The Gradient: “Our approach is a combination of engineering and craft.”
A conversation about the mission, the focus, and the ‘A-League’ of design agencies with the founding partners of The Gradient. Special thanks to theukrainian.org for letting us post this translation.
The Gradient is a Ukrainian digital agency with a focus on product design. Over the past five years The Gradient has become a company that generates significant value for international clients and serves as a magnet for talented designers.
The story of The Gradient sounds almost perfect. Young, talented, and ambitious professionals who had played key roles in IT enterprises decided to trade their comfort zone for a chance to build a venture of their own and enter the circle of the top design agencies.
Nowadays the agency operates from two offices in Ukraine (Lviv and Kyiv) and sets global objectives. They create complex digital products for clients from Norway, Great Britain, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other countries all over the world.
We talked to Olena Zanichkovska, Oleg Gasioshyn, and Denys Scrypnyk, The Gradient founders, about the mission of the company, the importance of being focused, and the art of combining engineering and craft.
Olena Zanichkovska
Founding Partner and Director of Product Strategy
About the start of one career
I have been working in the IT field since 2005. Starting at Eleks as a newbie student, I did some coordination work first and quite soon moved to the web department in the role of a project manager.
Eleks had their design studio, which was quite famous in Western Ukraine at that time. We worked a lot with various media resources and Kyiv projects, in particular.
Soon I became the young leader of the design department and I remained in that role for several years. That experience was, indeed, precious. Standing here, I would probably not entitle myself to lead a department back then. But I was young, ambitious and I felt like I could do everything.
We worked a lot with Ukrainian clients and Eleks customers. At that time, user experience design wasn’t something one could easily sell. It wasn’t well-known yet. Designers were creating websites intending to produce something nice in the frame of the customer’s preferences.
Five years later, I experienced an existential crisis, which pushed me to change. And I switched my place of work to GlobalLogic in the fancy position of senior engineering manager. By the way, when I joined Eleks I had only 50 colleagues. I could remember each person by name. In contrast, GlobalLogic already had 6000 people when I arrived there. I found myself in a completely different corporate culture with its own business processes. It was really interesting, though I faced a lot of challenges.
After a year I realized that I missed my previous job. I could follow a typical career path at GlobalLogic, but I decided to take another one and came back to ELEKS. I wanted to try my hand at management, engagement, and sales, so I went for business development.
At that time, ELEKS was building a ‘Product and Services’ department. It was a group of people who worked together on creating value propositions of all of the company’s internal services to promote them internationally and improve them from the inside. I spent another 5 years with them, leading digital processes.
In essence, we were product managers of different directions. I had an incredible manager Victor Gaidin (now VP of Sales and Marketing at Intellias — TU). We collaborated with the R&D, business analytics and design departments. Denis, my current business partner at The Gradient, was in charge of the design unit. We were a group of young, emotional, ambitious, and intelligent people, who tried to create new processes and innovate.
We did a lot of experiments and started working with the guys (Denys and Oleg, Olena’s current business partners at The Gradient — TU). In particular, we did the Google Glass Experiment with Oleg and Markiyan Maceh. The project gained multiple awards, including The Webby Award.
We did great stuff together. But the problem was that it wasn’t very applicable since there’s always a business side and there’s a fantasy.
Five years later, the company went for some organizational changes, which overlapped with personal changes of mine. The period of self-searching came.
I took some time off and went nowhere. Though, in a short while, ‘nowhere’ turned into the role of business development director at Perfectial, the Lviv IT company that was rapidly growing at that time. When I joined Perfectial, it was a company of around 140 people. My job was to create new business development processes, which involved coordination of marketing and sales, being a member of the board of directors, and influencing the strategy.
After about a year, Denys and Oleg came to me and said: “It’s time to move on. Your life is too quiet and calm. Let’s do business together!”
It’s time to move on. Your life is too quiet and calm. Let’s do business together!
