Fractional Design Leader
18+ years across enterprise software, scaleups, startups, and agencies — available fractionally, on contract, or as a consultancy engagement. I embed at the leadership level: setting design direction, building team capability, and shipping product. Comfortable with ambiguity, remote-first, and working across multiple engagements.
Capcade
Head of Product Design
- —Moved product work to test-first: model the users and test the models before building.
CloudBees
Lead Product Designer / Head of Design
- —Led from the front: designed and shipped a core-product redesign hands-on in Figma — customers called it a 'quantum leap' in user experience.
- —Built and owned the product design system — component library, design tokens and usage patterns adopted across product and engineering, with WCAG targets, automated accessibility checks and VPATs for large clients.
- —My research team found developers spent most of their time fixing errors in pipeline logs; that finding became CloudBees Pipeline Explorer, designed by one of my reports.
- —Prototyped and built the company's first AI chatbot dashboard (Beebot) at a hackathon, designing agentic onboarding flows.
- —Scaled the team from 3 to 9 and mentored specialists across research, product UX and design systems — while remaining the hands-on lead on flagship work.
Oracle NetSuite
Lead, Design Systems
- —Designed a WCAG-targeted UI catalog and component library from the ground up.
- —Wrote the design-system documentation that became the standard for product and engineering, and won adoption across three key teams, starting with Analytics.
- —Ran the design sprint that set the product-refresh strategy; led a team of 4 (UX, visual, content) while staying hands-on.
Mat3ra (Exabyte.io)
Lead UX Designer (contract)
- —Sole designer repositioning a tool as a platform: onboarding, information architecture and core flows.
Machinas
Art Director → UX Lead
- —Art-directed Hugo Boss and Esprit digital surfaces and turned their brand language into reusable UX: site-wide flows, a mobile grid, an Apple Watch storefront.
Monospace.Studio
Freelance UX Designer
- —Telanto: design system, brand refresh and marketing website (team of two). IESE: personas, story-mapping, IA and working prototypes.
- —Life Agency, Bologna: contract Art Director across the agency's clients (2013–15).
Core Skills
- Product / UX Design
- Design Systems & Component Libraries
- Design Tokens & Theming
- User Flows & IA
- Prototyping & Wireframing
- Accessibility (WCAG)
- Figma (advanced)
Leadership
- Player-coach leadership
- Mentoring & coaching
- Hiring & team building
- Design sprints
- Stakeholder management
Technical
- Git, React, Docker
- Design-to-code / dev handoff
- AI agents & agentic workflows (Claude Code, autonomous review/merge pipelines)
Languages
- English — native
- Italian — fluent
- Spanish — fluent
Founder — ShortStayApartments.com (2007–2011): bootstrapped a SaaS rental platform to 500+ listings; acquisition exit in 2011.
Senior Designer — Machinas (2005–2006): UI design for the Esprit global store.
BA, Computer Systems Analysis