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Management Blueprint | Steve PredaAuthor: Steve Preda
Interviews with CEOs and Entrepreneurs about the frameworks they are using to build and scale their businesses. Language: en-us Genres: Business, Entrepreneurship, Management Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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344: Build User Experiences That Work with Anastasia Golovko
Friday, 10 July, 2026
Anastasia Golovko, President and CEO of Tino Digital Agency, is helping businesses build user experiences that work by creating intuitive digital experiences that simplify complex systems and improve the way people interact with technology. By combining strategy, design, and engineering, she helps startups, enterprises, and organizations in highly regulated industries deliver products that people actually enjoy using. In this conversation, Anastasia introduces the Agency Growth Framework: Build Relationships, Find What’s Broken, Help Your Team Flourish, Nurture Creativity, and Offer Your Customers Relief. She explains why trust is the foundation of lasting client relationships, how identifying user friction creates immediate value, and why empowering creative teams leads to better products and stronger business outcomes. Anastasia also shares how eliminating user friction through live UX audits accelerates business growth, improves customer satisfaction and conversion rates, and demonstrates the importance of user experience in government digital services. — Build User Experiences That Work with Anastasia Golovko Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Anastasia Golovko, President and CEO of Tino Digital Agency, a team of experts specializing in helping companies and startups achieve their goals by providing comprehensive solutions in strategy, design, and engineering. Anastasia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Well, it’s very interesting that you combine strategy, design, and engineering. I have not seen this combination before. So where does this come from? The foundation for all of this is user experience and the connection to the user that we’re trying to build for many companies. As soon as you start thinking about the user and their experience, they get to enjoy the product more and more, and they get to find the buttons that the clients want them to find in their product. Okay. So basically, you have to have a strategy first, then you come up with a design, and then you engineer it. Yeah. The design supports the strategy, and then you have a good product. Exactly. We also work with startups, and we work with established companies. With startups, we encourage them to reach the market as fast as possible so that they get to prove their hypothesis. Because up until it reaches the customer and starts getting feedback from the customer, it’s all in numbers. It’s all in the… But it’s still a hypothesis of how it will perform. The sooner we’re there—with as few features as possible, while still being valuable—the better. Some clients call it an MVP, and some clients call it a Minimum Lovable Product. Then they can start getting feedback, and those relationships start building between the final user and the product. Yeah, that makes sense. And Lovable is actually also a vibe coding platform, isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. Maybe that’s where it comes from—that you can get a lovable MVP very fast with vibe coding. So let me start by asking you, what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in Tino Digital Agency? I recalled such a wonderful story that I want to share with everyone from my childhood. I was born when it was still the USSR. I’m originally from Ukraine, and when the USSR fell apart, everyone was poor. When I was 13 years old, I remember talking to my friends and saying, “When I grow up, I’m going to drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee.” They completely mocked me. They said, “That’s impossible.” I remember that question to this day: “Do you even know how much money that costs? Have you ever seen that much money?” My brain just flipped a switch. I thought to myself, “That’s just money. It can be made.” Money is there to be made. That mindset, I think, separated me from my childhood friends by giving myself permission to dream big without limitations. Just like somebody dreamed about sending a car to space, they gave themselves permission to think that up. So, ironically, I ended up owning a Jeep Grand Cherokee. We had it for 10 years. A while ago, there were floods in Houston, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee has very good ground clearance, so we were able to get through them. After I got that car, I remembered this conversation from back in the day. So we started our agency with zero capital and zero connections. Without growing into connections here, that created a set of blocks. So we were attracted to subcontracting for top agencies in LA, Silicon Valley, and Switzerland. Eventually, we landed a massive contract with one of the top Swiss banks, modernizing their digital products as well as rethinking their strategy toward the younger generation. That was my wake-up call. I realized, “Wow, we’re incredibly good at this.” The Swiss bank had such high standards that we had to fit within their branding. They couldn’t rebrand just because we thought something