# Silvio Sangineto > Product Design Leader at Microsoft | Human-AI & Agentic Platforms | Founder Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/silvio I am a Silicon Valley-based Human–AI Product Leader with design roots and engineering depth, building scalable products and the organizations to deliver them. For over 15 years, across startups and global enterprises like Microsoft, I’ve turned vision into execution - crafting product strategy, shaping Human–AI experiences, and helping teams lead with clarity and purpose. My journey spans early-stage startups across countries, where speed, adaptability, and lean teams were essential, to Microsoft, where I’ve led initiatives in 0-to-1 products like Customer Insights as well as multi-billion-dollar businesses such as Azure and Power Platform. Across these roles, the products I’ve shaped have touched more than a billion people worldwide. In both worlds, I’ve carried an intrapreneurial spirit, piloting new product development frameworks, applying data-informed prioritization, and crafting OKRs to align strategy with execution across complex, cross-matrix organizations. I believe technology can create a better future if led by the right people. That requires more than launching products - it means building organizations that sustain efficiency while scaling innovation responsibly. Alongside my corporate journey, I founded Lift Leaders, an AI-native platform to grow the next generation of leaders, and I partner with VCs and startups as a coach and advisor. My mission remains the same: unlock growth, lead with purpose, and build a future where humans and technology thrive together. ## Work Experience ### Principal Design Manager @ Microsoft Jan 2025 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States Driving design for Microsoft’s App Agents, creating Human–AI experiences that deliver value across business channels and help organizations achieve their goals. Focused on thin, adaptive, contextual AI layers that orchestrate interactions, connect data with context, and adapt in real time to support human decision-making. Leading a design team to craft solutions that are responsible, ethical, and beneficial for society while shaping the next paradigm of work where humans and AI collaborate seamlessly. ### Principal Design Manager @ Microsoft Jan 2024 – Present | Mountain View, California, United States Leading Design for a new generation AI native business process experience platform. ### Principal Design Manager @ Microsoft Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 | Mountain View, California, United States I'm currently leading the design and user research team focused on accelerating intelligent cloud-native experiences on Azure. The Global Cloud Native Applications Market size is expected to reach $16.2 billion by 2028, rising at a market growth of 22.9% CAGR during the forecast period. We are accelerating and evolving how organizations will build, deploy, and scale their workloads with confidence by leveraging the power of AI to maximize the value of their cloud investments. I am responsible for overseeing the team's strategic direction and day-to-day operations, ensuring we create intuitive and user-centric designs that align with the principles of cloud-native development. Our team empowers organizations to harness the full potential of cloud-native technologies, enabling them to build intelligent, resilient, and user-friendly applications in the rapidly evolving cloud-native landscape. ### Principal Design Manager @ Microsoft Jan 2022 – Jan 2023 | Mountain View, California, United States Leading a Design & Research team to evolve Azure customer experiences to build the Cloud foundations for 95% of Fortune 500 companies. ### Principal Design Manager @ Microsoft Jan 2020 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area Lead and nurture a Studio of global cross-functional creative talent. Inspire and mentor a diverse team of product designers, producers, content designers, UX researchers, overseeing platform-wide experiences incorporating AI, owning the vision and roadmap from conception until release. ### Venture Deal Partner @ Boardy Jan 2026 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area As a Venture Deal Partner, I support the firm by identifying and evaluating high-potential investment opportunities at the intersection of technology, AI, and product innovation. I leverage my operator and leadership background to source differentiated deals, assess founders and products with a customer- and execution-first lens, and provide hands-on strategic support to portfolio companies as they scale. I work closely with the investment team to strengthen conviction, accelerate diligence, and help founders turn vision into durable outcomes. ### Adjunct Lecturer @ Stanford University Jan 2025 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States Adjunct Lectured and Coach at Advanced course in Product Design at dschool. ### Mentor @ 500 Global Jan 2025 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States At 500 Global, I work directly with early-stage and growth-stage founders to develop the leadership mindset, emotional resilience, and strategic clarity needed to scale companies in a rapidly evolving, AI-driven world. My role focuses on helping founders lead with intention, navigate complexity, and build high-performing, human-centered teams capable of thriving through change. ### Leadership Coach / Mentor @ Plug and Play Tech Center Jan 2023 – Present | Sunnyvale, California, United States Empowering startups visiting Silicon Valley from all over the World for the Global