It was in March of 2016. Back then, all three of us were doing fine from in every respect: job roles, financial rewards, public recognition. But we wanted to create something new.
About entrepreneurship
We felt that we had hit the wall and there was a risk of finding ourselves in a gilded cage eventually. The reason is that when you work in a big company and you get promoted to a management role, you begin losing your professional skills. Of course, you improve your management skills, buth you see another factor coming into play. In big companies, there’s a lot of space for inter-office politics. As a manager, you’re still dependent on the internal undertows.
Each of us realized that it was the right moment to choose between building a corporate career and creating something of our own. The longer you stay in the same role, the more difficult it becomes to get out of your comfort zone.
I remember how much it took to make that decision at age 30, and I can imagine what I would feel if I was faced with that decision now, at 36. How much scarier it would be to lose a job. But no matter how hard you work as an employee, you’ll always have financial limitations. In business, you are your limitations.
About The Gradient’s vision
Back then, our vision was somewhat infantile since it was based on the antagonistic approach in the first place. If everyone did something in one way, we would want to do it differently. And our idea of “differently” was based on our infantile maximalism.
However, at that point, we favored such an approach. We wanted to create a company that would take up great projects and wouldn’t go for outstaffing. We envisioned that we would be a Ukrainian company that works with projects on an international level. We wanted to be those who get the majority of awards but have minimum bureaucracy at the same time. Such a utopia.
Although it was unrealistic, the truth is if one doesn’t begin with such a vision, one doesn’t achieve it later either. Reality happens and makes you adjust. That’s how we started our first year.
It was weird and complicated. We lost everything we had. At previous jobs, I’d been contacted by recruiters frequently. They were offering me opportunities to do training and consulting sessions and consultations. I had quite a range of activities when working in the companies. But as soon as I announced quitting the last company, everyone disappeared for a couple of months. After the market realized that we hadn’t sunk, people started to come back. It was a good lesson and experience for us.
In particular, it was a lesson because of significant financial losses. We got started in June and we paid our first 150-dollar salary to ourselves as founders in September.
About the mission and values of the company
When founding our business, we rented a small room, outlined our business processes, and signed a partnership agreement. We talked through responsibilities and conditions since we knew that we would certainly face crises later. And as history shows, most of the problems in business come from a disagreement between partners.
We agreed that if someone decided to leave the business before our company reached the 3-year mark, they would lose everything. Therefore, they wouldn’t be able either to redeem their share or to get money. Although we’d started earning some money earlier, the way The Gradient as a company and a brand is now was shaping up during all 3 of those years.
It might be that such an agreement about intentions doesn’t have much power in Ukraine but, nevertheless, it was important for us psychologically. Crises have always happened and will always happen to everyone. Each of us is impacted by business and personal contexts. Also, there are stages of personal development, temporary misalignments with the company’s goals, etc.
That was the moment when we sat down to discuss our mission and vision. Although we made some adjustments, our values didn’t change.
Our mission is to build products people love. We want to create digital products that help businesses and are valued by people
Speaking of the vision, that’s what has remained from our initial ambitions. In the IT market, everyone is trying to compete with one another. There was a time when I was deeply surprised that people didn’t pay attention to the work of worldwide leaders. The market is quite plain and it’s global, and there’s a lot of expertise that is better developed in the Western part of the world and the US. Therefore, when we started our business our benchmarks were the so-called ‘A-league’ companies, including Work & Co, IDEO, and Frog.
We want to be a Ukrainian company that plays in the “A-league” of design and operates at the same level of pricing, quality, and clients. But it should be a Ukrainian company. We used to joke that it would be cool to become a Galician version of Work & Co. (Smiling)
We’re from Lviv and we’re building our business here. Of course, there are Kyiv and other amazing cities. But Lviv is our place. And playing in the A-league is the criteria that we set for ourselves. It’s one thing to be number one in the village and a different thing to be number one at Harvard.
I’m afraid of limiting my personal development. And this resonates a lot in the context of The Gradient. When looking at the quality of our products at the beginning versus now, it’s obvious that the difference is large. But we understand that we have come this far and there’s a long way to go yet.
