Experience — Valera Sirotkin

2025 – present

VK

Head of Design and Design System for Mail

Led a team of 5 product designers: distributed areas of responsibility, ran performance reviews and team development.
Took part in hiring and brought 2 new designers onto the team.
Worked with Product to set priorities and goals for the design team and contributed to Mail's 2026 strategy.
Over this period the team moved from experiments in the Mail mobile app to owning the key user scenarios across all of Mail.
Worked on transforming the mobile Mail experience, including experiments with the home screen and core user scenarios.
Planned and managed the department's budget over two years, including tools, software, subscriptions, conferences and training.
Continue engaging with the broader Mail design community, including product, communications and design-system teams.

2021–2025

Design System Lead

Led the development and rollout of a shared design system for B2B and B2C.
Worked with a community of about 25 designers contributing to and using the design system.
Developed tokens, platform libraries and reusable components.
Built processes between Design, Product and Engineering.
Built tools and processes that reduced designers' operational load and sped up handoff to development.
Aligned the visual language and patterns across several product lines.

2019–2021

Lead Designer, Art Director

Developed systemic design for Mail and Cloud products, building cross-product patterns, components and navigation principles.
Built new sections — for example, fully designed and shipped the new «Payments» section in Mail.
Redesigned the mail client's settings section, improving structure, visual language and user flow.
Contributed to the landing-page builder, which later became the foundation of the email-campaign builder — from UX frameworks to the final visual layer.
Contributed to the Mail/VK rebrand — adapted visual solutions across product interfaces.
Designed internal interfaces: intranet systems, admin panels and the Stady learning platform, accounting for internal processes and corporate UX specifics.

2016–2019

Lead Interface Designer

Designed the «Accounting» section end to end — from concept and user scenarios to the final spec and implementation support.
Actively supported development: helped the team at every stage, clarified details, tested implementation and checked it against requirements.
Contributed to systemic interface standards: designed component behavior logic, documented UX patterns and aligned them with clients and teams.
Was an active member of the in-house design community: shared industry news, gave talks, and started and ran an internal design-digest group.