Overseas Acceleration & Learning program to excel in the dynamic landscape of product design and customer experience at scale. Providing Strategic Guidance: I help them define and execute winning product design strategies. It includes aligning design initiatives with business goals, market trends, and user needs. Customer-Centric Approach: I instill a customer-first ethos, guiding startups to build products and services that resonate with their target audience. I leverage customer experience best practices to drive loyalty and growth. Innovation and Creativity: I inspire creative problem-solving and out-of-the-box thinking, enabling startups to disrupt their industries through innovative product design and customer experience solutions. Team Development: I foster the growth of cross-functional teams, equipping them with the skills and mindset needed to consistently deliver exceptional design and customer experiences while their building their design culture. Results expected: - Empowered senior management, C-Suite to launch market-leading products and services while they are designing culture and organizations. - Elevated customer satisfaction and loyalty, resulting in increased revenue. - Facilitated the development of high-performing teams with a strong focus on innovation and user-centered design. ### Instructor and Faculty member @ University of California, Berkeley Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Help professionals learn how to create compelling user-centric experiences, create a design strategy and build a design portfolio to unlock a career in design. ### Founding Member @ Design Leaders Community Jan 2024 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States ### Advisor @ Harvard Business Review Jan 2021 – Present As an Advisor, I provide insight to shape the content HBR develops and enrich THEIR understanding of our perspective on ideas from HBR and the wider world of management and leadership. ### Founder @ SILVIO.DESIGN Jan 2008 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Empowering every individual and organization on the planet to transcend from a society of consumers to creators. We turn each person into their own creative studio. At the intersection of creativity and purpose, we transform people and organizations. Through the lens of design, we ignite potential, shatter limitations, and forge a future of boundless possibilities. Our guiding principle is that every individual has the power to shape their own path, and through our innovative approach, we equip them with the tools to create a legacy of impact. ### Judge @ Africa's Business Heroes Jan 2020 – Present | China Helping to select, showcase and grow local talent who are creating positive impact in their communities and beyond, and inspire a movement of African entrepreneurship. Over a ten-year period, the program will recognize 100 African entrepreneurs and provide grant funding, training programs, and broader support for the broad African entrepreneurial ecosystem. ### UX Lecturer / Ph.D. school @ University of Calabria Jan 2021 – Present | Calabria, Italy Lecturer for the course User Experience Design: the human side of technology. Department of Computer Science & Computer Engineering ### UX Mentor @ University of the Arts London Jan 2020 – Present | London, England Metropolitan Area The Professional Mentoring programme aims to support students to make a living doing what they love. ### Principal UX Designer (Mentor & Judge) @ Start-Up Chile Jan 2019 – Present | Santiago Province, Chile Deliver crucial advices based on real-world experience to entrepreneurs to bootstrap their startups. Main Areas: Product Development, UX/UI Design, User Research, Recruiting, Team Building and Project Management. ### Principal UX Designer (Mentor & Judge) @ MassChallenge Jan 2018 – Present | Greater Boston Area MassChallenge was founded with a singular purpose – to make it as easy as possible for entrepreneurs to launch and grow new ventures. MassChallenge experts are seasoned industry leaders who share their time, experience, and deep knowledge base to help startups grow. I'm contributing as a Mentor on Product Design / UX Design and Project Management. ### User Experience Designer Coach @ Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) Jan 2016 – Present Helping members of the IDF Design League to set and achieve their ambitious professional targets. I guide them in learning, preparing for certification, authoring publications, speaking at conferences, and completing design projects ### UX Coach @ Mind the Bridge Jan 2017 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Principal UX Designer (Mentor) @ FasterCapital Jan 2017 – Present | Dubai, United Arab Emirates ### UX Coach @ Springboard Jan 2020 – Jan 2024 | San Francisco I'm involved in the UX/UI track to mentor students, some of the activities are reviews of projects and design portfolio, giving career advice, helping with the execution of design challenges, setting goals and measuring them, job search advice. ### UX Coach @ Talent Garden Jan 2016 – Jan 2023 | Cosenza Area, Italy Talent garden provides the space, the training and the network for our select community of innovators to succeed. I'm a mentor for the Talent Garden in Cosenza - south of Italy - to help junior professionals to improve their careers and startups to build desirable products. ### UX Coach @ 500 Startups Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area 500 Startups is a global venture capital seed fund with a network of startup programs headquartered in Silicon Valley with over $390M in committed capital across 4 main funds and 