I design products where the hard part is not drawing screens — it is the business rules,
the dense data and the consequences underneath them. A white-label fintech platform sold to U.S.
banks and embedded in their online banking, high-load trading, a multi-tenant enterprise CRM
under NDA, biometric authentication in public infrastructure, an HR platform for organisations
of 100 to 5,000 people, and a mobile finance suite used by 500K+ small business owners.
Before any of that I spent eight years as a system administrator, from eighteen to twenty-six —
helpdesk, Windows, Linux, networks — and it shows in what I am drawn to since: the bank-side
admin console, the biometric back-office console, the multi-tenant and permission-heavy CRM,
the screens somebody operates all day. It also shows in how I specify one: empty, loading,
partial, pending, rejected, error, permission denied.
I have built three design systems from scratch and stayed to own them. Wireframes when
the question is structure, a coded prototype when the question is behaviour, and Figma as the
record of what was decided: component sets whose variant count is the product of their axes,
one variable collection resolved per mode, a usage rule beside every component. Because I write
the production front-end, what engineering receives is a working component with its edge cases
resolved — not a picture to interpret. The research is mine as well — the interviews, the
usability sessions, the experiments — because a finding I only read about is one I cannot
defend in a review.
The design function I run today I built myself: an engineering studio with no designer and
no product-management layer, where I set up review, handoff and component ownership and am
still the only designer. Before that I led design teams of eight and four, and before that, at
an e-commerce company, I turned interface decisions from stakeholder opinion into a
research-and-test loop and ended up owning the roadmap. Given the choice I take that order —
decide how design gets done first, hire into it second.
The brand half of a design lead's job I have done from inside the product: a bank's identity
through a theme layer rather than a re-skin, a marketing site designed and shipped hands-on in
Webflow, a homepage whose styling was tested rather than argued about. What this site does not
show is an identity built from a blank page; the brand
page says so first.
I measure design in outcomes, and I say when a number is missing. A test of the homepage on an
eight-figure funnel found +6.73% conversion at 100% probability of beating control — a
result the company then did not ship, and I costed that too. Bank onboarding cut from six
months to two weeks by replacing per-client styling with tokens. A component library whose
build fails on the first new hardcoded value, with the legacy debt frozen at a count that may
never rise.
I have worked fully remote since March 2021 — two U.S. companies, then the studio — and I
work CET hours from Italy.