For founders
We work directly with founders to help them unpack ideas into detailed product designs.
For product owners
We create custom design systems to keep all interaction patterns consistent across products.
For dev teams
We provide detailed specs, audits, and support to ensure every feature is shipped with the correct UI and UX.
We partner with early-stage and growing SaaS, Media, and Fintech startups to help them go to market, improve business metrics, build elevated product experiences, and establish a customer-centric design culture.
When we partner with your company, we become an extension of your organization. We’ll attend the necessary meetings and daily rituals and join your Slack and Figma workspaces. We'll work very closely with founders, product owners, and dev leads to learn about your business's nuances just like your own design team.
We assess all existing screens, flows, and interactions to create a baseline of business logic, information architecture, layouts, and design patterns. This allows us to identify UX and UI issues and often helps us recognize opportunities to create better business outcomes.
Armed with the findings from the audit, we create a set of designs and flows to optimize for specific outcomes. We consider the needs of business, end user, and developers to create an efficient flow, beautiful UI, and re-usable design patterns to accelerate development.
Design systems are libraries of components that show how elements look, behave, and combine to create complex layouts. They are instrumental in developing, maintaining, and evolving complex products with a high degree of consistency, quality, and faster time to market.
We design high-fidelity screens, arrange them into flows with detailed annotations, build style guides, and prepare the assets for developers. For complex interactions or nuanced flows, we will record video walkthroughs or jump on a Zoom call with your developers.
For Propel, design is more about problem-solving than the visual wow factor. While our work is visually sophisticated, we believe in functional design that adapts well to perpetual use. Since we build business tools and consumer apps that are meant to be used constantly, we optimize for visual sophistication while trying to keep things clean and elegant for repeat use.
It all started on a home PC in a small 9th-floor apartment on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, in the late ‘90s, when a teenage Vlad Khomutov taught himself Photoshop to design sci-fi-inspired interfaces for fun. Many pro bono projects later, an IT firm hired Vlad to create a website, inspiring him to become a freelance web designer.
What followed was a decade of designing and building software for startups, banks, telecoms, and automakers - from ERP platforms, FTP clients, and Flash games to online backup apps, countless websites, and Blackberry apps. Vlad founded several technology companies, discovering how much engineering-led startups lacked access to design.
Since 2016, we have focused on helping early-stage and growing SaaS, FinTech, and Media Tech startups by creating a design-led product development culture. We partner with founders, product owners, and dev teams to help them turn concepts into detailed product designs and build sophisticated product experiences.
Propel offers a rare combination of understanding the user experience a deep knowledge of technology and an eye for design.
Gaetano Carpino
Havas Worldwide
A significant contributor to the organization; Propel delivers with confidence under stressful client situations.
Kevin Kimsa
Partner, Scaleup Ventures
Propel was able to distill the design process to a simple well-defined plan. Their insights and talent were essential to my startup.
Owen Wong
Founder, Judith Healthcare
Excellent designers whose work is elegantly intertwined with technology.
Bryce Johnson
Microsoft
A catalyst, Propel brings a unique skill set to the table, an ability to crystallize ideas into tangible product.
Jonas Brandon
Partner at Metric
As a visionary and an architect, Vlad possesses a rare skill set that makes him invaluable.
William Haig
Founder at Webreel
You want Propel on your team; They always positively contribute to fun and respectful work culture.
Maxinne Abuyuan
Creative director, Mirum
Vlad is an exceptional team lead and maintains laser focus on customer needs to get it done.
Dijay Jadiya
Delivery lead, SapientRazorfish
RBC
Fast Venture
Webreel
Viafoura
Drip
The Chosen
Angel Studios
Capbase
Trinsic
