Design is Dead. Long Live Design.
On design winning its seat in the room but not always the authority to go with it, and why AI is about to settle that argument for good. Part of Design is Not Dead, an ongoing Substack on design leadership.
Hello, I'm Hugo. Designer by heart, manager by design.
15+ years building design teams, the standards they run on, and lately the way a company designs AI products at all.
Products shipped across risk, CX cloud, ATS and AI assistants.
Years leading design across fintech, adtech, CX, HR and creator tech.
Weekly active user growth on the platform I led at Screenloop.
Manychat's first AI products, shipped in eight months.
Shipped the first AI products, and the standard the next ones run on.
Built and bootstrapped the design and research function.
Led product design for Platform, new Admin and Data products experience.
Two flagship risk products, and where I started designing for machine learning rather than around it.
Most of what I've built is the scaffolding a team needs before it can do its best work: the hiring bar, the design process, the standard people hold when nobody is checking. I've hired and developed more than fifteen designers across four companies, grown and helped scale a team from six to sixty, and founded a design function that started with a single designer.
Four functions, founded or scaled. The method, and where it runs out.
Hatch Leadership Ateliers · Masterclass
Ran a sold-out workshop at Hatch Leadership Ateliers Barcelona on moving cross-functional teams from coordination to genuine shared ownership: decision rights, accountability gaps, and collective responsibility.
On design winning its seat in the room but not always the authority to go with it, and why AI is about to settle that argument for good. Part of Design is Not Dead, an ongoing Substack on design leadership.
An inside look at the product design process at Talkdesk, presented at Inside Talkdesk 2021.
View Presentation ↗Thesis on design impact in distributed and multicultural organisations. (Portuguese only)
View Thesis ↗The public version of the standards I build inside product teams. It indexes AI features by the job they do rather than the screen they sit on, then works each one through three chapters: what it says, how it looks, and how it responds. Thirty-question self-test included.
A curation engine for designers and AI-curation professionals. Discover design and art inspiration from open collections, build mood boards, and turn them into ready-to-use image-generation prompts.
View project ↗Find concerts and record stores around Barcelona by date, neighbourhood, radius, and mood. Built out of a long habit of digging for records in whatever city I'm in.
View project ↗