Sasha Zaiats

Designer & Builder  ·  AI-Driven Platforms  ·  Conversational & Agentic Systems

Overview

Sasha Zaiats is a Senior Product Designer based in Toronto, focused on fintech AI-native products, agents, and conversational interfaces. At Boosted.ai, she led design for Financial AI Agents and AskAlfa™ assistant, helping investment teams at firms like RBC, TD Bank, and McKinsey, etc. understand, trust, and adopt AI in their workflows.

Background

Originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, Sasha relocated to Toronto in 2022. Her path into design was shaped by a degree in Economics, which grounded her thinking in systems, tradeoffs, and business strategy, and still shapes how she balances user and business needs.

She's worked across fintech, AI, SaaS, ecommerce, and marketing: environments where design directly affects adoption, revenue, and trust. That's shaped a practical approach: design as a tool for clarity, performance, and measurable results, not aesthetic polish for its own sake. What she cares about most is making powerful, complicated systems feel intuitive.

Principles

If you worked with Sasha, you'd know she lives by these.

AI-native by intention

Judgment first, AI second. Claude is for stress-testing ideas and thinking through edge cases before Figma opens — not for making the final call. AI gives speed. It doesn't get the decision.

Coherence at scale

Messy components + AI = faster chaos. Standardize first: clean structure, defined behavior, clear logic. That's what makes Figma MCP actually work in practice. Build the system before letting AI speed up the work. Moving fast without one just ships the same error faster.

Data-Informed Decisions

Gut feeling alone is a guess. Data alone misses context. Assumptions get tested against how people actually use what's built, and evidence, not preference, decides what changes next.

Business Alignment

Design that doesn't move a number is a nice-looking failure. One standard applies to every project: solve the user's problem, and show up in a metric the business cares about: adoption, retention, or revenue.

Experience

Blue J

Product Designer · Nov 2026 – Present

Designing the experience for Blue J, an AI legal research agent built by OpenAI that helps tax and legal professionals find, validate, and draft answers.

Coordn8r

Product Designer · Feb 2026 – Oct 2026 · Toronto, Canada

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    Sole designer on an early-stage B2B SaaS platform, working directly with the founder (formerly COO of Boosted.ai).

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    Designing a data product for small teams who lack dedicated PMs — surfacing bottleneck detection and workload balancing signals so lean teams get capacity visibility without adopting heavyweight tools like Jira.

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    Running rapid concept-to-MVP cycles solo: discovery, wireframing, prototyping, and structured spec hand-off consumed directly by engineering via Claude Code and MCP.

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    Built and shipped the marketing website end-to-end, including coding in Claude Code and deploying via GitHub.

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    Established the product's design system and component library from the ground up, built for consistency and developer hand-off from day one.

Boosted.ai

Product Designer · Dec 2022 – Feb 2026 · Toronto, Canada (Remote)

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    Designed Ask Alfa™ and Financial Agents when no comparable products existed — conversational AI interfaces for making dense, live financial data usable and trustworthy. Defined how users phrase intent, how the system surfaces its reasoning, and how users correct it when it's wrong. Drove +34% adoption of Ask Alfa™ and +23% agent engagement.

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    Designed agent orchestration end-to-end: dashboards and monitoring surfaces for how portfolio managers configure, monitor, and recover AI agents running against live market data, where a silent failure is more expensive than a visible one.

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    Re-architected Boosted Insights and redesigned the formula builder, turning dense financial data into a meaningful, digestible interface for power users under high-stakes accuracy requirements.

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    Owned portfolio construction workflows end-to-end: discovery, usability testing, prototyping, and validation in close partnership with Engineering, Product, and Quant Research, de-risking desirability, usability, and feasibility before build.

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    Ran rapid GenAI prototyping (Claude, Cursor, Lovable, Figma Make) to validate concepts and shorten time-to-implementation across design and product; became the team's go-to for AI enablement and workflow automation.

Milestone

Co-Founder, Head of Product & Design · Nov 2023 – May 2024 · Toronto, Canada

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    Identified that users were abandoning onboarding before reaching their aha-moment because most platforms show features, not outcomes. Designed gamified flows that made the product actionable within onboarding itself, turning passive feature tours into active exploration.

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    Owned product vision, roadmap, UX architecture, and go-to-market strategy as sole designer and co-founder.

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    Achieved #1 Product of the Day, #1 Product of the Week, and #3 Product of the Month on Product Hunt with 1,090+ upvotes.

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    450+ waitlist signups and 10+ paying customers within weeks of launch.

Product Design Consultant

Self-employed · Feb 2021 – Present · Remote (part-time)

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    Shipped 30+ production websites across SaaS, healthcare, NGO, and e-commerce, leading full discovery-to-delivery cycles from research and MVP definition through high-fidelity execution.

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    Redesigned the landing page for Prinker Inc., driving a +64% improvement in e-commerce profitability through conversion-focused UX and visual design.

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    Designed and launched a virtual care clinic for Richmond Hill Sleep & Lung Institute, increasing online patient inquiries by +40% through UX-driven information architecture.

STUD-POINT

Designer · 2018 – 2019 · Kyiv, Ukraine

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    Launched and optimized the company's website, strengthening digital presence and supporting growth across marketing channels.

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    Maintained visual consistency across digital platforms and large-scale events.

AIESEC

Team Manager & Designer · 2017 – 2018 · Kyiv, Ukraine

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    Led a team of five and organized a multi-track hackathon within a global youth organization. Delivered conferences for 300+ attendees in partnership with international organizations and brands.

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    Directed brand strategy and multi-channel campaigns to drive visibility, engagement, and attendance.

Books That Shaped the Way I Think About Design

A running list of books that rewired how I approach design.

Good Strategy Bad Strategy
Just Enough Research
Make Time
Measure What Matters
Predictably Irrational
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The Making of a Manager
The Paradox of Choice
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Good Strategy Bad Strategy

Beyond Work

Outside of design, Sasha is endlessly curious about places, people, and how things work. She has traveled to 27 countries, and her other pursuits share a common thread: presence, movement, and craft.

🥾Hiking
✈️Travel — 27 countries
🍵Matcha
🧘Pilates
💃Dancing
🍳Cooking

Interested in Working Together?

Sasha is open to senior product design roles, consulting engagements, and advisory work — particularly in AI, fintech, and SaaS. The best way to reach her is by email or LinkedIn.