About — leadership, philosophy, and how I lead
Design leader, humanist, and systems builder — 20+ years turning UX into the promise a company keeps to its customers.
I'm a design leader and humanist with 20+ years building and scaling design functions — the last decade in financial services, designing the hardest decisions people make: pensions, investment, and insurance. I lead in two directions at once: I build and scale design systems and functions, and I lead teams through change — with influence and a quality bar, not authority. I believe UX owns the promise a company makes to its customers, and I'm now building that conviction on the AI frontier.
UX owns the promise
The interface isn't the product. The promise is.
A product page that says “in stock,” a date that says “arrives Tuesday,” a price that holds all the way to checkout — those are promises. When the experience keeps them, the company earns trust; when it breaks them, no amount of visual polish wins it back. So I lead design as the owner and quality arbiter of that promise: working across product, engineering, and the business to keep what the customer is told honest and whole.
- Lead through influence and a quality bar, not authority. The hardest and most valuable work crosses teams I don't control. I win it with a clear standard and evidence, not a reporting line.
- Turn structural gaps into development opportunities. A missing role, an unowned system, an under-instrumented process — these are where a team grows and a leader earns credibility.
The two pillars
A people leader who leads through change
Judgment and culture.
I inherited a demoralized team and steadied it. In 2+ years, exactly one person left — and on a team that arrived low, retention is the un-fakeable leadership metric. I built the team an identity (“Laboratorio UX”) and gave a small group real strategic autonomy. Rather than wait for headcount we didn't have, I turned the absence of dedicated design-ops and content roles into shared, collective ownership instead of silos — and I develop people deliberately, including a designer who went from nearly managed-out to a promotion candidate.
A strategic operator who builds and scales systems — and works the AI frontier
Influence, systems, and the frontier.
I took ownership of a design system that had none: built the business case, secured a budget across two departments I didn't control, and led a blended internal/external team to ship roughly 15 components plus the token foundations in about four months. I'm now evolving it into an AI-accelerated system — an agentic “design system that uses itself” — to crack the adoption problem that traditional governance can't fund its way out of. I direct agentic AI as a leader: I choose where it applies and I judge what it produces, rather than chasing a use case for the technology. (Precedent: earlier in my career I built a design system that the company's global headquarters scaled enterprise-wide.)
The turnaround method — ground truth before action
When I arrived, a senior leader — under their own pressure — wanted to let one of the designers go. She was coming off a difficult period unrelated to her capability, and the strain had left several people on the back foot. The easy move was to execute the exit. I didn't, for one concrete reason: I had no independent read of her yet, and I don't make an irreversible decision about a person until I've built my own ground truth.
That's how I work, every time. For the first two to three months, my 1:1s aren't for correcting. They're for letting the person be themselves, letting them get to know me, and letting me learn who I actually have and the real quality of their work. Only on that firm ground does real coaching begin.
With her, that ground showed someone very different from the secondhand version I'd been handed. I gave her time, backing, and work at her level. Today she's embedded in one of the largest parts of the business, working across multiple squads — and her own product manager comes to her for help managing uncertainty and shaping discovery. She went from nearly out to the person others rely on.
The point isn't the rescue. It's the method: build your own evidence about a person before you act, and most “problems” turn out to be development opportunities.
Credentials
- 20+ years in design and design leadership
- Led design teams of up to 13 people
- Designed for 600K+ customers across financial-services products (earlier product leadership)
- Built two design systems — one scaled enterprise-wide by global headquarters
- ~10 years in financial services
- Founded and ran a design agency for 10 years — commercial and P&L experience, not just craft
- Master's in technology entrepreneurship — Babson College
- Adjunct UX professor — Universidad Andrés Bello (UNAB) and Universidad del Desarrollo (UDD)
- Accessibility as a 7-year conviction — launched a previous company's first accessible products, and runs a full WCAG 2.1 AA program today
- Bilingual and bicultural — Chile · United States