpt.com
Gemini: gemini.google.com
Claude: claude.ai
Where to find Oleksii Tkachenko
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tkachenko-oleksii
Building Content Design Systems course: uxcel.com/courses/building-content-design-systems
Production and marketing by Uxcel. Interested in appearing on the Modern Skill Stack podcast? Reach out at partnerships@uxcel.com
What’s the biggest thing stopping you from being more visible at work right now?
Cheers,
Gene
