Hi, I'm Allan.
Head of product design, 23 years into a career that started with ink on paper and somehow ended up here.
I build businesses with design as the lever.
Ten years in product, twenty-three in the craft: fintechs, SaaS, venture builders, one intense global team after a merger. First designer in the room, more times than I can count.
A single week might mean usability heuristics on one screen, an A/B test on another, a lifecycle job in code, a sales call. Staying hands-on is deliberate.
Mentor on ADPListBook a 1:1 sessionSharing what I learn.
Part of the job happens outside the company: bootcamps, talks, conversations with people building the same kind of thing. Explaining a decision out loud is the fastest way to find out if it holds up.
An even longer run in art direction.
The other side of that timeline: over a decade as an art director, campaigns, branding, editorial layouts, one client after another across agencies before product ever entered the picture.
Composition and hierarchy were the job long before they were a design system. That instinct never left, it just moved into product.
Same curiosity, no badge.
Off the clock, it's running, diving, or three hours deep into a game that counts as research, I'll insist. There's a guitar too, badly played.
Same curiosity, really: how people behave, how systems work, how something ordinary becomes worth paying attention to.
Ink on paper, long before pixels.
Long before roadmaps, there was a 14 year old inking floor plans by hand, and a self-taught programmer figuring out code in 1998. Same patience behind a Maserati illustration people still ask me about. Different tools, same eye.
Curious what this actually looks like day to day?
See how I work