Don’t Build for Your Dog: The Case for Human-Centered Design in a World Obsessed with AI

When founders design products for themselves, or worse, for their “dog,” failure is almost inevitable.

In this episode of The Disruptor Podcast, host John Kundtz sits down with Oksana Kovalchuk, founder and CEO of ANODA. 

This leading UX/UI design agency has guided more than 200 startups through Techstars and beyond.

From writing her first line of code at age five to mentoring thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide, Oksana has seen the same mistakes repeat themselves:

👉 Building solutions for a problem only one person has

👉Scaling too soon—or not thinking about scale at all

👉Adding endless features instead of releasing an MVP

👉Trusting AI “hallucinations” instead of real customer feedback

Oksana explains why walking in the user’s shoes is the single most critical step in building products that work, scale, and actually get adopted.

She shares practical frameworks, from card sorting to real-world user validation, that keep startups from wasting months (and millions) on products no one wants.

Listeners will also hear:

1. Why relying on AI without data or training leads to dead ends

2. How to use the “pizza slice” approach to launch MVPs in three months or less

3. Why ignoring cultural and regulatory differences can sink global expansion

This episode is a must-listen for founders, product managers, and anyone tired of bloated apps that ignore the human experience.

To learn more about Oksana and ANODA, visit her website and connect with Oksana on LinkedIn or follow her on X.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to the Disruptor Podcast
• 0:50 Meet Oksana: From Childhood Coder to UX/UI Expert
• 4:18 Common Mistakes Founders Make
• 9:12 The Importance of User Experience
• 13:16 Building and Scaling Your Startup
• 15:55 Business Model Canvas and Financial Planning
• 19:45 Mentoring Startups: Fast and Effective Strategies
• 22:04 Final Thoughts and Advice for Founders
• 25:16 Conclusion and Contact Information

Transcript

John Kundtz: 0:01

Don't build for your dog the case for human-centered design in a world obsessed with AI. Hi everyone, I'm John Kundtz. I'm the host of the Disruptor podcast. For those that are new to our show, the Disruptor series is your blueprint for groundbreaking innovation. We started the podcast in December of 2022 as a periodic segment of the Apex podcast. Our vision was to go beyond conventional wisdom by confronting the status quo and exposing the raw power of disruptive thinking, and today's guest embodies that spirit. She wrote her first line of code at age five and now runs a global UX UI agency that's helped over 200 startups scale smarter by making design decisions that actually reflect human behavior. Today, we explore how to bridge that gap from back-end logic and product experience and uncover the most common mistakes founders make as they try to scale. Welcome to the show, oksana.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 1:16

Hi John, Thank you for inviting me.

John Kundtz: 1:19

It's great to have you. You're from Turkey, correct?

Oksana Kovalchuk: 1:23

Yeah, these days I'm in Turkey enjoying the sea.

John Kundtz: 1:26

As I mentioned in our prep show, it's one of my favorite countries. I really enjoyed traveling there on business, so it's very lovely. Great ancient culture, great food, great tea. All in all, it's a wonderful place. So glad you could make it today. So, as we get started, tell us a little bit about your background, your education, your experiences. How did you get into this business? You can start anywhere you want.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 1:54

Oh, of course, as you mentioned, I wrote my first line of code when I was five. My both parents are also software developers and I was so engaged and so obsessed with computers in childhood, Like with games. I want to play games, I want to like not to be bored, because when you're a kid you want to explore everything. And then in school we had programming classes. Then I become a student also for software development and learn as much as I could.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 2:28

Yeah, like it was a tough time because it was early 20, uh, 20, 00 and like not so many options we had. But like I started then my first job in very big outsourcing giants like E-Pump, C-Cloom, Exadel. But I've noticed the same problem everywhere Nobody. They less care about the people, but of course as a business they care about the money and the processes inside for the clients. For me as an employee, they were frustrating. They were really really frustrating. So just in a few years to be like brave and not very smart, that time I was very young, I was like around 21. And I decided to open my agency. Like it's really a very good age to start doing something to explore and just we start to get more and more clients, more and more jobs and like right now we're around 30 people and I'm helping the startups for a decade. So right now it's around 13 years for my agency and over 20 years then I'm working IT field.