13 micro funds. As mentor, I help startup sharing lessons that I learn while building desirable products. Most importantly, I help them in strategy to make their product robust and scalable. ### UX Coach @ WeWork Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | Greater New York City Area We partner with local incubators and accelerators to provide holistic, long-term support for startups throughout their journey. Above all, we believe in humanizing the startup process, encouraging inclusivity and diversity, and connecting people to one another. In the mentorship program I help anyone take the startup path and grow with us ### User Experience Designer, Speaker @ UX Laboratory Jan 2015 – Jan 2020 | Greater New York City Area We are a digital collective with contributors from all around the world. We started this company for likeminded UX designers to work together and create a lab-like environment where we could come up with the best ideas possible. We advocate the experimental nature of user experience design; Here we focus on problems not features. We focus on experience not revenue. We focus on ideas not limitations. We focus on creativity, amazing design & the power of great ideas. ### Lead UX Designer (Store Experience) @ Macy's Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area Playing a key role in shaping the user experience design for Macy's stores and additionally responsible for mentoring UX Designers and Associate UX Designers, and guide their efforts to align with Macy’s strategic vision. Some key activities: - Partners with the UX leadership team to define the domain experience and to ensure deliverables are consistent with the user experience design vision. - Design in-store environments, ensuring a consistent user experience across different platforms. - Works through domain design problems from beginning to end: conceptualizes new products and features, designs storyboards, workflows, interactions, wireframes, high fidelity mockups, and design standards based on business goals and user research. - Mentors domain team user experience designers. - Development and execution of UX design vision and deliverables for Stores - Strategic thinking, developing POVs and UX design vision. ### Lead Product Designer @ Momentum Design Lab Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco Bay Area We specialize in human-centered customer experiences across digital product innovation, technology transformation, and inventive marketing. With clients in categories like Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Consumer Products, and Technology, across both enterprise and consumer, we look at the totality of a client’s enterprise and develop solutions that can have an impact on how our clients do business. From AI to IoT to Analytics to Blockchain to Cloud-based Applications, we help our customers in ways that go well beyond conventional marketing tools. ### Speaker and Mentor @ StartupHouse Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Francisco We aim to transform ideas and projects in successful companies, providing the support needed at the earlier stage for entrepreneurs. We do this through accommodation, access to office space, incubation and connections to entrepreneurs in the network. I'm a speaker in the StartupHouse Foundry Program, an 8 weeks pre-acceleration program. ### UX Manager @ Cloud4Wi Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco, California Conduct usability tests, gather user insight, analytics, best practices, and perform competitor analysis to inform and drive design decisions Work into the Product Management team to rapidly prototype user interfaces and interactions Plan and design the user experience of applications, from concept creation and wireframing, to producing user flows and interactive prototypes Design user interfaces for the application across all customer-facing portals, creating mock-ups and polished UI, with related documents to illustrate user interfaces/flows Leads design work on applications providing oversight/direction to the UI developers and front end engineers, helping to ship high-quality UI and UX Develop and maintain user interface style guidelines across the product ### UX Consultant @ Namahn Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Brussels Area, Belgium Interaction designer heavily focused on satisfying the needs and desires of the majority of people who will use the products. ### Student Services Intern - Volunteer @ Twin Group Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | London • Assist with Induction • Assist with day to day running of school • Reporting ### UX Manager, Scrum Master @ Global Valuation Ltd. Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | London, United Kingdom I worked on a complex software-hardware solution for large OTC Portfolios called GVL Esther. It is an in-memory application that executes on large memory heterogeneous boards with acceleration. Tailored to Supermicro equipment and accelerated by nVidia K10 GPUs, GVL Esther achieves a sustained performance of about 10 TF/sec on each board. A handful of servers in a compact cabinet enclosure is capable of processing a workload 10,000 times better than that achievable by a large grid computing solution. CVA/DVA/FVA statistics for portfolios of 100K+ transactions, 2K+ counterparties, 200 time points and 100K scenarios can be obtained in about 10-20 minutes while simulating all credits dynamically, modelling re-hypothecation of variation margin and scenarios for value-at-risk and initial margin. Overnight calculations are capable of performing a total return analysis for CVA, FVA, DVA