Скриншот: Алексей Кирдяев
Alexey Kirdyaev, a product designer working in London fintech, surveyed 21 product professionals from Central Asia and conducted 6 interviews. The main finding: only 3 say designers have the final say on design and product decisions. Almost half the respondents, 10 people, work in Kazakhstan. Kirdyaev shared the results and his comments with raem.kz.
Only 3 out of 21 get to make the call
Asked who usually settles disagreements over design and product decisions, 6 respondents named the CEO or business head. Another 6 said it “depends on the project.” The product manager was chosen by 3 respondents, the designer or design lead by another 3, and a joint team decision based on data by 2. One respondent wrote: “The product manager by default, but you can escalate it.”
“That figure struck me because of another number alongside it: on average, designers rated their influence on the product at 4 out of 5. There were no ratings of 1 or 2 at all. So the designer has influence, but someone else makes the final call,” Kirdyaev says.
He puts this down to what decisions are based on. Of the 21 respondents, 17 cited the designer’s expert opinion as a basis for decisions, while 7 cited A/B tests. “When an argument comes down to one opinion against another, the person higher up the hierarchy wins. That makes sense,” he says.
The interviews offered different perspectives. A product designer in the B2B division of a major bank in Kyrgyzstan described a strict hierarchy: “If someone higher up doesn’t like something, we redo it.” A director at an Uzbek medtech company usually leaves the choice between options to the team.
A third of teams do no research
For 7 of the 21 respondents, there is virtually no systematic user research. For another 5, designers mostly do it themselves, while 4 have a dedicated research team. Another 7 respondents cited neither product analytics nor A/B tests as a basis for decisions.
Of the 21 respondents, 10 join once the task has already been defined: 4 receive a finished specification and 6 a defined problem. The other 11 get involved earlier.
Without a research budget, designers use what they have: examples from competitors or 3 options shown to colleagues. The strongest approach Kirdyaev heard about came from the sole designer at an Uzbek fintech company. He argues with the product manager for half an hour, then uses AI to build a working prototype and show why the idea will not work. “It’s harder to argue with a working screen than with an opinion,” Kirdyaev says.
Another story came from a bank in Kazakhstan. A designer and tech lead from a fintech agency, working within the bank, surveyed designers and product managers together with the head of design. They found that managers expected designers to take the initiative, while designers thought they were not allowed to. It took more than 2 years for product managers to start bringing analytics to reviews on their own.
The online cash register form had to stay awkward to use
Regulatory and legal requirements were named as the factor with the biggest influence on design by 15 of the 21 respondents. That was more than users’ cultural characteristics (13), payment habits such as QR payments and transfers (12), or multilingualism (11). Kirdyaev adds a caveat: this partly reflects a skew in the sample. Of the respondents, 12 work in fintech and banking, and 11 of them cited regulation.
The clearest example came from Kazakhstan. The sole designer at a contractor building online cash registers and fiscal data services split a long form into 3 steps. During development, it turned out that this would not work: government APIs had to be called in a strict sequence, and data could not be stored between steps. “So yes, this is how the form is going to be, and it’s going to be awkward to use,” he said.
“My conclusion: regulation is not an obstacle but material to work with in design. You need to learn about it at the start, not when you hand the work over to developers,” Kirdyaev says.
AI sped up developers, and design became the bottleneck
Of the 21 respondents, 16 said their teams had started actively using AI tools over the past 3 years. A total of 15 believe AI will change the profession more than anything else over the next 2–3 years. The questionnaire did not include a separate question about how often designers themselves use AI.
According to participants, AI already saves time on copy, summaries of specifications, draft questionnaires, translations and finding patterns. One interviewee uses it from the very start of a task: the same designer from the Uzbek fintech company. He gives the task straight to Claude, which builds an HTML prototype and, after a review, lays out the screens in Figma.
There are problems too. AI sped up developers, and some urgent features started shipping without design work, with mockups completed after release. Subscription limits became a new constraint. “I’m sitting here waiting for the 5-hour reset… my hands are tied,” one interviewee said. At one bank in Kyrgyzstan, the whole company was given access to corporate Codex, but only 1 of its 3 designers uses it.
“AI doesn’t change who makes the decision. You can put a mockup together quickly, but the business still sets the priorities,” Kirdyaev says.
Five tips for designers who want to influence the product
Kirdyaev spent 2 years working at Uzum in Tashkent and now lives in London. His conversations with colleagues left him with 5 tips.
- Before presenting your work, find out who can actually approve or block a decision. It could be a director, a product manager, a marketer with research of their own, or a ministry behind the director.
- Ask about constraints at the start. Find out which fields are mandatory, who requires them and which systems the user flow depends on.
- Bring evidence your manager trusts. If there is no research budget, show examples from competitors, alternative designs or a working prototype.
- Take the initiative, even if you feel no one expects it.
- Learn to use AI yourself, on your own tasks.
How the survey was conducted
Kirdyaev distributed the Russian-language questionnaire through Telegram channels and LinkedIn, collecting responses from August 8 to 25, 2026. There were 21 respondents: 10 from Kazakhstan, 6 from Uzbekistan, 3 from Tajikistan and 2 from Kyrgyzstan. Of these, 15 were product designers and 4 were design leads or heads of design. From October 15 to 24, he conducted 6 interviews lasting 30–45 minutes each: 3 with participants from Kazakhstan, 2 from Uzbekistan and 1 from Kyrgyzstan.
The sample is small and non-random. Of the respondents, 12 work in fintech and banking, and 11 work at companies with more than 1,000 employees. Kirdyaev himself cautions that this is not a representative picture of the market, that the data cannot be used to compare countries, and that participants probably overestimate their own influence. Participants are anonymous: only their role, industry and country are given. One interviewee is a former colleague of Kirdyaev’s.
Who has the final say on your team?