up. We had to fit into their tight branding and produce a good product within those guidelines. It made me look around the States and realize that—I had already lived here for more than half of my life—we have so much anxiety around finance and healthcare. After that moment, I decided to move our company in those two directions. Maybe our team can actually reduce that anxiety and make a real dent in the well-being of the nation—the well-being of the people who interact with products that are convenient, don't add to the problem, but instead resolve it and make it intuitive.Share on X Yeah. That’s great. I never heard the combination of finance and healthcare phrased this way—that both of them are a big source of anxiety for people. And if you can fix their problems in these areas, then you can actually reduce their anxiety and increase their well-being. That makes perfect sense. I also love the example of, you know, “what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve” kind of thing. Visualization is very powerful. It worked in my life as well. So this is a podcast about frameworks. It’s called Management Blueprint, and what I’m looking for is some kind of, it could be a mental model. It could be some kind of process. Something that simplifies the world and allows you to see things more clearly, make better decisions, or create a bigger impact. So what comes to mind? I love this question. I love this question, and I love viewing the answers from your other guests to this question, and how everybody approaches it differently. For different people, it is their own world that they built. So, in our world, first, we build relationships. No cold calls. We build these relationships with our clients and with our team.Share on X The digital agency market is oversaturated with low-quality providers who sign the client, then disappear for four weeks, come back, and drop a product that doesn’t relate at all. Then they come to us. Some of our clients come to us and say that the agency disappears. It’s really important for us to stay in contact. So our first step is building these in-person relationships. That also means visiting conferences, visiting events, showing up wherever it’s needed—before, during, and after the process as well. So I think what we do by building relationships is that we sell trust, not just the code or the design. Of course. Yeah, that makes sense. In this AI age, when there’s so much noise. When you’re online, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. But when you meet someone in person at a conference, then you know they’re a flesh-and-blood human being. Yes. And also, describing to a person that user experience is important, that I can do it, and that I do it really well doesn’t really give them value. Rather than just telling them, I can look through the site face to face and find certain things that are broken right there on the spot. It’s not a simple presentation. It’s already proof of my value. So that helps. So that’s first. The next one is the human element. The human element of the team. Our designers and developers are not machines. Each of those teams needs its own approach. They need their own conditions to flourish. They need their own conditions to be successful. If we keep a creative person locked into FinTech, compliance-driven products for too long, they’ll burn out. It’s two-faced. We try to avoid that as much as possible, but we consider what they’re telling us. We listen. If a designer tells us something isn’t working out, or they’ve hit a creative block, we try to rotate them, give them different exercises, give them a break, and so on. So, listening and rotating. Rotating between different types of projects. But whenever the FinTech project comes back, we need the FinTech team to work on it. So at this point… Sorry, I have a clarifying question. The previous point was helping your team flourish, basically. By rotating them, is it about helping them gain more experience, not burn out, or create more ideas? So what’s behind this idea of rotating? It’s the creativity that for it to exist, it needs different challenges. Let’s imagine a FinTech dashboard. It’s tables. It’s tabular. It’s a similar task that they’re solving. They’re solving how to convert tabular formats into digestible formats. Converting tabular formats into something that the user can comprehend quickly. With a food delivery app or a calorie-tracking app, they get to add more colors, use different styles, and solve a different problem. So I think that when they get to solve different problems, they keep their full creative potential.Share on X Yeah. You’re not allowing them to fall into a rut and just go on autopilot, basically. Not everyone. Not everyone. We mainly listen. We listen, and whenever we hear the signs that a person is asking for something more creative, we do that. Happy humans build great products. Yeah, that’s true. And we’re a service company. Our team is our main advantage. All right. So you build relationships, you find what’s broken, you help your team flourish, you stimulate or nurture their creativity. So what’s next? What’s the last piece of the puzzle? Is there another piece of the puzzle, or is that it? Yes. The next step is to provide relief. We could be building everything for everyone, but over time—my company is 10 years old now—and over those 10 years, we became really good at turning something