As a seasoned design leader with 15 years of experience, I serve as the strategic bridge between design, product, and engineering to build world-class web platforms.
New York, United States
Promoted to Design Systems & Operations lead after 2 years at Smartling.
Leading Design System squad dedicated to a new design language creation.
Acted as the primary point of contact and subject matter expert for the design system, supporting and guidance to product designers and engineers.
Fostered a culture of systematic thinking and reuse, mentoring team members on best practices for component-based design.
Partnered with Product, Engineering, and Brand leadership to ensure the design system met the evolving needs of the business.
Led the end-to-end lifecycle of components & patterns, from initial concept and design to development, testing, and release.
Ensured all components met stringent accessibility standards (WCAG 2.2 AA) and were built with semantic HTML and CSS.
Created and maintained robust documentation for designers and developers, covering component usage, accessibility guidelines, and brand principles.
Managed the DS backlog, prioritising new components and improvements based on user research and organisational needs.
Championed and introduced AI-driven design methodologies to the organisation, utilising a modern AI tool chain (Figma MCP Server, Cursor, Lovable) and generative AI (Claude, ChatGPT , Gemini) to rapidly build and iterate on interactive, WCAG-compliant prototypes.
Developed and launched a custom Large Language Model (LLM) for the design system, trained on our comprehensive documentation. This provided users with a conversational interface to ask natural language questions and receive instant, accurate answers, significantly improving the discoverability of information and reducing support overhead.
Empowered product designers across the organisation by establishing a multi-faceted mentorship program. This included implementing formal Design QA sessions, introducing detailed "Accessibility Notes" into design files, and creating a library of video tutorials on how to effectively use DS components and patterns.
New York, United States
Architected and fixed existing component library in Figma, which accelerated the design prototyping process by an estimated 40% and improved design-to-dev handoff consistency. Reduction from 780 components to 92.
Conducted a comprehensive UI audit across 4 products, inventorying hundreds of existing components and patterns to identify opportunities for consolidation and standardisation.
Analysed and documented widespread CSS inconsistencies and visual design debt across the platform, creating a data-informed backlog to prioritise the design system roadmap.
Defined and implemented a robust component naming convention and taxonomy, which created a shared language and significantly improved communication and alignment between design and engineering teams.
Evangelised the design system's value across the organisation through presentations, workshops, and office hours, leading to a 20% increase in adoption over 12 months.
Chaired the Design System Guild/Council, facilitating decision-making on new patterns, component deprecation, and breaking changes.
Spearheaded the creation of a "trial system," a high-fidelity rebuild of a core product feature using the new design system, to create a compelling, data-driven business case for increased investment in platform modernisation.
2023 — Now
2020 — 2022
Remote
Lead Product Designer on "Engagement" Platform Squad user journey, from improvements of existing features to new journeys/flows - Creating scenarios, user stories, journey flows, prototypes, wireframes.
Integration, development and supervision of Design thinking processes in the organisation such as Design Sprints, Design Critique sessions, Pair Designing and Design QA (together with devs)
Developing the UX team's design operations process and resource toolkit - I've integrated Figma in the organisation, transitioning from Sketch, Invision and Zeppelin.
Cross platform design (Desktop, tablet, mobile web). Working closely with the product and engineering teams to create, plan and execute new features for the platform.
Improving user journeys by analyzing problems (problem framing frameworks) user pain points, struggles and happy moments.
Observation (session recordings), competitors analysis, UX Interviews (internal and external users), analyse analytics data, heat maps, collaborating with UX Researcher.
Development of experiments (based on hypotheses testing model) in partnership with Product Managers.
Ownership of the design system creation and maintenance, based on the company’s brand values and vision - Figma components and variants, documentation on Confluence and ZeroHeight, Frontend integration support on Storybook.
Mentoring and coaching other designers (development of career plans, skills to learn and improve, plan of actions).
Facilitate UX workshops both internally and with clients, bringing people from all areas of businesses together to collaborate.
Education
Universidade de Aveiro
New Technologies of Communication
EDIT. - Disruptive Digital Education