According to industry research, around 60% of IT professionals report moderate or high levels of burnout. Experts attribute this not only to growing workloads but also to constant immersion in digital environments and always-on, always-online work.
Against this backdrop, a counter-trend is gaining momentum: specialists who have spent years building careers in digital products are increasingly turning to physical solutions and offline communities. This is the path Julia Tolmacheva has taken, a lead product designer who has built digital products for Microsoft, Porsche, Sensorium, Career.io, Arrival, Palantir and other major international companies. She now works as an independent product designer across various projects while simultaneously developing SABAKI, a pet products brand, and Kult, an offline community.
We spoke with Julia about her startups, her rethinking of technology’s role, and how the very logic of product creation is shifting in a world that has grown tired of relentless digitization.
Julia, you’ve spent more than eight years in product design, building solutions for fintech, HR tech, edtech, and AI projects. What professional challenges do even experienced specialists at your level face today?
One of the biggest challenges for product designers today is constant immersion in the digital environment, combined with growing pressure to keep up with the rapid pace of AI and machine learning. New models, tools, and capabilities appear almost daily, and many designers feel they need to learn everything at once just to remain relevant. It’s fascinating work, but it demands sustained concentration and can lead to professional fatigue over time. At some point, I felt a strong pull toward more tangible projects, creating real, physical things you can hold in your hands, test in real life, and watch make an impact on people.
At the same time, my interest in physical products isn’t a departure from product design, it’s an extension of it. I became increasingly interested in projects that bridge the gap between digital and physical experiences. Many of the same principles; understanding user behavior, reducing friction, building trust, and designing meaningful interactions, apply whether you’re creating software or physical products.
This is one of the reasons I became interested in PetTech and connected products. Today, physical products are rarely purely physical. They increasingly exist as part of a larger ecosystem that combines hardware, software, data, and intelligent services. I find this intersection particularly exciting because it allows designers to think beyond screens and create experiences that exist in the real world while still benefiting from technology.
I continue to work in digital product design and see it as my core professional field. At the same time, I believe the future of design will increasingly be shaped by the convergence of digital and physical experiences, and exploring that space has become one of the most interesting parts of my work.
Why did you choose a project specifically in the pet space?
My interest in pet products actually goes back to my industrial design studies at the British Higher School of Art and Design, where I was fascinated by how this category could be reimagined through the lens of design, engineering, and user experience.
The idea crystallized once I got my dog, Luna. As a pet owner, I very quickly noticed a striking gap between the scale of the market and the quality of the products in it. Luna constantly drew my attention to small, nagging frustrations with existing solutions: awkward attachments, poor materials, flimsy construction.
What surprised me was that the pet industry is growing rapidly, yet many products are still made without the level of attention to detail that has long been the norm at the best tech companies. As a product designer, I wanted to bring that approach to pet tech and build a product brand that combines technology, design, and a deep understanding of what owners actually need.
It sounds like your brand SABAKI is built on the same approach you used in digital products: first, a deep understanding of the user’s problem, then the search for a solution. With people, that’s straightforward; you can simply ask them about their experience. But how do you research dogs and understand their needs?
You obviously can’t invite a dog to an interview and ask what she likes or doesn’t like. So instead, you study behavior: you observe, test hypotheses, and pay close attention to the animal’s reactions.
At the same time, it’s important to understand not just the dog, but the person beside her. In practice, we’re researching two users at once: the dog helps us understand whether a solution is genuinely comfortable and safe, while the owner tells us whether it’s actually useful and practical in everyday life.
What concerns dog owners most?
People rarely complained about how products looked; far more often, the issue was reliability. Owners told us that products break quickly, get lost during walks, stop working after rain, or are simply uncomfortable for their pets. What mattered to them was knowing that a harness or a tracker wouldn’t fail when it counted.
That’s why we put our primary focus on the quality of construction, materials, and components. Over the past two years, we’ve gone from silicone prototypes hand-built in a workshop during my graduation project to full partnerships with international manufacturers and suppliers. We visited factories in China in person, took part in selecting materials, tested dozens of design variations, and completely redesigned certain elements more than once.