that is complex or heavily regulated. For some reason, clients know that it has to be intuitive. To be competitive, it has to be convenient. Sometimes it’s in industries where they have a lot of competition. Whoever is more convenient for the client will move forward. Not for the client—I mean, for the final user. Apple philosophy. Yeah. So, to be a relief, to be their right hand, we need to be looking for companies that are undergoing some changes. Maybe it’s a digital transformation. Once, we completed a merger for companies that were providing hosting and security. They merged into one. They needed all of that infrastructure to be brought together. Their internal teams were too busy doing their internal tasks. So for that overhaul, that digital transformation, we come in as a relief squad with the skill to make it intuitive. So we can call it becoming a reliefShare on X Offering relief. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a mindset, really. It’s thinking about, “How can I make these people’s lives easier? can I help them do their work better, with less mental strain and less cognitive load?” And for them, in the end, it’s for their users as well. I often say that we build experiences that work. Every business owner comes up with an idea of what they want their end users to do, but they don’t always find it. They don’t always find it because, somewhere along that chain, there was a UX designer, a UI designer, and a developer who all worked together on that user experience, and something didn’t go right. Typically, with a little bit of data, or just complaints, or just suggestions, the owners and the product owners know what’s not working. They can see that some registrations aren’t happening, some sign-ups aren’t happening, some applications aren’t being filled out completely, and so on. Some tickets aren’t getting booked. Marketing worked fine, but somehow the carts are being abandoned. Why is my cart being abandoned at the moment when we spend so much money on marketing? We don’t do marketing. We know what marketing is trying to do, but what happened then? So you’re treating the client’s effort as a complex system, and you want to optimize that system so that everything serves the same purpose, it’s simple, and you have a team that keeps improving it. Yeah. If they have some kind of Google Analytics or Hotjar analytics, it’s always easier to put a number to the words. We can say that this user experience is broken because the consumer is overloaded at the cart. Maybe you’ve seen those shopping carts where there’s a timer, additional upsells, and also some additional decisions they have to make, whether they want insurance or not, and so on. It becomes very overloaded. Sometimes people just close it. It’s too much. So we look at the cart and see how it can be improved to be more pleasant. Yeah. That’s great. That’s fantastic. So, switching gears here a little bit, what drives growth in your particular business? That’s what I actually started to talk about. I now realize that this friction audit, UX review, UX evaluation—that gives immediate value. It is the foundation of our business growth.Share on X The thing is how it’s delivered. If I present it in a room and talk about user experience, how it’s important, and how to lay things out, the perceived value is hard to communicate. It can sound abstract unless we’re talking about something specific. Our real growth driver is a live, maybe casual, friction audit. For example, at a recent conference, a business owner asked me to look at her website. Right there on my phone, I pointed out a few specific UX blocks that were delaying the purchase. I was like, “Look here. Every second user is delayed. They’re drifting away. They have to make two extra clicks to get where they need to be. This click is not necessary. You can remove it. You can place it here instead.” Control dropped. She said, “That’s exactly what I needed.” When business owners see exactly where they’re losing money in real time, that value is undeniable. So you go to these conferences, then you talk to people, they show you their website, and you point out a couple of friction points. Immediately they see, “Wow, you guys could fix that.” That already is value. Then, probably, if you found two friction points in two minutes, if you dive deeper, then you’ll find a lot more, right? Yeah. That is the ultimate path, which we don’t always take. We can only go to so many conferences and have so many of these conversations. But the opportunity to have that conversation is where the most growth comes from. That’s the optimal way to grow—by showing, not just telling. We definitely have a good presence on the platform for designers called Dribbble. If you search on Dribbble for finance or FinTech products, you'll find me. That already speaks to our experience.Share on X But this kind of conversion of experience into value for our clients, for those business owners, that’s an add-on. That doesn’t come from a pretty picture. I have many pretty layouts, and those who understand user experience can see it, but that’s not always the case. To understand user experience, you have to have experience. You have to be in that area. Typically, that’s for repeat entrepreneurs. A part of our clients are serial entrepreneurs who keep opening businesses. They can’t stop opening businesses. I think when you’re in that mindset, it’s hard to