Background Paths
Background Paths

Hi, my name is Nasko. I am

Some of my work

Tide logo - white
Since 2023

SaaS in fintech from 0 to 8+ million in ARR

Summary:

Small business owners are blindsided by tax bills and can't answer "Am I profitable?" or "Can I pay my bills?"

As Staff Designer leading strategy across payroll, tax, reporting, and accounting, I built 0-to-1 tax management and financial analytics tools that solve these painful questions.

Introduced freemium as an entirely new activation method for Tide. Created surfaces across the ecosystem of products to drive traffic with hooks related to people's jobs to be done — getting users to try different products by delivering value upfront instead of paywalling features. This activation strategy was first iteratively tested and released across products and the ecosystem.

In my day-to-day: I prototype in code, use AI throughout my process, and let data drive decisions — not opinions.

Key Achievements:
  • • 0 → 10,000+ subscribers, 0 → $8M+ ARR
  • • 22% activation rate (vs. 0.9% baseline) - a 24x improvement
  • • Built AI assistant for 3K+ employees
Role:

Fractional product manager/ staff designer

Mentoring 2 designers, 2 junior PMs and a researcher

Hotjar logo - white
2022

New onboarding experience for 15,000+ sign ups/mo

Hotjar onboarding experience
Summary:

New users couldn't reach insights fast enough — 5% activation despite 15k monthly signups.

Approach: Ran experiments with the pricing page (which accounted for 20% of signups). Separately, tested and removed friction points in the sign-up and onboarding process that weren't relevant to all user personas, then designed a personalized onboarding flow for our target customers—product teams in small and medium tech companies.

Role:

Senior Product Designer

Product Manager

Team:

1 designer

8 full-stack engineers

2 product managers

Myself

Key Achievements:
  • • 10% overall improvement in activation across all segments
  • • 30x improvement in sales pipeline (0.5% to 15% demos booked)
  • • Redesigned onboarding for 15k monthly signups
Insurify
2021

Redesign of a marketplace with millions of daily users

Summary:

Users didn't trust the clunky interface for high-stakes insurance decisions. I led a comprehensive redesign as Lead Product Designer driving growth strategy.

Approach: Transformed a 30-field form into a conversational flow that guides users through complex decisions with confidence and clarity.

Hired and led 2 designers across 3 engineering teams, establishing the company's first design system to enable rapid iteration. Built the first end-to-end product development process—from requirements definition through design execution to engineering handoff.

Role:

Lead product designer

Growth product manager

Team:

Myself

2 designers

CPO, VP of marketing

2 product managers

3 engineering teams

1 analyst

Key Achievements:
  • • 32% increase in flow completions
  • • $1.2M additional monthly revenue
  • • 20% MoM sales growth
  • • Built first design system
  • • Hired and led 2 designers
  • • Established end-to-end product development process
SalesDesk
2023

Foundational research and UX strategy for an AI CRM tool

Summary:

Conducted foundational user research to inform the product direction for a new AI-powered CRM. This project involved working closely with the founders, recruitment strategy and in-depth user interviews, competitive analysis, and market research to identify key pain points and opportunities. The insights were synthesized into detailed user personas and journey maps, which laid the groundwork for the core UX strategy and feature prioritization.

Tech Stack:
User ResearchUX StrategyPersona DevelopmentJourney MappingCompetitive AnalysisStakeholder Workshops
Caliper logo
2022

Democratize data. Make it social. Let anyone get answers in seconds, not weeks.

Portfolio 2024 animation
Summary:

Business data is scattered across multiple tools like Stripe, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, HubSpot, and other tools. Nobody knows what's actually working. Calliper connected everything into one feed where anyone could ask questions in plain English and get instant answers. "Which ads drove our best customers?" "Is our pricing experiment working?" No SQL, no spreadsheets, no begging engineers for reports.

Think: social feed meets data warehouse and a friendly slack bot. Ask questions, share insights, make decisions fast. Sequoia wrote us a $1.2M check to build it. We shipped the MVP in 2022. Company later shut down, but the problem we were solving was real as hell.

Role:

Conducted a dozen founder interviews across early stage companies

Built the design system from zero

Shipped core product features including the data feed, goal tracking, smart alerts, slack bot

What people are saying

"Nasko has a real drive and curiosity to understand the problems to solve. He uses his experience in design thinking and is skilled in bringing relevant stakeholders together in alignment."

Andrew Denholm

Head of Design, Chip | previously, Tide

"At Calliper Nasko made impact in a very short time - organised a design system to designing several core product features. All the product discussions with Nasko are a delight."

Tony Popov

CTO, Calliper

"Nasko is a fantastic designer, incredibly data-driven and user-focused. He skillfully combines this with a deep understanding of product requirements."

Owen Bennett

VP of Product Design, JP Morgan Chase | previously, Tide

"In a product manager-designer relationship, transparency in feedback is essential. During our collaboration, this was evident as we aligned business requirements with design specifications."