John Kundtz: 3:49

So here, like geography of what I'm doing and my background, that's fantastic, Working in large outsourcing arena for most of my career, but also working now with lots of startups and early stage companies. The whole focus on creating a user experience is, in my mind, one of the most important things a startup company can make. What are some of the biggest mistakes, though, you've seen as you work with founders when they're trying to take sort of this traditional tech first approach to product development and design.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 4:31

Oh, it will be a very long list, but the biggest problem, the first top one they are not thinking about how they're going to scale it. They're going to scale it, so what I mean? For example, usually if it's a tech founder, he or she mostly thinks about solving the problem that this person experienced by himself. But you need to see when you're releasing the product to the market, you need to understand how many buyers you can attract, how many people experiencing the same problem. Maybe you're unique here and you can sell 10 copies and that's all. So the scaling, it's really important.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 5:15

The second part it's put user first. Walk in the user's shoes. Sometimes both business and tech entrepreneurs they're starting solving problem in their own way. They're not thinking about okay, will this solution be helpful for the user? Because sometimes the startups and new products they just drop out of the market just because it's not more efficient than do it like in old school way. So this is the second thing.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 5:48

The third one I think nobody pays attention to the scope creep. So we started building, for example, the MVP yeah, I hear like you're laughing because this pain is everywhere. So you start building the MVP. Then you start thinking, oh, my God, if I wouldn't add this feature, like from this competitor, nobody gonna buy my product. And then it happens again, again and again and the scope for the MVP becomes like two years roadmap for the very small product and still zero users, zero real feedback. Because sometimes you can build that feature but, for example, only few users using this in your competitors. But like, don't spend money on something that just hypothesis in your mind. Test it with real feedback. Start asking your mom, dad, dog, friends, everyone.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 6:53

When we designing something in our agency, our designers, they go in like to the streets, they meet on friends. They start asking, asking anyone in that room, like, hey, are we building this one? What do you think about? Like, grab as much opinions as you can, but the huge like, the huge consideration, you need to validate that opinions. Like if you're gonna ask your grandma about building this feature where she's not aware of, probably her feedback wouldn't be very relevant.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 7:29

So it relies us to the fourth point that I want to mention validate the feedback. Because sometimes startup founders they are so worried, so stressed, they start consulting with everyone, like even talking to the dog or cat, and then consider this feedback as valuable. It's very like high-level valuable and the problem for us. For example, we try to guide our clients. The problem is the feedback will be totally different, like you have three options or two options and in the same time we can have light background and the dark background in the same time, without two different versions. But it's often when we receive feedback like this and then we're guiding this and trying to validate with bigger amount of respondents, bigger amount of interviews, to qualify what's better for the product. But again, the more data you have it's better, but a lot of data is your enemy.

John Kundtz: 8:38

I wholeheartedly agree and I've seen these mistakes over and over and over again, especially for tech founders. Having spent some time, like you, mentoring and helping tech startups, I see, as you pointed out, tech folks trying to build technical solutions and not necessarily solutions people want to buy or use. And, by the way, we used to make that same mistake at IBM over and over and over again. I could go through examples from the 80s and the 90s, probably all the way up to today. Also, walking in the persona's shoes understanding your users and what they need is probably a whole lot different than what an engineer or a tech founder might think they need. And then your other point I had a guy that I used to work with. He said you know, there's three things you need to do.

John Kundtz: 9:30

When you're trying to do discovery, go talk to as many people as you can. When you're done with that, go talk to as many more people as you can. And when you're done with that, go talk to more people. When we were prepping for this, you talked about people talk to their dog and they design for your dog, and that's why I sort of weave that analogy into the show title. But you're spot on. I mean people talk to the wrong people or they think their experience is what everybody else's experience, and then they build something and it won't scale or, really more importantly, nobody cares, or the user experience is just not that good, so they just they don't buy it. So, with that thought and with that thinking, what is the one mindset or mindset shift or habit you wish every founder would adopt before building their next product?

Oksana Kovalchuk: 10:20

Yeah, I think. Pay attention. Start paying attention to everything what surrounds you. For example, five minutes ago, I had a fight with my microwave because the UX that it's built with it was I don't know. Some idiot created this because it shouldn't be like a slider to set a time. I want to pick one minute. Why I need to have this slider to slide it and it immediately slides to 30 minutes. Who's going to cook 30 minutes in the microwave? No, and this is about UX. It's about how users are going to feel when using your products, how users are going to use it and their needs. So in this time, in this case, I see they didn't do the job well In your case, like Alexander Osterwalder, business model canvas understand your business and your flow around what you're gonna build this house.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 11:22