stop. Yeah. Some people are good at starting companies, and other people are good at building companies and growing them. Yeah. So what’s one thing, Anastasia, that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? I’m actively trying to figure out how to get into the government space—government contracting. That’s a whole different animal. To get a government contract, one of the rating criteria is previous government experience. Today, it’s 2026. Every agency has a website. It means they have a vendor. It means they’ve had a vendor, or somebody has a preferred group of vendors, and so on. Large companies are taking a big part of that market. The market is oversaturated. Somebody comes in and does a website for dirt cheap, and it’s not good. Not always, but we’ve seen it. We’ve been trying to break into our local market in the city near where I used to live. They had an RFP for a website. I thought, “Oh, I wish I could do that. I know them so well.” But another company came in with a lower offer. I think the website became worse than it was before. You know, there’s a big gap between commercial company websites and government websites. You try to pay a bill to the government, like taxes, and there are a million clicks. It’s so complicated, and it doesn’t have to be. I can totally relate to this. I say, “Why don’t these people fix this up?” And I think it partially comes from one of the points that I was making before. It’s that understanding user experience and understanding the value of it isn’t a given. It’s not something that existed a while ago. That was not one part of the rubric when they evaluated the offers. Exactly. It has to match the existing system. It has to transmit data. It has to be ADA compliant. But nowhere does it say that it has to be convenient for the users. Yeah. And we can quantify it. We can gather a user group, gather their feedback, and so on. So right now, on Monday, I’m doing a demo for our first nearly completed government contract. That client actually prioritizes user experience, and she asked, “Could we possibly do user testing with my actual users?” I cannot tell you how much I love that question. Just the fact that she prioritizes that is exactly what we do. Yeah. Well, you bring a lot of passion to solving problems, and I love that. So if you had a magic wand to fix one thing inside your company in the next 12 months, what would that be? Being the person who’s always trying to fix something—and in my family, it’s great that I have my business, because otherwise I’d be going around fixing them. Yeah. Yes. My husband would be just enough. So I think the first thing would be to focus on our team and make sure they're always heard. That they get the time they need. That they get their problems resolved on time by senior leadership, by HR, or by whoever is needed.Share on X I’ve noticed several situations where that’s been postponed, or the person doesn’t speak up, or they see that I’m busy, someone else is busy, and they just think, “We didn’t want to bother you.” Then there comes a point where they’re not happy. That’s too late. We don’t want them to become unhappy. So if I had a magic wand, I would make sure that my team is heard. That’s the most important thing. Once they’re heard, then we can see if it’s solvable, if it’s not solvable, and so on. Yeah. That’s very important because, ultimately, you said that you want a happy team. Because a happy team does great work. If people feel heard, they’re going to be happier and deliver. And if somebody’s selling widgets, it’s the equivalent of saying, “I want my widget to be perfect.” For my widget to be perfect… Because we test for skill before we hire, so they already have the skill. They already have good teamwork. I think the environment that we’ve built is already there. We have those foundations for them to be able to apply themselves properly. But then, what if something happens along the way? Yeah. Love it. I love this human-centric approach that you take—not just for your team, but also how you look at the human user experience, the people, to improve the lives of your customers by designing good products. Yeah. So if someone would like to take advantage of your services, or they have some friction that they want to alleviate, or they’re a government agency and they figure, “Well, maybe these guys down in Houston can help us,” where can they reach you, and how can they connect with you personally? It’s very easy. Tino.design is our website. There, you can schedule a call with me. Just choose any time on my calendar and speak with me or my right-hand person. Alexander is also available. Whichever time is more convenient, we can just have a conversation and see whether we can help or not. Okay. So you heard Anastasia Golovko, President and CEO of Tino Digital Agency, down in Houston. She really cares about your company, your user experience, and making sure your people aren’t frustrated using your technology. If you liked what you heard, reach out to them. Check out Tino.design. Book a call. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us on YouTube, give us a review on Apple Podcasts, and stay tuned because every week we have an exciting entrepreneur come and share their best-kept secret framework with us. So thanks, Anastasia, for coming, and thank you for listening. Thank you, Steve. Important Links: Anastasia’s LinkedIn Anastasia’s website
