Nick Mikulin

I combine design thinking with technical awareness and product management experience to design, prototype, and ship user interfaces.

I co-founded and designed MODUL, a presentation tool for busy people, and created a minimalist self-reflection app smthmind.

I simplify product experiences as Staff Designer at Manychat and teach product design ↗ at Harbour.Space University in Barcelona.

Nick Mikulin

MODUL

For years I watched developers, teachers, students, and seniors struggle with presentation tools that are overly complex and clunky. I wanted to make slide building easy and playful for people who need to present but don't have time to fight the software. Together with a technical co-founder, I built the product from scratch — covering user research, design, and UI development with React. Try for free at modul.page ↗

MODUL Screenshot 1
MODUL Screenshot 0

smthmind.com

Challenged myself to code solo and ship a working product over a weekend. Built a clean, minimalist web app for quick reflections using IndexedDB for local-only data storage. Achieved 5th Product of the Day ↗ on Product Hunt and open sourced ↗ it. In 2025 with the help of Claude Code I converted it into a minimalist iOS application and published it on the App Store. Try the Web App ↗ or download the iOS App ↗

smthmind hero
smthmind iOS screens
smthmind web app

Manychat

As a Staff Designer I lead product-wide design projects across sign-up, billing, navigation, information architecture, and UX patterns. Recent examples: I redesigned the WhatsApp sign-up flow, which raised the connection rate by over 10% and brought median account connection time down from 7.4 to 6 min. I reworked our color system for accessibility, recalculating tints to fix contrast issues and shipping the update myself.

Building vision prototypes with Claude Code like this one ↗
Manychat Design Setting visual direction
Designed conversational builder for visual flows
Manychat Color Fix Fixed UI colors for accessibility
Page Anatomy Redefined page anatomy for product-wide consistency

Experience

Since 2022
Senior → Staff Product DesignerManychat

I lead product-wide design projects across sign-up, billing, navigation, information architecture, and UX patterns. In addition to design work, I've also helped hire and onboard 15 designers and design managers through more than 95 interviews.

2021 – 2022
Product Designer → Design Team LeaderOzon

Redesigned Ozon Advertising Platform and later led the team of two designers. Built a design system to balance delivery speed and quality.

2020 – 2021
Lead DesignerGazprombank

Led presentation design for IT department of a top-5 Russian bank, from building slides and prototypes to helping with keynote delivery.

2019 – 2020
Freelance Designer

Used my presentation making skills to design slides and coach keynote delivery at major Russian tech companies and several startups.

2018 – 2019
Account ManagerHuawei

Managed smartphone supply and sales for federal retail. Learned a lot about hardware retail, but realised that my interest is back in software.

2017 – 2018
Business Development Product ManagerRedmadrobot

Did pre-sale analytics and product management at Russia's biggest mobile app development studio. Learned a lot about design. Loved designing presentations and later switched to doing them full-time.

Education

2016
Product Management InternYandex

Learned best practices of product management and user research from Yandex employees. Teamed up with a designer and developer interns, and delivered a complete Android app in 6 weeks.

2013 – 2017
B.A. Computational LinguisticsHSE Moscow

Instead of learning a specific language, studied how languages work as systems. Learned Python, basics of frontend, and data analysis.