A six-month facilitation engagement. Your team builds a UX strategy grounded in real customer understanding, with structure and coaching from me throughout.
Product teams rarely fail because they ship too slowly. They fail because they ship the wrong things. Quarter after quarter, with confidence and on schedule, they deliver updates that provide little value to the people using the product — and, by extension, to the business.
The fix isn’t a faster process, no matter how loud the 10x-delivery chorus gets. Shipping nonsense ten times faster only puts ten times more nonsense in front of your users.
The real answer is deliberate UX strategy work, done cross-functionally — the kind that holds up over years rather than quarters.
Work of this kind produces three things. A precise understanding of where your users’ experience sits today and how it needs to change over the coming months and years. A direct line between that experience and the business outcomes you care about. And a vision of the future experience that the whole team actually believes in.
This programme is how your team builds that vision, and how this vision manifests for the entire organisation. Six months, one workshop a month, bi-weekly coaching in between. It happens on-site with your design, product, engineering and customer care leaders. Your team does the work, I guide it.
What changes during the programme
The gradual shift in mindset and ways of working begins from the very first workshop. By the end of the programme, you end up with:
- A long-term UX vision the whole team believes in, expressed as the future experience of real users rather than a list of features, and captured in a format the rest of the company can rally around.
- A set of UX outcomes tied to specific improvements in your users’ lives — actionable long-term goals that connect business objectives to design direction.
- Metrics that cascade from the vision down to the next sprint and actually track progress.
- Your team’s own number on the cost of the current experience gaps. The kind of number that unlocks budget conversations and ends prioritisation arguments previously stuck at the level of opinion.
- Product conversations that start with problems worth solving, not features to build.
- Clarity on where your understanding of your users’ actual experience is thin — which parts of it you know well enough to make confident decisions, and where research needs to go next.
After the programme ends, the team carries this way of working forward on its own.
Why I built this programme
Most product teams I encounter have no shortage of direction at the business level. Revenue targets, conversion goals, churn numbers — the leadership view tends to be clear. What’s often missing is a crucial layer between those numbers and the product and design decisions the team makes.
Three gaps recur, and the programme is built around closing them.
The first gap is the absence of a shared understanding of the future experience you’re building for your users. Teams know where the business is meant to go. They often know what product metrics need to move. But when you ask what their users’ experience should be like in two or three years — the answer is usually a feature list or silence. Without that shared picture of the future, every product and design decision becomes a local quick fix. And quick fixes don’t compound when they aren’t pointed at anything — they just stack up. If there’s no end state to navigate toward, it doesn’t much matter which direction the team picks. Your planning horizon shrinks to a quarter, or maybe to a few sprints.
When the team does have that vision — your users’ future experience, where every step is genuinely delightful rather than merely satisfactory — every product decision, design call and prioritisation argument has something to measure itself against.
The second gap is the missing layer between business goals and product design direction. Business goals don’t translate into product work on their own. If your goal is to grow revenue from subscriptions, the product outcome is clear enough: lift renewal rate from, say, 70 percent to 85 percent. But “design something that lifts renewals” gives a product team nothing to work with. There are dozens of plausible directions from there, and no basis for choosing between them. The layer teams are usually missing is UX outcomes: what needs to change in the experience of our existing subscribers to make it more likely they renew? That’s the question design can actually act on. Answering it properly, with a focus on the real users, is what turns a business goal into a roadmap with a defensible logic behind it.
The third gap is problem framing, which underwrites the other two. Product organisations have spent a decade optimising for delivery speed, and AI tooling is now compressing delivery further. None of that matters if the team is building the wrong thing. Delivery speed was never the real constraint. The constraint is, and has always been, how teams identify problems, and how they decide which problems are worth solving in the first place. The programme puts problem framing back at the front of the process, before the team commits to building the thing right and building it fast.
The programme addresses all three gaps, though not in the order I’ve described them. We start with where your users actually are today, work outward through the problems worth solving and the outcomes that follow, and only then craft the long-term vision — once the team has the substance to build one that holds up.
Who this is for
Tech product companies with a UX or product design function already in place, and the appetite to move it from tactical to strategic. The programme is designed for cross-functional teams, not design teams on their own. It works best when product, UX, engineering and customer care leaders are in the room together — because what changes during the programme is how those functions work with each other.