The second one validate the opinion. I know that the tech guys usually talking to the tech guys Tech guys I'm from this band, but we're always thinking that we are smartest person in the room. You need to validate this because if you want to build for the users when you're hunting, if you want to hunt a duck, you need to think like a duck. So, guys, take our crowns down and go and speak to the real users, to the real people. I know 99% of us don't like speak to the people, but you need to decide what you want more to build a very good product and become rich, or don't talk to the people ever. So then, when you start talking to these people, pay attention, ask them can you use this software or something in front of my eyes and start paying attention to these stupid microwaves around it? If you see the buttons, the filters, the person, for example, exports all data to Excel, normalize it, then upload it again and struggle around help. See, then, how many people struggling with the same stuff and start doing something with this. And if you don't have an idea here, you have a flow. If you're thinking and considering about this idea again, see how people using competitors it's impossible right now to not have competitors for the new software. To be honest, more than a million, billions of different software already built. If you don't have direct competitors, of course, you will have indirect.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 13:06

So slice it by feature by feature and seek around with your additional feedback that you need to grab. Then, for the MVP, build fast. You need to release something in next three months. If you have an idea that I don't know needs years to build and years to release. Pick another or slice it like a cake or pizza and pick only one piece. Don't try to eat pizza or circle around Then three months.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 13:35

Yeah, you're very enthusiastic when you start. All we like fulfilling this fire inside our soul. We have so many energy but you will work for weeks without results. You will wait for these results and still like three months it's like minimum time to build MVP, just to create it. Then you need to release it and start marketing and start promotion and usually, like three months again, you need to see the very first small results.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 14:09

You need to keep this fire for at least half of the year to not burn out, because working without results, without really big achievements, it's really hard. And if you will postpone with your new ideas and you will add new features inside this product, then you will see result in a year or two. Money budget, don't forget. Second, working without result for a year or two, what reasons you're gonna have to not just stop it and leave it, just drop it and that's all Like okay. You'll say, okay, I've burned some budget some time. I have no energy to drive it to the next level or even release. This is the biggest. It's the core of all these things that happens to the founders.

John Kundtz: 15:02

There's some great things in there and let's unpack a couple of them. I love the pizza analogy because we use that all the time at IBM when I was there. Don't try to cook the whole pizza because you don't have time. We actually also used the 13 week or the three month analogy of build something, bang it out in 13 weeks or three months or a quarter, evaluate it, pivot if needed. You're not going to spend a lot of money. You're going to get good feedback. It's the classic fail fast and fail cheaply, because every startup is going to go through a series of pivots. I don't care where you are, especially right now as we introduce sort of this next wave of disruption of AI. The cloud wave definitely disrupted a lot of tech companies and certainly in the next wave here's going to even make more disruptive and things are going to move faster and faster.

John Kundtz: 15:55

I want to circle back on the business model canvas. So I don't know if all of our listeners are familiar with the business model canvas. I'm a big fan of it. I've used it with some of the classes that I teach for entrepreneurs. Just let's circle back in on it. Give us a little bit more background on it from your perspective and I'll put a link to some of the business model canvas information that I use with my students.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 16:19

Yeah, of course, some people like founders when they start in the startup, thinking okay, it will be for free for now and then I will figure out. No, you need to figure out, before you will send this idea to anyone, how you're going to earn money. It's not a charity. To be honest, I'm the founder of a service company. I think it's the same problem for every single founder of any business, from the cafe or copy point up to IBM founders. You overstressed 24-7. You have huge responsibility. You have financial responsibility, your emotions and everything. You own only one person who can take care of it, and when you start hiring, it's again the bigger responsibility. Don't don't fly in the sky like. Stand on earth and understand how your business model gonna work. Will it be service business model? You're gonna I don't know ship some kind of physical product, because even the tech startup it can be backed with a physical product. For example, a lot of things right now you can buy by subscription model, even like groceries, everything you can buy on the subscription model and still is a technical idea beside it AI startups, everything you need to calculate. For example, if you're doing AI, you're building something on LVM and you need to pay for it. And if you're doing something for free, then okay, you're not a business, you're a charity organization where you're taking all your income and cover bills. So start building a business and see profit points where you will cut your margins, where you will get these margins. Because if you're doing the service, build the financial model. See, okay, how many services, for example, we build the startup easy. All projects that start with Easy are never easy.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 18:27

We built the startup and the business model was to cut commission between the buyer and seller. So it's like a marketplace. And I said okay, let's emulate the situation where you have 100 companies and this amount of orders with this revenue. Will this revenue be enough for you? He said oh, no, because he decided to put commission less than Stripe even doing and it was for $10,000, it was around 300 bucks. No, and it's very small purchase. The check is pretty small, so there is almost nowhere when you can get the more margins Said okay, you will introduce the commission. Then let's do the ads for the shops that promoting on your marketplace. You can sell them ads, sell them packages, doing something. Then again we have users, we can sell something to them, you have user base. So we start thinking and we found additional 10 20 000 dollars per month where he can also grab the revenue. So thinking about it on every single point.

