UX/UI designer Kateryna Orlova has been named a Gold Winner at the ECDMA Global Awards 2025 in the Strategic Growth & Client Delivery Leadership category. The win came for her work developing and scaling the product platform of U.S.-based SaaS company Yourco, where she approached design not as a collection of individual interfaces but as a system built to grow alongside the business.
For Orlova, the award marked an important milestone in a career that began with small freelance projects in Ukraine and gradually led her to work on SaaS products in Ireland and, later, the United States.
"When you spend a long time working on a project, what you tend to see most clearly are the problems that still need to be solved and everything that could still be improved," Orlova says. "So when independent experts from different countries evaluate your work and it earns a Gold, it hits differently. For me, it was both incredibly exciting and deeply meaningful. It confirmed that the approach I had developed over the years, through different projects and teams, actually holds professional weight."
From Freelance Beginnings to International SaaS Teams
Orlova has worked in UX/UI design since 2020, specializing in interface and product design for SaaS platforms, as well as mobile and web applications.
She started out as a freelance designer in Ukraine, taking on a range of clients, an experience that gave her something hard to come by inside a single company: designing digital products for wildly different challenges and audiences, where each new project meant rebuilding the logic from scratch rather than refining one process for years on end.
One of those freelance projects eventually connected her with OnePageCRM, an Irish SaaS company. After a year of remote work, Orlova relocated to Ireland to join the team on-site. There, she began diving deeper into a live product used daily by real customers, grappling with its logic, its evolution, its constraints, and the real-world consequences of every design decision.
Her career then took her to the U.S., where she joined Yourco and stepped into work on a different scale entirely: developing a full product ecosystem during a period of rapid growth for the SaaS business. That project is the one she submitted to the ECDMA Global Awards.
A Project Built to Grow With the Business
Orlova's work at Yourco landed during a phase of aggressive platform expansion, as the company launched new enterprise offerings while juggling multiple categories of clients and partners simultaneously. As the platform grew, it became clear that one-off interface fixes weren't going to cut it. Orlova took ownership of the overall UX strategy and information architecture for the digital ecosystem: navigation logic, user pathways, and the connection between how the product positioned itself and what it actually delivered.
One of the project's key components was a scalable design system built around structured design tokens, reusable components, modular building blocks, and consistent rules for creating interfaces. The system made it possible to develop different parts of the product more quickly without constantly rebuilding elements from scratch or compromising the consistency of the user experience. Once it was in place, design-development mismatches dropped, and new product pages launched noticeably faster.
"What mattered to me was creating something that would not solve just one immediate problem, but would give the team a foundation they could continue using," Orlova explains. "To me, good product design means that once your direct involvement ends, the system keeps helping other people make faster, more consistent decisions."
The experience gained from this project can be applied far beyond a single company. The challenge Orlova addressed is common to many growing digital businesses: as the number of features, customers, and business lines increases, so does the number of disconnected solutions. Orlova's approach offers an alternative. Rather than fixing interfaces one at a time, she built a system of principles and components that can scale alongside the product.
What Strategic Growth & Client Delivery Leadership Actually Means
This category isn't judged on a polished interface or an impressive visual design alone. It recognizes a professional's ability to turn a complex product or business challenge into a system that helps a company grow: launching new solutions faster, serving customers more effectively, cutting internal inefficiencies, and maintaining quality as the organization scales.
At its core, the category recognizes professionals who can look beyond the boundaries of their individual role and see the digital product as a whole: the user, the technical constraints, the team's workflow, and the needs of a growing business.
That is precisely the level at which Orlova operated on the Yourco project.
A Competition Judged on Results, Not Brand Recognition
The ECDMA Global Awards is an international professional awards program organized by the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association (ECDMA).
In 2025, the competition drew 356 entries representing companies, teams, and professionals from around the world, including participants from the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Spain, and other markets. The competition spans a broad range of disciplines, from digital strategy and e-commerce to technology, customer experience, platforms, and digital transformation.
Neither company size nor brand recognition alone provides any advantage. The organizers designed the judging process so that each entry is evaluated primarily on the strength of the work itself and the results it produced. Every eligible submission is independently reviewed by at least ten qualified judges, and any judge with a conflict of interest is removed from evaluating that particular entry.
Most of the final score is based on factors that cannot easily be replaced by an impressive presentation: innovation, measurable impact, and quality of execution.
Winners aren't determined by ranking entries against each other. They're measured against a fixed bar. A Gold Winner title requires a score of 90–100, Silver requires 80–89, and Bronze requires 70–79. That means earning Gold reflects meeting a defined, high standard, regardless of company size or project budget.
According to Orlova, it was precisely this judging system that made participating in the competition particularly intense.
"You know your project will be reviewed by people who work with digital products, technology, and business themselves. It isn't enough to simply show the final result. You have to explain what problem you were solving, why you chose that particular approach, how it worked in a real product, and what changed after implementation. It forces you to look at your own work completely differently," she says.
"We Wanted to Recognize Work That Usually Goes Unnoticed"
Eugene Mischenko, president of ECDMAand organizer of the ECDMA Global Awards, notes that one of the competition's original ideas was precisely to bring visibility to professional achievements that are rarely seen by a broad audience.
"We created the ECDMA Global Awards not to reward the loudest presentation or the most recognizable name. In the digital industry, an enormous amount of genuinely important work remains behind the scenes. Professionals redesign processes, improve product systems, eliminate inefficiencies, connect teams, and develop solutions that continue shaping how a business operates for months or even years—yet from the outside, much of that work often goes unnoticed.
"That is why it was important for us to evaluate not how famous someone is or how impressive the presentation looks, but the quality of the decisions and what they actually change. Kateryna's project is a strong example of that approach. This is not a single, visually impressive design solution. She created a system that helps the product continue to evolve and makes the growth process itself more manageable. These are exactly the kinds of achievements we want to bring greater visibility to," Mischenko says.
According to Mischenko, the ability to evaluate projects independently of company size is particularly important for an international competition. Strong professional work can emerge within a major corporation just as easily as within a small product team. The jury's job is to recognize the quality of the solution itself.
A Win That Marks a New Chapter
For Orlova, the Gold Winner title wasn't so much the finish line on one project as it was confirmation of a professional direction she's been building for years, across different countries and different scales of work.
Countries changed, companies changed, the scope of the work changed, and along the way, so did her understanding of the profession itself.
"Early in your career, you tend to think that a good designer is someone who can independently create a strong interface. With experience, you realize that something much harder is creating the conditions in which strong solutions can continue to emerge consistently, again and again, across different teams and scenarios. That is probably why this award means so much to me. It's not about one interface or one project. It's about an approach I have been developing gradually over several years," Orlova says.
The real win here doesn't belong to a single solution, but to a system built to outlive the project itself, one that keeps helping a team make decisions and withstand continued growth. For Orlova, it's international recognition of her professional approach. For other digital companies, it's a practical example that scaling doesn't start once a business has already grown. It starts when a team designs the product to be ready for that growth in advance.
