Black-and-white portrait of Anya Surnina
Senior Product Designer

I like turning ambiguous problems into products people want to use.

I’m a senior product designer specializing in 0→1 and AI products. Over the past eight years, I’ve worked across consumer marketplaces, payments, restaurant technology, and hiring—taking complex, ambiguous problems from early research and strategy through shipped experiences.

Most recently at Toast, I led consumer product work across restaurant discovery, payments, and new product bets, while exploring how AI could make finding the right restaurant feel less like searching and more like asking someone who knows what you want.

Based in San FranciscoFigma · Claude Code · HTML/CSS · Prototyping

I like the messy part.

The problems I’m drawn to rarely arrive with a clear solution. They start with incomplete information, competing needs, technical constraints, and a lot of questions.

My job is to create clarity—understand the real problem, make ideas tangible quickly, learn from users, and work with product and engineering to turn that ambiguity into something useful.

With AI, I think that responsibility matters even more. A compelling interface isn’t enough; the experience has to earn trust through relevance, transparency, and knowing when not to guess.

Away from the screen

When I’m not designing

When I’m not untangling product problems, I love traveling and exploring new cities—wandering through unfamiliar neighborhoods, finding great local spots, and experiencing how people live in different places.

Closer to home, you’ll find me running, hiking, watching a good movie, or making macramé art pieces—a slower, more tactile kind of making that’s a nice counterbalance to digital design.

Anya exploring a passage between towering blue glacier walls
Anya paddleboarding beside a glacier, wearing a red helmet
Anya weaving with colorful wool on a picnic blanket in a park

Expertise

  • 0→1 Product
  • AI Experiences
  • Product Strategy
  • Consumer Products
  • Payments
  • Marketplaces
  • User Research
  • Prototyping
  • Responsive Web
  • Design Systems
  • HTML / CSS
  • Workshop Facilitation

The Journey

Senior Product Designer Toast

2021–2026

Led strategy and design across Toast’s consumer ecosystem, including restaurant discovery, payments, and new 0→1 products.

My work ranged from launching Toast Local and increasing takeout conversion by 22%, to simplifying group payments and exploring conversational AI as the next evolution of restaurant discovery.

I also helped designers adopt AI-powered workflows across the team and used code-based prototyping to make emerging product ideas tangible earlier.

Product Designer Indeed

2019–2021

Designed tools for employers managing jobs and candidates at scale, simplifying complex hiring workflows and exploring new ways employers could manage their work across Indeed.

Product Designer HotSchedules

2017–2019

Designed restaurant workforce tools for employee scheduling and forecasting, helping employees manage their shifts and managers make staffing decisions.

As the sole designer on the employee home page redesign, I partnered with product managers, product owners, and developers to improve the scheduling experience.

Web Designer Practice Cafe

Earlier

Designed and built 50+ responsive websites, giving me a hands-on foundation in visual design and front-end implementation—and probably explaining why I still like getting into the code when a prototype needs to feel real.