Conversation with Roman Musatkin
Roman Musatkin is a Product designer and advocate for cross-cultural collaboration between European Union, Russia and Iran.
He currently lives in Finland. It’s our privilege to have him here to have a conversation about his experience, cross cultural journey and his perspectives about product design.
Hello, Roman. Good morning. Welcome to our show and let’s introduce yourself to our audience
Well, first of all, thanks for having me here. so my name is Roman. I’m from Siberia. , I do product design for close to seven years now. And I’ve worked in Russia. I worked with companies in the United States.
I did mentor on design, in many different places, including Iran and then now I live in Helsinki, Finland for the last three and a half years. , designing products myself and also leading a design team.
So when did you start to do our first design job and what has encouraged you to pursue a design career?
Well, I was very lucky to choose it very early. I got my first money for a design project when I was 14, that was my debut in the industry way before I even knew what product design is.
Back in school days, I started in a school newspaper as a journalist. I thought they will become a journalist then. They needed somebody to design the newspaper in Coreldraw and I happened to be this person.
And so I learned the tool and then somebody asked me to make business cards for them and I did that. Then somehow in a year after that, I ended up designing plugins for Google Chrome. I even had a freelance task, designing a website for a chain of Supermarkets in Kazakhstan. And that was my first big money I earned being 14 and I bought myself an iMac.
That was my first big money I earned being 14 and I bought myself an iMac.
that was my start in a design career. And I think that a big push to my career was the fact that on the internet. Nobody knows how old you are, so you can start early and, get access to these problems very early.
You’ve mentioned Corel draw, now there are a lot of tools in the market. How do you set yourself to adapt to this kind of changing design dynamics and tools?
When I started designing websites, I was using Adobe Photoshop, for everything. still the part of, my design experience working in, Photoshop and use tools like Figma and sketch. But we’re more advanced.
One thing I noticed is that once you get used to one-two, it becomes very difficult to change. what I find very important in this, even if you have your workflow you consider efficient. One of the tools you should continue exploring and trying for side projects or personal projects or for a small task at your main job to try something else.
I love Figma take as it is the number one tool that I use. But at the same time, for some personal projects, I force myself to use Adobe XD or, sketch or something else. Just to get a handle for like how UI patterns differ, how tools evolve, what features your tools may have but Figma doesn’t. It also makes your experience as a designer because you see other ways to solve the same problems.
There are a lot of people who wanted to pursue design as their career. Told they are from different backgrounds. What would be you are one at by spot them to kickstart that design career?
Well, the number one piece of advice that worked for me was just trying to expose myself to as many different design problems as possible. So not focusing on one particular field or industry. I think that is something that even experienced designers will enjoy because when you work in the same company on the same product for many years, you’re just used to one particular domain. And I think it’s beautiful when you can just solve these riddles and challenges and very different fields.
Especially with ones where you do not work. I have many software developer friends, and when they learn to program, they have this kind of little challenges, little coding challenges that they solve, ranging from five-minute challenges to one-hour challenges. And I think something similar is very needed for designers, at the beginning of the career, but all the time.
when it comes to design hiring how do you see people with and without formal design education?
This is both a huge advantage and a challenge. because when I started where it was just no good product design education. And I think even right now, there are very few places around the world where you can get proper Design education. just because the industry is changing so fast that, you get the necessary experience and knowledge must faster when you practice it at the same time..
Of course, it makes it much more difficult for you as an individual to structure your knowledge and to make sure that you have a good foundation of design, where, it is so easy to just superficially learn about UI patterns or like how to make design systems without seeing the underlying kind of design principles that, many designers traditionally learn in school. So I feel that I, as an individual I have to spend twice as much time on my education as the people who have formal education to keep my knowledge structured.
Whenever we apply for design jobs, recruiters look at case studies and portfolios, but tactically speaking, we work on a project and then quickly move on to another one and give very less focused on documenting the project as a case study. Do you have a habit or best practice for documenting these case studies and as a hiring manager, how do you even approach candidates without a solid portfolio?
Personally, I do not do it. And I didn’t update my portfolio for a long time, uh, because that is how oftentimes it works among the product designers. especially with ones with work in one company, for a couple of years. So, in a company where I work in a hiring process fee, Actually did have a note that it is okay for some product designers, not to have a portfolio. and to try to find a different way to validate where these inexperienced, for example, just ask them to, talk about a couple of, design projects. that they had lightly not necessarily prepared as a case study that would require a significant investment.
I think it’s just very important to be able to, to give an overview of your experience and to talk comfortably about a problem that you’re solving and they’ll be able to prove, how you were thinking I think is more important than going from a case study on, portfolio website, because that, in any cases like the very first layer of, design experience and very much more to validate in the hiring process.
You are a very frequent traveler and visited more than 200 cities. So tell us what motivates you to travel?
There is a very famous designer in Russia who has been to every single country in the world. He one of not so many people in the world and one of, a not even fewer number of Russians who’ve been to all the countries. He is extremely punctual in documenting his experience. So he has a report for every single place where it could have been and the map and the list of cities. And then he keeps track of how many times he’d been to every single place.
His reports are very good, from most of the tribal reports you see on the internet, whereas most people focus on the same kind of sites and domain attractions in every place that they’ve visited. He instead taking pictures of trash cans and navigation in the subway and colors that you see on postboxes or like post stations or bicycle paths and underground passages. Seeing this kind of report taught me that there’s so much we can learn from, thinks on the surface which looks not so insightful, not so interesting. And so that became also for me, a huge inspiration for traveling. So, in the early days, I was traveling exactly for that to see how in one city of a trashcan is different from the other, and then how that knowledge can make me better as a designer.
I have what I call is the design library. So I take pictures of every interesting object I see in any place where I go. From icons to navigation, to again the trash cans or escalators, or if the bus stops or whatever it is. And oftentimes in my career, it did help to have this ready-made like prepared reference library that you can use when you’re solving design problems.
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Host and photographer of this episode : Sheik Mohaideen