An emerging or established UX function, with one or several designers and some research activity already happening — possibly a dedicated researcher, possibly not yet. A cross-functional core group of product, engineering and UX leaders who can commit to the full six months. Executive sponsorship at CEO, CPO or CTO level: someone who wants the work to happen and will back the decisions that follow from it.
Two conditions matter more than the rest. A willingness to treat the programme as a shift in mindset rather than a polish on current practice. And a strong culture of ownership inside the product organisation — because your team does the heavy lifting here. I provide the structure and run the workshops, but the weeks between the workshops matter just as much.
That said, smaller teams just beginning to build in-house design and product functions are also a good fit. For them, the programme is a way to build the right habits into the organisation from the start, rather than having to unlearn the wrong ones later.
How it works
The programme runs for six months and includes:
- Six monthly workshops of four to six hours each, held on-site at your offices or a venue you arrange.
- Bi-weekly ninety-minute coaching sessions between workshops, for the whole duration of the programme.
All six workshops are deliberately practical. The team walks into the very first workshop with real work already in flight — a project, a feature, an initiative the organisation is investing in right now. We use that live initiative as the material for the rest of the programme.
The arc of the work runs roughly as follows:
- Months one and two focus on understanding your users’ current experience and reframing strategic initiatives around it.
- Months three and four develop UX goals and the metrics that track them.
- Months five and six produce the long-term vision and prepare the team to carry the work forward after the engagement ends.
Between workshops, the ninety-minute bi-weekly coaching sessions are where most of the continuity happens: the team uses them for whatever they need — preparing for the next workshop, reviewing drafts, thinking through internal conversations with executives, working through resistance, or deciding how their own rituals should change. By month six, the team owns the work, and the programme ends cleanly.
Pricing and terms
Six months, fixed monthly fee, paid in instalments. Scope is agreed at the outset and doesn’t drift. Workshops are held on-site; travel costs are invoiced separately at cost. Specific figures are covered on an introductory call.
I run a limited number of programmes at any one time and won’t take on concurrent engagements with companies competing in the same product category.
Who you’d be working with
I’m Kyrylo Slavetski, a UX strategy and design leadership consultant with twenty years in product design, UX research and design leadership across a range of product companies. Earlier versions of this programme grew out of the work I‘ve been running inside product organisations for most of the past decade — refined across multiple teams and contexts into the form it takes today.
I started KSLV to do this work the way I‘ve always wanted to: in person, with a small number of teams, over enough months for the shift to take hold. Based in the Netherlands, working with clients across Europe and, when the fit is right, further afield.
Frequently asked
Who should be in the room?
A cross-functional group of six to twelve people: typically the Head of Product or equivalent, the Head of Design, one or two senior engineers, the lead researcher, and the executive sponsor for at least the first and last workshops. Wider stakeholders are brought in at specific moments rather than asked to sit through the full programme.
What if our team has never done this kind of work before?
The programme is designed for teams making the shift for the first time. No prior experience with outcome-driven metrics, strategic research, or UX vision work is assumed. The first workshop uses the team’s own in-flight initiatives, so the work starts on familiar ground.
Can the programme be shortened or compressed?
The six-month shape is deliberate. The work needs time between workshops for the team to absorb new ideas, conduct research, produce drafts, and have the difficult conversations internally. Compressing the programme tends to produce workshops that feel productive in the room and change nothing in the organisation a month later.
Where do the workshops take place?
On-site. I travel to you and facilitate in person, either at your offices or a venue you arrange. The in-person format matters: the generative work depends on the quality of attention a room full of people gives each other, and that doesn’t survive video calls. The bi-weekly coaching sessions between workshops are run remotely.
What about confidentiality and competing clients?
Mutual NDAs as standard. I don‘t run concurrent programmes with companies competing in the same product category — that includes direct competitors and close adjacents.
How is the programme priced?
A fixed monthly fee for the six months, paid in instalments. Specific terms and pricing are covered on an introductory call.
Let’s talk
Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether the programme is a fit. The call is genuinely diagnostic — I’ll ask about your team, your product, and the conversations you’re currently stuck in, and I’ll tell you whether this is the right engagement for where you are. If it isn’t, I’ll point you toward something that is.
Write to me at kslv@kslv.io, or schedule a call directly.