We aren’t just competing with other agencies from our country. We are competing with the whole world, which has strong players, some of whom founded this industry. In Ukraine, we don’t even have a decent school of product design, which means that all of us are self-learners who gather knowledge in a piece-by-piece fashion.
About becoming a member of the A-league
Recently, I read “Principles” by Ray Dalio, and since then I have been recommending it to friends. One of the main principles the author communicates is “accept the reality”, which resonates with me a lot. In my opinion, the first thing that needs to be done is to realize what reality you’re living in. We may want a lot. But it’s important to be aware of the context: we’re from Lviv, Ukraine, and we have got problems with the economy, politics, and education.
At the same time, we should remember our strengths: cool people, creativity, and financial opportunities.
One of the main things that helps someone join the ranks of the top players is knowing how to pick your people. It takes a long time, sometimes it’s painful. But we learned how to do it right. Now, we’re conducting interviews with around 40 people to find the right match for just one position on our team. We don’t take everyone and we often refuse to hire people because we value the cultural integrity of our company. With such a team in place, you spend 90% of time on achieving results.
About advantages and challenges of the partnership
I guess that being in a partnership is of the same level of difficulty as maintaining family relationships. You build connections with a person who will never see everything exactly the same way you do. However, your partnership’s strength lies in your differences.
A partnership is about strengthening weak points and leveraging the strong ones
Oleg Gasioshyn
Founding Partner and Design Director
About the principles and approaches of The Gradient
In the company, we often use an analogy of mechanics and racers. We see each client as a racer. He takes part in the race and our job as mechanics is to build for him an excellent bolide.
We consider the type of race, the weather, the other competitors, and a lot of other factors. However, the main thing to take into account is the driving style of the particular client. We want to build a highly effective car. But we can’t drive it for the client. It’s each client’s job to be responsible for the result, business approaches, and the venture in general. And that’s the key thing in our cooperation with clients. It’s not about denying responsibility. We just choose to work with the reality of the situation.
There are a lot of agencies that talk about how awesome they are and that they do the whole job for their clients. We think that our work should be done in the shadow of the client.
We should watch and analyze our clients’ needs, actions, and differences.
About victories and awards
At a certain period of professional growth, I was hunting awards. In The Gradient, we decided that we wouldn’t take part in competitions. And it’s sort of a principle. The reason is that quite often people create products tailored to a particular award. Those who work in advertising agencies know that there are projects that are built to win awards and there are real-life projects.
Also, sometimes you create a project that is appealing and impressive in terms of advertising, but it won’t reach the desired goals in the mass market. The same holds true for design work. We can produce a great design, but it won’t work for the client. He might not possess the technical and financial capabilities to make it live.
On the other hand, let’s say, we craft a great product for other designers. Then we may receive a couple of awards, a lot of applause, and some amount of likes on Behance. But frequently, our real customers are someone’s grandmas and grandpas who don’t get stylish designs and swipes. They just want big convenient buttons. All too often, this is the reality and we need to consider the context of the client and do our job accordingly.
If it happens that we do a niche product for designers and it receives awards, that would be great. But awards aren’t our end goal.
About focus
Another important part of our approach is getting focused. The definition of product design is broad enough. We, in particular, are interested in complex systems and products. For instance, it might be a huge e-commerce product that contains a set of subproducts, or it might be an ecosystem of mobile applications and websites.
We are interested in complex systems and products
There are companies that can create small or medium products better than we can. They can make better creatives, logos, or visual design. But we are better in the engineering approach.
About combining engineering and craft
Our approach is a combination of engineering and craft. There are situations when we can’t work with the clients because they expect us as the designers to be emotional and talk a lot about engagement. Instead, we don’t use many words and we want to move from words to deeds as soon as possible. Even though we, of course, have emotional context, we split the product into elements anyway and try to create a system.
