Toms Varpins

Currently building TabbyTab, a tool that turns audio into music notation so I can learn to play my favorite songs on guitar. Built by directing AI.

Sole product designer on Pop-Up Store, an in-house e-commerce product for merchants to sell directly through Printify. • Traced an 18% decline in new stores to specific, fixable problems in the journey. That case helped fast-track a full redesign ahead of Printify’s rebrand. • Mapped what successful merchants actually did on the platform, then redesigned store creation around it, reversing the decline and growing new stores 9% within three months. • Found a way to claim ownership of a journey split across teams, by scoping a small change that let us iterate and run experiments independently. • Shipped mandatory KYC verification under a 90-day compliance deadline, reaching 91% completion among active merchants

Part of the design team building an AI-powered physiotherapy product using motion capture and voice assistance to improve exercise feedback. • Designed AI-assisted exercise feedback, helping users correct their form in real time. • Designed therapy controls that gave users more autonomy for their treatment journey. • Built prototypes to align Customer Care and Product teams on new features. • Contributed new patterns to the design system, making the product more consistent across features.

Owned the signup-to-deployment journey on a developer tools platform expanding from WordPress into application and database hosting. • Suggested removing the payment barrier for new signups, after weighing the fraud trade-offs with the risk team. Leadership agreed and we rolled it out with limited-use trial credits. • Redesigned the signup-to-deployment flow, cutting deployment time from 8 minutes to 3. • Presented four ways to redesign the flow and made the case for the more ambitious one. It became the default pattern reused across every hosting service. • Untangled authentication that three separate teams each partly owned into one consistent flow, which later led the company to give one team full ownership of it.

Sole product designer for a 0 → 1 digital business registration platform and internal admin portal. • Found that 82% of business registration submissions failed on the first try, and designed real-time validation to fix it. • Gave reviewers a severity system to flag what needed judgment versus what was fine, cutting reviews that used to take up to 15 days down to a glance. • Split the submission flow into three phases, documents, payment, and signing, and built separate paths for single-business owners versus accountants managing dozens of entities. • Ran workshops with every government department involved and mapped their combined process for the first time. Used “submission” as the shared concept that let each department see the same system through their own lens.

Working across consultancy teams on technical products in FinTech, e-commerce and digital transformation. • Turned the German central bank’s SEPA spec into requirements for N26, mapping how transactions moved through services owned by different departments and aligning every team involved. The system processed over 1 billion transactions in its first month without issues. • One of five teams building the new microservice architecture for a car-leasing digital transformation project processing 6+ billion GBP annually. • Also worked on a real-estate platform, running A/B tests on new features. • Facilitated 12 product discoveries and 40+ retrospectives across consultancy engagements.

Worked on new products from concept and research through prototyping and MVP. • Took Iomob from pre-funding wireframes to an enterprise pilot with 80 users. Four months in, a client conversation showed the real value was in the routing infrastructure, not the consumer app, so I led the pivot to a white-label platform. • AdType client onboarding took a week of manual reporting work per client, which capped how fast the company could grow. Designed a data visualization product that let clients monitor their own campaign performance directly, cutting analysts out of the loop entirely. • Ran user testing in public spaces across both products, with 60+ participants total.

Helping a live chat startup pivot to an agent-assisted support service and reach profitability. • Spent 10 months building a new agent-assisted support service, queue management, shortcuts, knowledge base, billing, and hired the team to run it. It became the company’s main profit driver, taking the business from negative revenue to profitable. • Became the most-used live chat solution globally, up from #2, helped by a free, feature-rich product and a community forum I ran, turning feature requests directly into the roadmap. • Designed, tested and launched native iOS and Android apps, alongside improvements to the core web experience.

Most impact: Scrum master & Magento Solutions Specialist certifications Role: As a project manager for a Magento agency working within cross-functional remote teams we delivered e-commerce sites to international clients.

Was a shared UX resource working with the design team and product managers to build new product ideas or help existing startups iterate. • Redesigned parts of 6 existing products (3 mobile, 3 responsive web apps) • Built prototypes for 2 new products (A dashboard and a mobile app) • Launched 1 new product (backend dashboard) • Conducted 3 user tests • Conducted 3 design thinking workshops • Responsible for design resource allocation and UX process development

Most impact: A research project for the national post to define a self-service system for customers. Role: sales pitches with the focus on user-centered approach, gathering requirements and prototyping solutions for small to medium-sized businesses. Mostly websites and simple back-end systems.

Noteworthy achievements: • 3 Usability Audits for existing systems • 4 User Research & Testing projects • 6 different system prototypes delivered Role: Analyse existing systems, understand user pain points, create and test prototypes, present user research results and deliver working system prototypes

Greatest achievement: Participated in a conference about e-mail marketing best practices. Mailigen is an e-mail marketing provider for which I provided customer support via phone, e-mails and support desk. I also was tasked to find new integration partners to expand Mailigen's functionality.

Door-To-Door (B2C) sales representative distributing Latvian Mobile Telephone services and finding the best solution for each individual.