Career Journey – Marina Nekrasova: When Architecture Meets the Digital World

Marina Nekrasova did not plan to end up designing interfaces for a manufacturing platform. She started with buildings.

After studying interior and architectural design, she spent her early career working on residential and commercial spaces. The kind of work where you’re thinking about how people move through a room, where the light falls, and what feels right when you walk in. Satisfying work. But something kept pulling her toward screens.

“I realised that designing digital products has more in common with architecture than people think,” she says. “You are still creating a structure for people to navigate. The flow, the logic, the way someone moves from one point to another. The thinking is actually the same. The medium is just different.”

That realisation set her off in a new direction. Graphic design first, then branding, then progressively deeper into UX, until she joined Xometry six years ago and found herself doing something she had not quite expected: building a design function from the ground up.

Starting From Zero

When Marina arrived at Xometry, there was no established UX practice in the European region. No design system. Just a fast-growing platform that needed someone to figure out what good design should look like for a manufacturing tech company.

“It was a bit daunting, honestly,” she admits. “But also a real opportunity. I was not coming in to execute someone else’s vision. I was there to help define what UX even meant in this context.”

Six years on, that foundation is well and truly built, but Marina’s approach to her work has not changed. Every project still starts the same way: not with a design tool, but with a question.

Why Before Interface

Before Marina reaches for a design tool, she wants to understand the problem. Properly.

Why does this feature need to exist? Who is struggling with what, exactly? How are people currently getting around it?

“I never start with the interface,” she says. “I talk to stakeholders, I map out the existing workflow, I try to really understand the pain before I start thinking about the solution. Otherwise, you risk designing something beautiful that solves the wrong problem.”

At Xometry, that due diligence is non-trivial. Marina designs for three very different audiences: internal teams, manufacturing partners, and external customers. Each group brings its own level of technical knowledge, its own frustrations, its own expectations of what a platform should do.

“I have to think in systems. I cannot look at one screen in isolation. I need to understand the whole ecosystem first, then work down to the details. Otherwise things that look fine individually end up not connecting properly.”

Nobody Builds Alone

The people Marina works most closely with are product managers and engineers. And she is pretty clear that the best work only happens when all three are genuinely in the room together.

“A product manager thinks about business logic. An engineer thinks about what’s technically feasible. I focus on user needs and how to connect all three perspectives into a solution that actually works for people. When that collaboration clicks, you end up somewhere none of you would have reached alone.”

Six years of working that way has given Marina a clear sense of what great collaboration looks like and what it produces.

The Real Challenge

Manufacturing is not a simple industry. The information flowing through Xometry’s platform, technical specifications, tolerances, process constraints, compliance requirements, is dense and precise and leaves very little room for misinterpretation.

Marina’s job is to make all of that feel manageable to the person on the other side of the screen. Whether that person is a procurement manager who logs in every day or an engineer placing their first order.

“The goal is always to reduce cognitive load,” she says. “Nobody should feel lost. Nobody should have to work hard just to understand what’s happening. That sounds simple but it’s genuinely hard to achieve when the underlying subject matter is this technical.”

To stay on top of it, she treats every new project as a learning opportunity, going deeper into whatever manufacturing process or industrial constraint is at the heart of the problem.

“Curiosity is non-negotiable,” she says. “You have to actually want to understand how things are made, why tolerances matter, what the difference between processes is. If you don’t find that interesting, this job will be a struggle.”

The Habit That Stuck

Working at Xometry has changed how Marina experiences the world outside the office too.

“I analyse interfaces everywhere now,” she laughs. “I’ll be at a self-checkout in the supermarket and I’m already picking it apart. Why did I hesitate there, why is that button in the wrong place, what would I have done differently. My friends find it rather amusing.”

It’s the same instinct, she says, that makes her good at her job. The best designers are the ones who never really switch off, who are always noticing, always questioning, always filing things away.

What a Good Day Looks Like

“A good day is when something complicated becomes simple.”

Marina doesn’t elaborate much beyond that, but she doesn’t need to. It’s the through-line of everything she does, from the architectural thinking she brought from her first career, to the systems approach she’s applied at Xometry, to the interfaces she builds for people who just need to get their job done without friction.

“When you look at something that was confusing or frustrating, and after your work it just makes sense. That’s the feeling. That’s what keeps me going.”

For Designers Thinking About B2B

Marina’s advice for designers considering a move into industrial B2B is short: don’t let the complexity put you off. Let it draw you in.

“If you like hard problems, if you’re comfortable sitting with a lot of questions before you start designing, if you actually enjoy working closely with engineers and product people, you’ll do well here. The complexity is the interesting part.”

The one quality she keeps coming back to is not a design skill. It is a habit of mind.

“Be analytical. Stay curious. And don’t assume you already know the answer before you have really understood the question.”