Craft is different. Quite often agencies create generic products such as corporate websites. There is a general approach, sort of a template, in which one has to update the web design and the logo. In our case, almost every product is a new story. We have a couple of people who can implement the whole cycle, from discovery to creating an interface and creating its detailed retouch.
We don’t work with all clients. That’s why we chose the craft approach. Since we’re interested in long-lasting projects, we don’t accept projects that have to be delivered in a short timeframe. With our clients, we want to be a product team of partners and work together towards growth. We managed to accomplish this in 3 or 4 projects that we’re maintaining.
About changes in the Ukrainian market over the past 15 years
First of all, the perception of IT entrepreneurship changed, and the number of outsourcing companies increased. As of design it wasn’t developed much fifteen years ago. That was the time when the first specialists just started to show up. The main thing, however, is that the concept of IT design became part of the conversation at all. Before that, design and development had existed separately. And due to this, the market had been expanding for a while. Then, Ukrainian product companies started to appear.
As a result, new formats began to come up: agencies, outsourcing and product companies, and so on. And it’s great that people have a choice, the opportunity to change and gain the experiences of others
The market has become way more interesting.
There is also a huge demand for service design. Accordingly, outsourcing companies are hunting through the entire market. They raise salaries, and many people fall into the “golden cage”. That means they can get a salary of 5–6 thousand dollars per month simply because of the circumstances. And so, a person without special skills may fall into this system and won’t develop as a designer. There are very few people who understand this and are willing to go for a lower salary to gain experience. For the most part, if you’re an average healthy person, it doesn’t make sense to do so. (Smiling)
Speaking of changes in customer context, it is safe to say that the market has become global. We have worked with foreign clients before, but the process of working with Ukrainian ones is much more interesting.
Sometimes I receive more joy from showing my mom the billboard I made than from having product launches in the British, Egyptian, or other markets. Yes, those launches are economically more profitable and more challenging in terms of processes, but you do not feel such joy.
Now, little by little, everything is changing. We are negotiating with Ukrainian businesses and already have signed a contract with a Ukrainian branch of an international company. People work in the global market. Therefore, if you want to get a good result, you have to pay according to the global price tag. But it’s great that there are more and more companies in Ukraine that understand this.
About role models
First of all, there’s Work & Co. We really like their approach. They have a slightly different model, but our approaches are quite similar.
We keep in mind Frog, IDEO, Instrument. Also, there is Pentagram, but their direction is slightly different since graphic design is not our field. If we could become a Pentagram in the world of product design, that would be cool.
At the beginning, we had a supergoal in mind to have a million dollars in revenue during the first year of work. It is good, though, that we at least survived.
How long does it take to become like them? I do not know. At the beginning, we had a supergoal in mind to gain a million-dollar income during the first year of work. It is good, though, that we at least survived. Our motto of the first year was: “Thank you that we’re still alive.” (Laughs) That’s why it’s hard to say when we’ll reach our goal. Most likely, it takes decades.
There is still a problem with age. You may be a true professional, but you need to gain life experience. It really solves a lot. How you think, how you assess the challenges, how you respond to them. Pentagram also employs people with extensive professional experience, people in their forties or fifties. That’s why we need at least ten years to become such.
Denys Scrypnyk
Founding Partner, Chief Executive Officer
About the corporate culture of the company
We are a small company. And so, we can not work with all clients, for better or worse. This forces us to choose.
Now, our team consists of around 30 people. For the last year our biggest growth has been in personnel. Before that, we had been expanding slowly. The last employees who had left us opened their own businesses, which means that in five years we have raised a generation of people who want to create something of their own. They have opened cool companies. We respect them and wish them success.
Interestingly, they are trying to adopt the best of what we had and implement it within their companies. They don’t create another The Gradient. Instead, they build their own. We are very happy when people grow and develop.
If you want to work with top-level clients, you can not operate the same way as companies that don’t have such clients. Therefore, you need to do something different.
