Thoughts & insights
Blog
Design leadership, remote teams, and nearshore product design.
CLAUDE.md for designers: turn Claude Code into a design partner
CLAUDE.md for product designers: a template that turns Claude Code into a design partner with your taste, your rules, and your anti-patterns.
Design systems for agentic workflows: how teams scale output
Design systems for agentic workflows help Heads of Design scale on-brand output by enabling cross-functional draft creation with portable AI-ready standards.
Spec-Driven Development for Designers in the Age of AI
Spec-driven development for designers turns AI into a reliable delivery system by aligning product, engineering, and go-to-market execution.
Figma MCP + AI: design tokens from variables to production JSON
How Figma MCP and AI keep design tokens in sync across code, internal tools, and brand assets—one JSON source of truth for every platform.
Peridio & Avocado OS: semantic tokens and AI-native design systems
Semantic design tokens for Peridio and Avocado OS: surfaces, complementary intent colors, and JSON-first specs that let AI and Figma stay aligned.
Figma MCP templates for scalable company collateral
Use Figma MCP to extract template content as markdown, swap copy and images, and let non-designers ship white papers, battle cards, and event collateral at scale.
Designers who build: how modern teams ship faster and better
Designers who build help founders and VPs ship faster with fewer handoff gaps by connecting product, engineering, marketing, and execution in one loop.
Preparation for future self: small favors that reduce stress
Preparation for future self turns small setup habits into calmer execution. Here is how I leave practical favors for later me across design, writing, and team work.
AI-assisted design workflows: what actually works
Which AI tools genuinely improve product design workflows, which are still hype, and the patterns that make AI a multiplier for experienced designers.
AI for design directors: sales decks, reports, and marketing assets
How a design director uses AI to produce sales decks, executive reports, and marketing assets at startup speed—design as a multiplier across business functions.
Ship landing pages in hours: Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub
How design and marketing use Claude Code to scaffold pages fast, Cursor for visual precision, and GitHub to ship landing pages at startup speed without handoff delays.
Beyond prompt engineering: AI agent infrastructure
Move past chatbot prompts. Shell scripts, reusable skills, and persistent memory create the infrastructure that makes AI agents faster, cheaper, and smarter across every project.
How design leadership accelerates startup speed-to-market
How a design director accelerates product, engineering, marketing, sales, fundraising, and customer experience—one cross-functional role, faster time to market.
Nearshore design leadership: the LATAM advantage for US startups
What US startups gain from a nearshore LATAM design director—diverse perspective, different ways of thinking, and real-time collaboration at competitive rates.
GitHub Actions and CI/CD for automated deployments
How to set up automated builds, preview deployments, and accessibility linting with GitHub Actions—demystifying CI/CD pipelines for design-technical roles.
How I embed in engineering teams as a design director
Concrete patterns for participating in sprints, reviewing PRs, pairing with engineers, and building deep trust as a design leader inside development teams.
Branching strategies for design-engineering collaboration
How to structure feature branches, coordinate design token updates in code, and manage releases cleanly between design and engineering teams at any scale.
Self-hosting as a designer: from Plex to Docker to open-source AI
From Plex to Docker to self-hosted AI — what running my own infrastructure taught me about the constraints that shape every design decision.
Git workflow scripts: designing processes that earn engineering trust
Rebase helpers, link checks, commit chunking, and branch scripts — how designing your own git workflows changes the way engineering teams see design.
How Head of Design and Head of Marketing actually collaborate
How to use Linear to align design and marketing on campaigns, launches, and brand work—shared projects, explicit phases, and no cross-functional chaos at startup speed.
Design as the creative hub: where every team does their best work
How design became the cross-functional hub where product, engineering, and marketing collaborate—FigJam workflows and remote rituals that actually stick.
Design as a fundraising multiplier: decks, brand, and investor trust
Why startups that invest in design across pitch decks, one-pagers, landing pages, video, and their full brand experience raise more effectively and build investor conviction.
DesignOps for distributed startups across time zones
How to build design operations infrastructure that connects design output to product, engineering, marketing, and executive reporting in a multi-country distributed startup.
Nearshore design leadership: why US companies hire in LATAM
Why US startups hire nearshore design directors from Latin America—time-zone overlap, senior leadership quality, and real cost efficiency without the usual tradeoffs.
Digital to physical: AI concepts, materials, and fabrication mindset
Digital fabrication exploration: AI concepts to printed objects, material tradeoffs, and how making builds stronger design leadership confidence.
Design systems at scale for IoT consulting
How a team of 10+ designers at an IoT consulting firm built a compounding design system—templates, tokens, usability guidelines—that made every project faster than the last.
From Figma to filament: why I 3D print as a product designer
How 3D printing and physical fabrication sharpen product design thinking—tolerances, iteration loops, and the constraints that screens never teach you.
The designer's maker lab: CAD, 3D printing, and woodworking
Why every designer should build a home maker lab—Fusion 360, 3D printing, and woodworking teach physical constraints and design instincts that sharpen digital work.
What I learned founding a Figma design community in LATAM
How building a 500+ designer community across Latin America on Discord taught me about open collaboration, shared knowledge, and the compounding value of giving freely.
Engineering concepts for everyday life: redundancy, MVPs, and kanban
How software engineering frameworks like redundancy, modularity, continuous improvement, and MVPs quietly improve the way you live—practical systems thinking beyond code.
The design engineer: code, 3D printing, and hybrid design practice
A case for hybrid design practice—how 3D printing, AI workflows, git, servers, and dev collaboration compound into more effective design leadership and better product work.
Git for designers: rebase, amend, and how to earn engineering trust
A practical guide to git rebase, amend, feature branches, and clean commit history—from a design director who works in the terminal every day.
How I structure remote design teams for US startups
Practical patterns for building and leading distributed design teams that ship product with US-based startups—ownership models, time-zone overlap, and communication rituals that work.