Atomyze was an international startup backed by market-leading companies, including Global Palladium Fund, Trafigura, Glencore. The project's goal was to enable tokenizing, trading and investing in RWAs, democratizing access to commodities market, with the initial focus on institutional companies.

The project was staged in several parts, the Swiss-based business unit being the first to launch. The next stage was development of the US business unit with different product vision.

My task was to establish and lead the design unit in remote first environment. Initially I was involved as external consultant advising on brand platform creation. In parallel I was studying the project and the legacy from IBM, the previous tech partner.

First I've got roadmaps and forecasts for team workload, made job description for the future roles. Once the openings weere published, I'
ve reviewed over 200 applications, shortlisted and interviewed 15 or so designers and hired the best ones. Goes without saying I also onboarded them properly, with product goals and introduction to other team members.

Later on other great US-based freelancers joined us on regular to support with the spikes.

Today Figma is the golden standard, but back in 2020 Adobe XD and Sketch were still quite common in product design. I've chosen Figma for it being platform agnostic, cloud-first for always up-to-date layouts. It saved us from the hassle of file management too! Also company-wide libraries, easy access management and a ton of other features important for a large IT project.

Besides setting up Figma the engineers and I agreed on using the Angular material library to reduce development time and focus on the flows and business value. Later we've built our project-wide design-in-code library with components.

I've involved product team, analysts, developers, testers to work on wireframe/PoC level for two reasons. First, to drive collaboration and understanding of what we were building, and second — so the engineers would approve the designs early and prepare for the implementation beforehand. This saves a lot of time compared to silo-minded teams, like literally days and weeks for each significant feature.

Part of design work is testing and validating decisions. Sounds obvious and easy — but what to do, when there are no users yet? I've priorized scalability, easy-to-adjust approach so the future code adjustments would save precious ressources. Also internal tests, expert validation, peer review and continuos communication with the product team to ensure we do the right thing.

I've used Kanban methodology on the Swiss-based track, where the overall project management was built more straightforward. On the US-based track the whole team was using LeSS  — Large Scale Scrum. I've setup a Design Scrum team to address the requests from the feature teams faster with our limited resources and deliver more, taking the Scrum Master role.

It turned out that combination of proper tools, working culture and management approach made our team the fastest performing unit on the project, working across different time zones and continents remote only.

EU business unit: Initial tokenized and traded value on the early-stage platform in Europe over 900 million Euro. Glencore and GPF, world's largest metallurgical suppliers, were among the first clients who onboarded.

US business unit: regulatory compliant market-ready tokenization platform with trading venues like fast spot trading, OTC tools, full tokenization-redemption product lifecycle, extended with admin panel and customer support tools.

I've gained valuable experience leading design in ambiguous environments with limited user data, balancing speed and quality, and scaling a team. Working with legal requirements and KYC processes enriched my knowledge in regulatory projects. This project also expanded my Scrum Master skills and deepened my ability to lead multi-disciplinary international teams.