Tania Kramar is now an associate partner at The Gradient. She joined in 2017, a month before finishing her international relations degree, when the studio was 13 people. Nine years on, she's gone from marketing trainee to business analyst to strategist, and now associate partner. She never took a course for any of those roles. She learnt them on live projects, sitting next to the founders. Here's that path in her own words, plus what a strategist does at an AI-native design agency, and why she thinks AI raises the bar for real expertise.
Starting as a marketing trainee in a 13-person studio
I came to The Gradient straight from university. I was in the last month of my international relations degree when a job ad showed up in my Facebook feed. I wrote a very long cover letter. Soon after, I was sitting in an interview with Denys Skrypnyk and Oleg Gasioshyn.
That was 2017. There were 13 of us. Later the team grew to almost 50. Denys liked to joke that I was the only person in the company working in my field: someone had trained as a pharmacist, someone else as a product designer, and I could at least point to international contracts.
My job was everything nobody else had time for. Cold outreach to leads and venture capitalists from Olena Zanichkovska's, Denys's and Oleg's LinkedIn accounts. Updating the website and adding case studies to it. Instagram posts. Articles on Medium. The shoemaker's children go barefoot, as they say. A design agency rarely has time for its own marketing. I sat opposite the founders: Denys, Oleg and Olena. Every day brought new ideas from three directions.
People who arrive with a specialism know what they're good at. I didn't. Nobody tells you what your strength is. You find out by trying everything, and paying attention to what pulls you in.
Learning business analysis on live projects
The move into business analysis came from helping on projects whenever a team needed an extra pair of hands. When the offer came, I had no background in it. No courses. The team paired me with one of our business analysts as a mentor, gave me a book and showed me how to write user stories and how to talk to a client. And that was my way to go.
On B.TECH, a large product team split the work by product area. Each area had a business analyst and a designer working as a pair. How much a business analyst matters depends on the designer. A strong designer owns the concept. With a less experienced one, you work out how everything should behave from start to finish. I'd take screenshots from Figma, lay out the flow myself and walk the designer through how it should work.
Then came requirements for the developers. The unglamorous part. "When the user opens the homepage, he sees a header and a welcome message. He can tap the block below. When he opens it, he sees…" Every state, spelled out. Miss one, and a developer comes back with: "I didn't build this because it wasn't in the requirements. If it had been, it would have been three story points, not two."
That work taught me precision. It also showed me the limit of the role. A business analyst owns a piece of the product. Not the product.
The project that turned me into a strategist
Investgaze changed how I thought about my job. It was a fintech product for investing in collectible assets. I worked as part project manager, part product thinker. The founder pulled me into exercises I wouldn't have done anywhere else. We worked through hypotheses, tested positioning ideas and argued about what the product should be in an atmosphere of trust, where no idea was too early to say out loud. After Investgaze, I moved into strategy, and I knew this was the work I wanted to keep doing.
Growth also came from the other direction. On one project, the client was hard on every call. We'd prepare every edge case in advance, and something still went wrong. You grow there too, but your focus quietly shifts from value for the end user to keeping the client satisfied. The user ends up forgotten. Both kinds of project teach you. Only one produces a better product.
What a strategist does at an AI-native design agency
It's hard to explain what I do. Business analysis is point work: you own a flow, you think through how it should work, and you explain it perfectly to developers. Strategy is the bigger picture. It still includes hands-on work when something specific needs doing, and there's no fixed line where strategy ends and design begins.
It starts in discovery. My job is to take the client's idea apart until we understand it: what they want to build, who it's for, why it should exist and whether anyone needs it. Then I prepare the foundation, so that when the designer starts conceptualising, we both know what we're building. Often, we do that part as a pair.
In my ideal world, a designer would do all of this. I say it to the whole team: a strategist is an unfinished designer with The Gradient context. Someone who pays attention to what a designer doesn't have to. I don't have an eye for UI. I can tell when something is bad. I can't tell you why one almost identical option beats another. Our designers see things I never will.
AI has closed part of that gap. Flows that used to take me three days of clicking in Figma now take a few minutes with Claude, plus up to two hours to bring them into Figma through MCP and shape them the way I need.
Why AI raises the bar for expertise
Plenty of people now feel they can build anything with AI. A client can send you a prototype they generated and say: this is the experience, I want exactly this. That's a new kind of challenge. You have to translate your expertise into a new format and prove why your solution is better than something put together in two minutes. It's also why clients come to us.
The part I enjoy: designers now own more and more of development. On almost every project, a developer says "this is impossible" at some point. Today a designer can answer: I built it, here's how. It's even better when the client challenges the developers alongside you. The result is almost always stronger and more viable. One person still can't cover every role on a serious product. But the distance between an idea and proof has never been this short.
I'm also wary of instant approval. When a client loves everything on the first pass, I assume we've missed something. Even after calls that went well, I go back to the work and ask: is this everything we could have done here? That habit makes the work better than it would otherwise be.
Becoming an associate partner after nine years
When the partnership offer came, I didn't think twice. I've been here nine years, and I don't love change. This didn't feel like one. I'd already been doing most of what the role involves, so becoming an associate partner felt like the natural next step.
What changed? The weight of responsibility. Day to day, the work is the same. One new part: I'm now the person newer teammates come to with any question about how The Gradient works.
I call myself a child of the triumvirate. Oleg shaped how I work more than anyone. When I need an honest read on a product decision, I go to him, because he'll tell me straight whether it's good. If it isn't, I figure out how to make it good. Olena taught me how to run a client call, mostly by letting me sit next to her and listen. Denys has a rare kind of soft power in a crisis. In a recent tough situation, he listened, asked a few questions and said: let's think about it this way. At The Gradient, you never have to wonder whether you're allowed to walk up to a partner and ask.
How The Gradient has changed in nine years
I'm a The Gradient kid. From my first week, I saw a team that was always looking for a better way to do the work, which means we're always changing something. So the pace of AI doesn't scare me. Today we look one way. Tomorrow, another.
What has changed is how The Gradient understands itself. For years, everything revolved around the core, around specific people. Now there are more partners, each with their own view, and the company is learning what The Gradient is beyond any one person's contribution. It's a culture and an approach, not a list of names.
We also spent a long time trying to formalise everything: one approach to design, one to discovery, one skill matrix. Looking back, the search was worth it. It taught us that the value isn't in formalisation. Different work needs different approaches, and AI makes that obvious. Why build a rigid process around something that may be irrelevant tomorrow?
If you're here, you're treated as a professional. That means the freedom to do the work the way you think it should be done. In sensible doses. I've never wanted to be the one running workshops or giving talks. I want to do good work, alongside people who see things I don't. Nine years in, that's still the plan.
Tania is an Associate Partner and Product Strategist with hands-on experience in UX strategy, product discovery, and user research for digital products. Her focus is on aligning business goals, user needs, and product decisions throughout a project.
