Prodamus XL (formerly axl.tech) is an all-in-one platform for online school owners and course creators: course builder, landing pages, funnels, CRM, mailing, payments, webinars, and analytics in a single product.
The axl.tech platform had been live since 2019. I joined in December 2021 as Senior Product Designer. Direct reports: 2 product designers and 2 front-end/layout developers. Broader team: CEO, CTO, CMO, HRD, Head of Support, and a 17-person dev team.
Users: online school owners, experts selling courses and webinars, and technical specialists/agencies who set up online schools for clients.
The platform solves tool fragmentation: instead of a dozen separate services for landing pages, funnels, CRM, webinars, and analytics, users get one ecosystem.
We ran Customer Development and JTBD interviews, and a competitive analysis (ClickFunnels, Kajabi, GetCourse — the main benchmark on the Russian market, plus Skillspace, CoreApp, AntiTrainings; internationally Thinkific, Hotmart, Teachable, Kartra+Everwebinar, JustClick, Podia, LearnWorlds), maintaining a living spreadsheet comparing features and pricing.
Through these interviews, we won over several influential clients who went on to spread the idea organically further on their own.
Conflict: entrepreneurs running online education businesses were losing time to manual syncing between mismatched tools rather than teaching and selling.
Business goal: consolidate the entire online-school workflow into one product, while continuously accelerating feature releases to catch up with and outpace competitors — GetCourse first among them.
A component system built on Ant Design — "build it once, reuse it everywhere." Instead of the classic cycle of "designer draws → design review → revisions → handoff" for every screen, we built a system where a new component was created once on top of Ant Design and then reused by developers without going back through a designer each time. This was a deliberate bet on speed over per-screen visual polish — and it, more than the mere existence of a "design system," is what let a 4-person team hold a 4–6 week cadence on major features instead of 12.
Time-on-Task discipline. Every redesign was measured against a Time-on-Task (ToT) baseline, tracked through event tags on key actions. We validated first in internal corridor tests with the company's own technical staff, then confirmed on real customers in production. This before/after discipline ran consistently across all 4 years, not as a one-off exercise.
Ant Design had a number of front-end quirks — in spacing and several other places. Rather than burning the team's capacity on a constant fight against these inconsistencies through per-screen design review, we made the call to drop formal design review "until better times" and live with the framework's limitations in exchange for speed. It was an explicit trade-off: pixel-perfect polish on every screen, in exchange for a release cadence that 1,200 schools needed faster than a flawless screen.