John Kundtz: 19:42

Great points. Let's move over to some of the stuff you've done. You've mentored over 200 startups through TechStarts, so what makes your approach a little different, especially when we're focusing on design to be so effective, especially for these early stage companies?

Oksana Kovalchuk: 20:10

the tech stars. I'm doing a lot of mentorship but in total it's around 1000 startups and always I telling them do it fast, find the connection for connect dots and do it fast. Start. Stop creating 101st block schema on the wall like start doing the real thing without all these ideas. Validate them, Because usually all these tech founders they have ideas more than money and more than time. Harsh truth.

John Kundtz: 20:36

Totally and, anna, I'd be interested from your perspective, particularly since we're working across the globe. I see a lot of people with a lot of good ideas but, as you mentioned earlier, they don't necessarily validate those ideas. And then they start to burn a lot of cash, especially in the software space, to build a product and spend money on developers and servers and SaaS providers. This is way before they even have an MVP and way before they validated their SOM and their SAM and their addressable market and in many cases I see them trying to go after too big a market. You mentioned that right. So start small. Know your users.

John Kundtz: 21:16

The tech stuff's great, but people don't buy for tech. Even if you have really great technology or a really great app, if the experience isn't any good, nobody's going to use it Because, as you mentioned, there's too many other competitors. So people are going to expect a superior experience. You said walk in their shoes. Understand what's important to that persona. Use the pizza analogy. Don't try to eat the whole pizza. Just a small slice. Make sure it's something that tastes good, cooks fast, doesn't cost a lot of money If they got to add pepperonis or take away the sausage or mushrooms or something like that you pivot along. So I think these are wonderful pieces of advice for our founders that are listening to the show as we wrap it up. Is there anything else I haven't asked you that you'd like to share with our listeners?

Oksana Kovalchuk: 22:05

I think the small note is also, when you're doing the startup idea right now, everything with AI. I think everyone saw this funny TikTok video what are you doing this year? Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai. Often AI startups they fail when they have no idea how they're going to train the model, because without training it's not worth nothing, because chat, gpt, you can use it. You need to train it by yourself. That's all. I attended too many pitch nights. The first question do you have trained AI model? No, goodbye, that's end of the conversation.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 22:47

So if you're doing something with AI, understand how you get the data, have the plan, how you will get the data. Then have the plan B, what you're going to do if the plan A is going to fail, and have the plan C at least. And of course, for listeners who, for example, building the startup from other countries and plan to expand, for example, in the United States or expand to other countries globally, think about the culture, think about the problems inside that countries. When I consulted in United Nations German Council, the problem was the German startups. They try to attract money for penetrating United States market, for example with healthcare applications, but the healthcare in the United States and in Germany. In Europe overall is different Different regulations, different processes, everything totally different. And they even didn't get the point where to have the telemedicine in the United States you need to have doctors with United States license. So, like, think of it, like from every, each point that's possible, it will help you to not fail like without a huge effort fail without a huge effort.

John Kundtz: 24:10

Great advice Experienced something similar to that where we were working with a company when we invested in. It was a healthcare company. It goes back to your scope creep conversation as well. So they got an opportunity in Europe. They put all of their focus and all of their funding into what the client in Europe needed, totally forgetting about really what their core market was, which is in the United States. But we essentially had to fire the CEO, the founder, because he was taking what was supposed to be a scalable SaaS company and morphed into a custom development organization where they were building for one specific client that couldn't scale in the United States because of all the unique rules in the European Union At the end of the day, because he was burning through all the cash and they had to get rid of him, had to go through another funding round just to make the cashflow so they could survive, and so the advice I'd have is follow your advice, Ascana, because at the end of the day, if you don't, and you've got investors, they're gonna say sorry, you're out of here and they're gonna be back out on the street.

John Kundtz: 25:16

So this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate it For those listening who want to stop building for their dogs, as we were talking about. Where can they find you and learn more about you and your company?

Oksana Kovalchuk: 25:32

Of course, you can visit my website, anodamobi. You can connect me with LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter where I, some day after week, trying to keep sharing really good insights about my life and about user experience what we see in this world.

John Kundtz: 25:52

That's awesome. We will, of course, put all of those links into the show notes so that you can connect with Oksana on LinkedIn and at our website, and so I'll give you the last word before we wrap up the show.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 26:09

Oh, thank you, Guys, don't be scared to build some ideas. Just build it in a smart way.

John Kundtz: 26:14

Awesome. Okay, so I'm John Kundtz, and thanks for joining us in this edition of the Disruptor. Have a great day. Thanks for listening.

Oksana Kovalchuk: 26:23

Bye-bye.