Today, our products use components from leading global manufacturers, including Duraflex and Fidlock, companies whose solutions are used by brands like Nike, Adidas, and many others.
In digital products, you worked with metrics like retention, conversion, and even economic impact for users. In some projects, the savings ran into tens of millions of dollars. What metrics do you use with a physical product to assess its value?
The underlying logic is largely the same: we care about more than just a first impression or visual appeal. We look at whether the product becomes part of someone’s daily routine, whether they use it consistently, whether they come back to it, whether they trust it in real-world conditions, and whether they’d recommend it to others.
But in PetTech and connected products specifically, there’s one deeper metric that’s harder to formalize: whether the person thinks about the accessory while using it. If an owner puts on a harness or clips on a tracker and then forgets about it entirely, because they’re confident it’s safe, reliable, and predictable, that means the product has achieved its primary goal.
The concept behind SABAKI’s products was recognized at the international Code & Create competition, which focuses on innovative solutions at the intersection of technology and artificial intelligence. How exactly is AI used in them?
We’re currently developing a device, a health tracker for pets powered by machine learning, along with a companion mobile app. The team is working on moving beyond simple data collection toward interpreting that data and turning it into clear, actionable insights for the user.
We’re exploring the use of machine learning to analyze behavioral patterns: activity levels, sleep, movement, and the overall rhythm of a pet’s life. The goal is for the system to detect meaningful changes and translate them into signals that owners can actually understand. For example, reduced activity, shifts in sleep patterns, or unusual behavior can serve as early indicators worth paying attention to before any obvious symptoms appear.
Ultimately, we want the technology to help owners better understand their pets. More broadly, mutual understanding feels to me like one of the most important challenges we face. We’ve learned to build incredible digital tools. We can work remotely, stay in touch with friends across the world online, and use artificial intelligence in virtually any area of life. But at the same time, more and more people are experiencing fatigue from the constant flow of information, a lack of deep connection, and a sense of loneliness. That’s why I want to design products that strengthen bonds rather than erode them.
You speak a lot about the importance of real human interaction, building new connections, and experiences that simply can’t happen online. Those ideas are at the heart of your KULT project. What does it mean to you personally, and what are you hoping to achieve through it?
The mission of the Kult is creating an international, cross-cultural community of designers, artists, researchers, entrepreneurs, and technologists, brought together around creativity, education, and inquiry. At its core are creative expeditions, off-site residencies, educational programs, and workshops that weave together design, storytelling, art, travel, and the practice of immersing yourself in a new environment.
Through KULT, we create conditions for people from different countries and professional backgrounds to spend real time together and exchange experience. What matters to me is that these formats help people step outside their familiar professional roles and discover new possibilities for creativity and collaboration.
I think of SABAKI and KULT as two sides of the same philosophy. One project helps people use technology more intentionally. The other invites them to step away from it sometimes, so they can hold onto their curiosity, their powers of observation, and their ability to create something new.
To bring our conversation full circle: can we say that a human-centered approach and more mindful use of technology are already becoming a trend in the industry?
I think it’s no longer just a trend; it’s a deeper shift in how professionals are beginning to understand their work and the role technology plays in human life. For a long time, we were in a phase where digital products were built in the name of efficiency, speed, and scale. Now, there’s a growing conversation about the quality of the human-technology relationship: how sustainable, comprehensible, and ecologically sound it really is over the long term.
For me and my colleagues, this is also a very practical concern. Working with physical products in the offline world significantly reduces the risk of professional burnout. When you see a real person, a real outcome, and can actually watch a product make a difference in someone’s life, you experience a different sense of meaning and completion. It helps you stay engaged and keep your energy through long development cycles.
In that sense, I genuinely believe that the professionals who will be most valuable in the future are those who can live in both worlds at once: who understand technology deeply while never losing touch with real life.