and loss distribution by generating over 100 million scenarios and 20 billion of portfolio revaluations. This is in excess of a factor 10K with respect to large grid implementations which typically arrive to generate only about 2 million portfolio revaluations overnight. The revolutionary architecture is based on large heterogeneous boards able to process entire global portfolios with up to a million trades without splitting the valuation across different nodes. ### UX Designer and Web-Master @ Consigliere Regionale della Calabria Jan 2011 – Jan 2014 | Paola Mi sono occupato di tutto il ciclo di sviluppo del sito web istituzionale. A partire dalla raccolta dei requisiti fino alla relativa implementazione sfruttando il cms Joomla (php) e MySql Server come Database. La grafica è stata completamente curata in Adobe Photoshop. ### Consultant @ Italfondiario spa - Fortress Investment Group LLC Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Rome Area, Italy Responsible for assisting in the development and support of both internal and external reporting needs. At the same time, responsible for providing trend analysis to the management team to enable them to make informed decisions regarding resource management. ### Consultant @ Avanade Jan 2011 – Jan 2012 | Milano, Italia Design and manage complex engineering projects over their life cycles. Specialized in private cloud and delivery solutions to satisfy big italian customers like publitalia'80 and fastweb. ### Consultant @ Avanade Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Roma, Italia Worked on projects at Publitalia'80 (entertainment), fastweb (telecommunication) and INPS (governmental agency). ### Software Engineer @ Caliò informatica Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Rende Development of a CRM module using Java and PHP ### ICT Responsible @ Regional Councillor Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 Sono stato responsabile dello staff durante tutta la campagna elettorale per quanto concerne il web-marketing e la cura dell’immagine del consigliere regionale in carica. Mi sono occupato di tutto il ciclo di sviluppo di un sito web. A partire dalla raccolta dei requisiti fino alla relativa implementazione sfruttando il cms Joomla (php) e MySql Server come Database. La grafica è stata completamente curata in Adobe Photoshop. ### Microsoft Student Partner @ Microsoft Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Milano, Italia Un programma che premia e riconosce gli studenti più talentuosi delle università italiane per la loro dedizione, passione e coinvolgimento con Microsoft durante ogni anno accademico. Durante il percorso come Microsoft Student Partner ho approfondito seguendo diversi seminari microsoft le tecnologie .NET (C#, F#. ASP.NET) pubblicizzandole in ambito universitario con i docenti e gli studenti. ### Professor @ Istituto comprensivo San lucido Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | San Lucido Insegnare in modo adeguato i principi dell’informatica a bambini non è stato per niente semplice. Mi sono cimentato in questa esperienza utilizzando tutti gli strumenti che ho considerato necessari. Gli argomenti trattati e perfettamente assorbiti dagli studenti riguardavano tutti i principi dell’utilizzo del pc, le sue componenti, il sistema binario, le operazioni in binario, la video scrittura, realizzazione di presentazioni multimediali, fogli di calcolo, navigare in internet in modo sicuro e sfruttare i nuovi social web con cautela. ### Professor @ Scuola Media Francesco Bruno Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 | Paola Durante il corso gli argomenti trattati e perfettamente assorbiti dagli insegnanti e dal personale ata riguardavano tutti i principi dell’utilizzo del pc, le sue componenti, il sistema binario, le operazioni in binario, la video scrittura, realizzazione di presentazioni multimediali, fogli di calcolo e navigazione in internet in modo sicuro. ### Responsible of ICT Office @ Municipality of Paola Jan 2007 – Jan 2008 | Paola Da responsabile dell’ufficio comunicazione & IT mi sono occupato della gestione in prima persona della fase di startup dell’e-government all’interno della Pubblica Amministrazione target. Si è iniziato a prevedere l’ utilizzo della firma digitale e la realizzazione di un sito internet in grado di gestire al meglio i bisogni dei cittadini (compreso l’albo pretorio online). Inoltre nella fase puramente di comunicazione è stato mio compito interagire quale portavoce dell’amministrazione con tutti i quotidiani locali, regionali e nazionali per la realizzazione di comunicati stampa o organizzazione di eventi. ### Software Engineer @ Createc s.r.l. Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | Rende Ricerca e sviluppo di un web-crawler che utilizzasse l'high-throughput computing e l'opportunistic computing per la ricerca e l'indicizzazione. E' stata utilizzata l'integrazione tra globus, condor e il mondo java. ## Education ### Public Speaking Stanford Continuing Studies ### Other in User Experience and Interaction Design IxDF - The Interaction Design Foundation ### Bachelor of Engineering (BEng) in Computer Engineering Università della Calabria ### Oracle 11g Course in Amministratore DB Oracle Confor ASP ### Master of Engineering (MEng) in Ingegneria Informatica Università della Calabria ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/silviosangineto - Portfolio: https://www.facebook.com/ssangineto/ - Portfolio: http://silvio.design --- Source: https://flows.cv/silvio JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/silvio/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-13