Product design got more interesting, if you like hard problems

I spent 11 years working in-house at Mercedes-Benz, Vistaprint, Ocado, and Wordbee. That’s where I learned the craft, the process, and the thinking needed to design large products with real constraints and at a scale you can’t simulate on your own. I’d take those years again.

As AI became genuinely impactful in the design process, I started to feel that I wasn’t designing in the most efficient way. The workflow for designers had changed fast, and it takes any large organisation time to absorb a shift like that. So I decided to leave and pursue more creative and innovative projects. I led experience design at YEEZY, designed a jewellery brand, and then built AVEE on my own to push myself to learn how to use AI as a designer and builder in a real-world context. That work now runs through Obliquo-02, the studio I created.

AI has changed the role of a product designer. It has become more demanding, because designers can now take responsibility for a wider part of the product.

Before, you might notice that something in the live product was not quite right or did not match the intended design. Fixing it would become a low-priority Jira ticket, behind more urgent work. Now, a designer can often make that change directly and open a merge request, so small polish stops competing with the harder engineering work for the same backlog.

A designer’s work can more directly shape the experience people actually use, rather than stopping at the design file. Being able to think from the initial problem through to the smallest details of an interaction, for products that reach thousands or millions of users, is what makes product design exciting to me.

Outside of screens: gravel biking, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and making beats on the Akai MPC One and SP-404MK2.