We are a service business based on people and their professional level. In order to be in the A-League, to get into tenders with our competitors and industry leaders, we need to hire top people. This is the foundation.
Oleg has always advocated the importance of hiring top-level people. Olena and I could sometimes give in on this point, but Oleg always held the bar high, and it has worked out very well.
There was also the trap of being a small and unknown company where no one wanted to go. We could not hire top experts in the field immediately, but we knew that we needed to look for people with similar values at their core. Phrases like “enter the IT field” would immediately close the candidate’s path to The Gradient. We were looking for people with burning eyes, who may not have known something, but who were deeply interested in creating things. And at the start, we had to develop such employees ourselves. Now, we are already trying to hire the coolest people possible.
Perhaps, we could have had 60–70 people on the team by now. Our sales would allow us to do this, but if we grow too fast, people who work won’t understand that. And we may lose our culture. Second, there will be a problem with scaling.
About projects
There are two types of clients we work with: small and medium enterprises. Those are companies from different industries that are not at the early stages of the life cycle.
Now, due to coronavirus, there is much less “crazy” money given to idiots. And there are way more conscious and elaborate requests.
For example, there is a large company. Let’s call it B.TECH. It’s a huge Egyptian company with such services as B2C, online and offline sales, B2B marketplace, lending and much more. Our task is to pack all that in a new, better and more comprehensive wrapper.
There are great niche projects. For example, Holberg EEG, a company from the Scandinavian region, has developed a system for neurologists to evaluate electroencephalogram results. You have probably seen this in movies or in real life when doctors attach electrodes to a patient and investigate what is going in their brain.
The company has created a standard by which specialized doctors can assess what is happening. They see certain parents, classify them and make a comprehensive report on what is happening in the human brain. This is a very special project with special software, in which a complex working tool is created for a doctor who works with it daily and also conducts complex research.
This project perfectly illustrates what we want to do, which is building large complex projects
Another big story is Saudi Fransi Capital. Like the Egyptians, they see world products and want to have the same. Still, they have a substantial legacy of different systems, and it is impossible to just stop everything and start a new one. Therefore, one needs to rethink and restructure existing projects.
Saudi Fransi Capital is the investment branch of a large bank in Saudi Arabia, which provides brokerage and investment services for the bank’s clients. They help buy various assets, invest money, and more. They use old and inconvenient services. And so, they pay people to do it over the phone. This is the real state of the market.
We’ve reassembled the entire ecosystem of their products, packing it all into one product that focuses on two user segments: mobile for basic and middle traders, and a desktop solution for professional traders.
Lumiere is one of our current projects. Imagine that you are a producer or an advertiser at Disney. You have got a new movie and you need to create a trailer for it. But before you publish this trailer online or on the big screens, you need to test it. While it’s easy to do with digital products, all you can do with trailers is show them to a small group of people. Then, you try to find out what they think.
We work with a company that has taken these processes to a qualitatively new level. They help companies like Disney organize the entire process of researching and evaluating the perception of video content. For example, they help to understand how viewers perceive the hero. They have an internal tool of their own and use various techniques to collect feedback from viewers while those viewers are watching video content.
Now their task is to turn this internal tool into a convenient SaaS product, and we are helping them with that.
About finding clients
It is always different: we find clients through inquiries, recommendations, our site, cases, etc. The magic begins when the client writes a letter. One of our values is moving fast and that priority was formed after our experience in large companies, where everything was slow.
We came to understand that if a potential client receives a letter in response to a request within an hour, we have a high chance of getting a project. We have brought communication to such a level by selling, not our experience, but the confidence that we will be able to help him.
It also helps to sell a combination of factors: how we show our processes, our attitude about the potential project, communication, how well-developed our agreements are, and so on. We have thought through the agreement for a long time so that our clients would not have a lot of comments about the protection of their rights and the protection of ours. It is important to always play win-win.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about us, just leave them below, and we’ll be happy to answer them.
Interested in launching a product or transforming yours?
Say: hello@thegradient.com
