Portfolio & CV
Product Design, with a product management background
I turn messy onboarding, compliance and admin flows into products people finish setting up on the first try, across fintech, insurtech and other regulated industries.
8+
Years in product & design
Startups & agency
In-house in 2 startups,
agency before
Design + Product
Design craft, enhanced by product ownership
2×
Guest lecturer at EKA, 2022 & 2023
Based in Tallinn, Estonia — open to remote work
Montonio
Montonio offers payment methods (and much more) for online stores. When signing up, a merchant expects to easily turn on the payment methods most convenient for their customers. What they got instead was pages of forms and threads of AML emails. Here's how we fixed that.
Problem
Sales and customer support kept telling us that merchants were having a really hard time submitting their business information for background checks. The data backed it up: there was a bottleneck between signing up and getting approved by our AML team.
From the merchant's side, anyone who wanted to use Montonio as the payment solution for their online store had to type in large amounts of business information just to sign up. Multiple pages of forms before even seeing what you're signing up for.
MY ROLE
Product Designer · 2022 – 2023
Product Manager · 2023 – 2026
Key decisions
Pull the data from business registries. The sheer amount of information Montonio asked for was off-putting. But most of it was already available in state business registries, so we integrated the registries for the Baltics and Poland. It was a logical solution and a standard for KYB forms, but the technical implications had blocked it at Montonio until then.
Let merchants in first, ask for KYB after. Merchants could now log in and see the Montonio dashboard and everything the company has to offer, and only then were nudged to complete KYB. This meant rebuilding how we manage users and their linked companies in the database — a completely standard expectation for the user, but again a huge technical shift for Montonio.
Use the e-signature merchants already trust. Merchants have to legally sign the information they submit. In the Baltics, e-signatures are standard and widely used. In Poland, we discovered the provider we'd implemented was unknown and looked suspicious to merchants, so we switched to the local standard.
We focused so hard on the registry integrations to cut down manual entry that we missed a second bottleneck in the funnel. After merchants submitted their data, our AML team had follow-up questions based on what the business did. These were asked over email and dragged completion out for weeks. A few extra forms based on the merchant's business category fixed that bottleneck too.
Outcome
Some real improvements evident in the data:
Montonio · What happened next
With KYB out of the way, newly signed-up merchants still needed a clear starting point. We built a welcome page that shows what Montonio offers and guides merchants to activate it right after signing up.
Problem
The onboarding journey was centred on KYB forms, which overshadowed the actual value Montonio provides. New merchants landed in the dashboard with no obvious next step.
The challenge was shifting the focus from compliance tasks to service activation, so merchants understand what Montonio can do for their business from the very first screen.
For Montonio, the problem was just as real: merchants who signed up but never integrated meant revenue that never came in.
My role and team
Product Manager
I shaped the direction of the feature, brought together insights from research and measured the impact on activation. The design sprint was facilitated by the product designer, and we iterated together with the developers.
Key decisions
Lead with value, not compliance. The first screen gives merchants a simple overview of Montonio's services instead of opening with forms.
Put the next step right in front of them. After KYB, the most important thing is integrating Montonio into their store — so that's what the page points to.
Outcome
Some real improvements evident in the data:
INZMO
INZMO needed new claim handlers to get up to speed quickly, without leaning on internal training or scattered documentation. We built a step-by-step checklist right inside the admin panel where claims are evaluated.
Problem
Claim handlers jumped between tens of Confluence pages and the admin portal, and relied on word-of-mouth explanations from colleagues. New hires took months to become confident, and senior handlers spent much of that time on hand-holding and fixing errors.
The challenge was turning this informal, spread-out process into a structured workflow that lived inside the tool they used every day.
My role and team
Product Designer · 2021 – 2022
I mapped the real decision path of claim handlers and turned it into a workflow that was both intuitive and compliant.
Key decisions
Build the checklist into the admin panel. Instead of better documentation somewhere else, the guidance lives where the work happens — one single source of truth.
Follow the real decision path. The checklist mirrors how experienced handlers actually evaluate a claim, step by step, so it stays both intuitive and compliant.
Outcome
What used to depend on the knowledge of the most senior employee became a guided, transparent process for a team of 8 claim handlers:
ADM Interactive · 2019–2021
UX/UI Designer
Smart-ID needed to help users recognise phishing and know when not to enter their PIN. I turned an intimidating topic into a short, example-based quiz that's quick to complete but still teaches the key principles.
Usability testing led me to pin the answer/next control to the bottom of the screen. Still live as part of Smart-ID's security campaign, in all Smart-ID languages.
Check out the quiz →UX/UI Designer
Citizens could see a municipality's rating without knowing what it was made of. I designed the visualisations and interaction layer, replacing static legends with in-graph, hover-based explanations.
Still live, and promoted ahead of local elections to help people decide how to vote.
See how your local government is doing →UX/UI Designer
For a shopping centre, the physical building is the main event — but Estonia's largest one had a store, social media and website that felt disconnected. I used the physical environment as the source of truth and built a digital system shaped by the building itself.
Working in an agency team directly with Ülemiste's marketing department, I took it from UX prototypes and a modular design system to developer handoff. Launched with the brand relaunch and is still live.
About
For the past three years I've been a Product Manager at Montonio, owning merchant onboarding and activation. I wanted to get closer and closer to users, and the PM role got me there: a lot of user conversations, data and decisions. It also came with very long days — if you know, you know. I loved every minute of it.
Now I'm ready to switch back to Product Design — a more asynchronous, craft-focused role — and bring that PM experience with me: an even bigger appetite for data, tracking, validation and talking to users. Lots of talking to users.
Before that, I started out in 2018 as a UI designer and grew into UX as I got more curious about how people think, behave and move through digital products — exploring problems, shaping flows and understanding user motivation.
Alongside industry work, I was a guest lecturer in Introduction to User Experience Design at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2022 and 2023. Explaining the fundamentals to students sharpened how I communicate ideas and kept me grounded in the basics.
Painting
I'm also a working artist — I make and frame large abstract paintings, and people actually buy them. @kaarimaalib
Book club
Founded at EKA, five years running. Every year has a new topic: AI (five years ago, when it still seemed like a weird dream), 20th-century history around the globe, sustainability (which somehow ended up in Marxism — don't ask) and biographies. This year we're starting with a light read: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis.
Experience
Kaari Sibrits
Product Designer
Sep 2023 — Aug 2026
Montonio
Payments platform for online stores
Jun 2022 — Sep 2023
Montonio
Payments platform for online stores
Jul 2021 — Jun 2022
INZMO
Insurtech
Dec 2019 — Jul 2021
ADM Interactive
Digital agency
Teaching
Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA) · 2022 & 2023
Delivered the UX foundations lecture to about 15 BA design students each year.
Education
Estonian Academy of Arts · 2019 — 2021
Session-based programme, completed alongside full-time work.
Tartu Art College · 2012 — 2016
Skills
Research
User interviews, usability testing, analytics and research synthesis
Design
UX/UI, prototyping and design systems in Figma
Domain
Onboarding, KYB and compliance flows, admin tools
Product
Requirements & scope, success criteria, data and tracking, roadmapping, stakeholder management
Languages
Estonian (native) · English (professional working proficiency)
Beyond work
Large abstract paintings (@kaarimaalib) and a book club I founded at EKA, now in its fifth year.
