Kirill Lazarev’s education in other people’s businesses

Before Kirill Lazarev had an agency to put his name on, he had some German watches to sell. A businessman wanted to clear stock from a failed venture. Lazarev could return the cost and keep the markup. He built a website. An inventory problem had supplied both a business opportunity and a reason to learn design.

As website commissions followed, he asked clients how they sold, who bought, and how their businesses worked. The early screens were hardly award bait, by his own account. They brought in leads. It is a useful beginning for someone whose company would eventually collect prizes for how digital things look: the first test was whether anybody bought anything.

Today, Lazarev is the founder and CEO of Lazarev.agency, the Ukrainian-founded product design business working on AI interfaces, websites and software. He is based in San Francisco. The geography and the technology have widened considerably since the watch shop. The question underneath the work remains pleasantly awkward: what does this screen help someone do?

A studio grows out of the question

Lazarev founded the agency in Kyiv in 2015. By 2023, its team described a business of more than 50 people with an office in New York. Its roster of disciplines had expanded to include product and motion design, UX strategy, business analysis and marketing. A founder could no longer personally contain everything the company needed to know.

That change matters in design, where the public often sees a finished page and imagines a solitary person choosing typefaces. A software interface contains decisions about priorities, language, business rules and what happens when someone makes a mistake. Different specialists bring different ways of spotting trouble. The agency's team describes its purpose as combining creative work with commercial success, a pairing that sounds straightforward until a client asks for both by Friday.

The international expansion had a practical route. Upwork helped the company find customers beyond Ukraine. Lazarev later discussed the platform as something an entrepreneur could learn systematically: how to present a profile, answer a brief and agree a contract. For a young agency, those apparently administrative tasks are close to the heart of the business. A portfolio is silent until somebody decides to hire you.

The reluctant collector

There is an enjoyable complication in Lazarev's relationship with prizes. He once considered awards a waste of time and money. Client results mattered more than little emblems on a website. Then the company decided to change its marketing, seek warmer enquiries and enter competitions. The sceptic had found a business case for the trophy cabinet.

In 2022, the agency website won the Webby People's Voice award in Professional Services & Self-Promotion. Lazarev credited the Ukrainian community's votes. He also described a modest, concrete commercial effect: the award made selling easier. Customers could discover the agency through the Webbys, and the recognition gave a prospective American buyer a reason to take the conversation seriously.

That is an unusually useful way to talk about an award. There was no need for a fairy tale in which a statue arrived and a queue of customers formed outside. Recognition reduced some of the uncertainty around hiring a distant creative team. A prize could do a little introductory work before the founder joined the call.

The official credits for the winning site provide a second corrective to the lone-designer story. They list strategy, product management, lead design, interaction, development, motion, 3D and copywriting. Lazarev appears as Kyrylo Lazariev, credited for strategy. The object in his hand stands for a collection of other hands at work.

At the ceremony, he used his five-word speech to speak about Ukraine. His words were: “Be brave, fight for Ukraine.” A professional celebration had become a brief public address. Five words leave very little room for a sponsor list.

“Be brave, fight for Ukraine.”

Kirill Lazarev · 2022 Webby acceptance speech

Making room for the competition

Another project from that period offers a different view of his ambitions. Ukrainian Power presented Ukrainian creative agencies to international clients after Russia's full-scale invasion. Lazarev worked on it with fellow creatives; the published credits identify him as chief strategy officer. The directory's purpose was to help businesses keep finding work while their country was under attack.

The project brought together more than 30 agencies employing over 770 people. Its layout randomized the companies' positions so attention would be shared more fairly, with filters to help buyers find a specialty. Here was a design decision with an ethical consequence that could actually be described: a firm would not be permanently stuck at the bottom of somebody else's list.

There is generosity in building a place where a buyer might choose another agency. There is also commercial sense. A stronger market for Ukrainian creative work can help more than one seller. The project makes Lazarev's interest in business feel less like a private scoreboard and more like an interest in the conditions that allow businesses to function.

The lesson he wanted to pass on

In 2022, he also described RockUpwork, a course created with support from Ukraine's Ministry of Digital Transformation. Its subject was practical selling for creative and IT professionals. Lazarev set an ambition of helping bring $100 million into Ukraine's economy by sharing what he had learned about earning from international customers.

That figure was a goal. Its significance lies in the mechanism: teach many other people to win contracts, rather than try to route every contract through his own company. A founder's knowledge of proposals and profiles is less photogenic than an award-winning homepage. It can still be valuable to someone trying to land the next project.

His professional biography extends this teaching impulse into mentoring designers and participating in design organizations. He describes himself as a professional member of AIGA and a member of the Art Directors Club of Europe. He has also publicly announced judging the Shorty Awards. Winning, evaluating and explaining work have become neighboring parts of his career.

When the interface makes a promise

AI has given Lazarev a fresh version of his old business question. What should a person expect when the software can generate an answer, make a decision or act on a request? A button once promised a fairly specific action. A conversational box can invite almost anything. That is a considerable responsibility for a rectangle.

At the 2025 AI INFRA SUMMIT, he spoke about product experience and expectations. The event's account described a design problem that continues beyond the first impressive demonstration: people need continuing value and reasons to trust what the product does. A system can produce a remarkable result once and still be difficult to live with.

His later conversation with Keith Newman widened that discussion to chat, generative interfaces and conversational agents. They explored a web in which software agents could become important users themselves, and experiences could anticipate needs without demanding so much visible interaction. These are propositions about where design may go. They also challenge the assumption that more interface always means more product.

Lazarev's writing returns to research as the foundation for those decisions. In an article on AI UX research, the agency argues for testing failure as carefully as success, keeping human judgment over research conclusions, and helping users trust a system in proportion to what it can actually do. The unglamorous recovery after a wrong answer deserves attention alongside the polished demo.

A voice, a video, another Webby

Elva makes the discussion tangible. The mobile AI video editor lets someone describe a desired video by voice. The product handles tasks including choosing clips, editing and music. Lazarev.agency designed its brand, persona and interface as parts of one product experience. The designer's problem includes how to make an instruction feel understandable and how to carry the user through the work that follows.

In 2026, Elva won the Webby People's Voice award for AI Visual Design. The distance from the agency's 2022 self-promotional website is instructive. A studio once used its own site to demonstrate what it could make. Now a client product could demonstrate how its approach worked when the main interaction was a spoken request.

His June 2026 article on AI product roadmaps makes a related argument: shipping a feature does not finish the job when a model's behavior continues to meet real users in unpredictable circumstances. The roadmap must accommodate learning after launch. The designer who began by watching whether websites brought customers has found another reason to keep watching.

Lazarev's career has acquired international offices, judging invitations and an imposing spiral of metal. The durable part is a habit of asking how the thing will work for the person using it. A watch needs a buyer. An agency needs a client. An AI product needs someone willing to come back tomorrow. There is plenty of design work in the space between a first impression and a second visit.