Tony Leung

Director of Product Management, iFLY Indoor Skydiving | previously, Insurify

"He demonstrates a strong grasp of product priorities, and ability to ship, particularly in ambiguous situations."

Justin Drees

VP of Admin Services, Tide | previously, Klarna

"Nasko was always coming up with well-thought-out solutions. In addition, he established a set of processes to improve how the product and design team worked together."

Kellen Urbon

Senior Product manager, Insurify

"Nasko has a real drive and curiosity to understand the problems to solve. He uses his experience in design thinking and is skilled in bringing relevant stakeholders together in alignment."

Andrew Denholm

Head of Design, Chip | previously, Tide

"At Calliper Nasko made impact in a very short time - organised a design system to designing several core product features. All the product discussions with Nasko are a delight."

Tony Popov

CTO, Calliper

"Nasko is a fantastic designer, incredibly data-driven and user-focused. He skillfully combines this with a deep understanding of product requirements."

Owen Bennett

VP of Product Design, JP Morgan Chase | previously, Tide

"In a product manager-designer relationship, transparency in feedback is essential. During our collaboration, this was evident as we aligned business requirements with design specifications."

Tony Leung

Director of Product Management, iFLY Indoor Skydiving | previously, Insurify

"He demonstrates a strong grasp of product priorities, and ability to ship, particularly in ambiguous situations."

Justin Drees

VP of Admin Services, Tide | previously, Klarna

"Nasko was always coming up with well-thought-out solutions. In addition, he established a set of processes to improve how the product and design team worked together."

Kellen Urbon

Senior Product manager, Insurify

Side Gigs & Experiments

TideAI
2025

AI-assistant for 3000+ employees

Summary:

Developed an AI-assistant for Tide employees from various departments and use cases. A powerful knowledge bot that increases velocity, decreases silos, and enables cross-team collaboration. Impact: 3K+ users, 50K+ queries/month, 40% reduction in cross-team questions. Built with OpenAI API + RAG on 10K+ internal docs in confluence and now exploring adding additional sources of information.

Tech Stack:
Next.jsTypeScriptOpenAI APIVector DatabaseTailwind CSS
Team:

1 product AI engineer

Myself

Clarify Logo - White
Clarify CRM
2025

Engineering-as-marketing: showcasing the benefits of an AI-powered CRM that saves time in building relationships

Summary:

Developed an interactive marketing tool for Clarify, a next-generation AI-first CRM platform. The centerpiece includes a time-savings calculator and a visualization tool that demonstrate the stark contrast between traditional manual CRM workflows and Clarify's AI-native approach.

The tool serves as an asset in Clarify's Go-To-Market strategy, allowing potential customers to input their current sales data and instantly see how Clarify's AI capabilities could transform their workflow. The side-by-side comparison vividly illustrates how sales professionals can reclaim hours previously lost to administrative tasks and data entry, redirecting that time toward meaningful customer interactions and closing deals.

Tech Stack:
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSReact Hook FormChart.js
Target Audience:

Sales leaders and executives

Real estate professionals

Sales operations managers

Business development teams

Opaa Logo - White
Opaa
Since 2025

Restaurant ordering with QR codes and digital payments in SE

Summary:

Opaa is a point-of-sale system designed specifically for restaurants and cafes in Eastern Europe. The platform enables customers to scan QR codes at their tables to browse menus, place orders, and pay digitally—all without waiting for service staff. This approach caters to the digital-first preferences of younger generations who value convenience, speed, and contactless interactions.

What sets Opaa apart is its comprehensive support for various payment methods including cryptocurrency options like Bitcoin and Stablecoins. This flexibility addresses the growing demand for alternative payment solutions in Eastern European markets, where digital adoption is rapidly accelerating but international payment systems often have limitations.

Tech Stack:
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSBlockchain IntegrationServerless Functions
Role:

Co-Founder

Product design

Front-end

Blockchain Integrations

Balance Guru Logo
Balance Guru
2023-2024

The power of smart software and expert accountants, all in one place.

Summary:

BalanceGuru was an accounting automation platform designed to simplify financial management for businesses. Our journey began with thorough product discovery, building a list of interested customers, and launching an MVP that quickly gained traction. We generated traffic and onboarded two paying customers. However, after a year, we decided to shut down the project. Achieving product-market fit in a relatively small market proved challenging due to the lack of documented APIs for banks, the national tax agency, and other institutions. The necessary integrations required over a year of development just to establish basic connectivity, making automation and scalability unfeasible from a return-on-investment perspective. Given these constraints, we chose to explore other opportunities.

Tech Stack:
Next.jsTypeScriptTailwind CSSPostgreSQLPrisma ORMVercel
Role:

Myself as full-stack design, development, and product strategy.

Co-founder as back-end engineering, system architecture.