Build a design center and unfreeze the flagship

There were designers at GPN before me. What was missing was a shared process, a shared language, and places to exchange. They sat inside their departments, never crossed paths, and helping each other was awkward. In the first weeks I mapped the territory through the leads: who sits where, who reports to whom, who's working on what. The output was a table that turned out more accurate than most of the company's official documents.

The internal portal through which an employee files for vacation, a business trip, any request. Before us the company had 800+ scattered services; you couldn't file a simple request without a colleague's help. The two previous design teams stalled at the mockup stage, unable to reach agreement with the departments. I spent another six months walking into the same dead end and hitting the same wall.

We only moved once we changed the language of the conversation. We stopped coming with an idea and started coming with numbers. Before-and-after measurements from the UX research gave us those numbers; on top of that we secured the CEO's sign-off in a letter, lined up allies across departments, and held about a hundred respectful meetings with service owners.

I didn't create Consta — I came in as CPO to a DS that already existed. But it was the industry's first open design system from an industrial company, and my job was to bring it to production standard across GPN's products.

A team of 4. As the design system's CPO I held the priority backlog, the budget, and advocacy inside and outside the company. Aleksey Tityaev (art director reporting directly to me) ran the component side and the link with product teams. A staff developer owned releases, infrastructure, and support. A designer owned documentation and the Figma library. There was tension inside the team: I wanted to burn down the product teams' backlog faster, the developer wanted to stabilize the infrastructure. The balance didn't always hold, and some releases slipped.

Consta is a production DS; dozens of GPN's internal products run on it. Two telling ones here. ERA Drilling ran under Aleksey Tityaev's art direction. Jupiter was built by a team from another department that chose Consta as its standard. Different domains, different teams, one interface language.

A design function rests on people. Without an HR brand, neither hiring nor retention would have scaled for us.

I pushed on several channels at once: external talks, partnerships with universities and schools, an internal community, plus a couple of experimental plays like the access badges. Not all of them took off equally, but together they became the brand.

We launched a regular AI pipeline for illustration in Q1 2022 — six months to a year before generative models became a standard in design teams. Mostly concepts and communication design inside the company, plus the news feed in ESO. Most companies at that point were still just discussing ChatGPT.

We put neural nets on the level of the design process itself, not as a "wow, look, a neural net." Stable Diffusion and MidJourney slotted into that pipeline as they went public and by the end of 2022 became the main stack. Llama and ChatGPT — for text and macros. Whisper — for the UX researchers' transcriptions. Part of the team was skeptical, and some said outright that I was overrating the tools — a normal reaction for 2022.