I started in product — a product manager at Tencent on 100M-user products — then left Big Tech for the diving business: founding product lead on a booking app, later co-running a dive shop with a 5,000-member community. Design came next, full-time in EdTech, and I'm now senior product designer at ablefy in Berlin — sole designer for the payments and compliance teams, owning customer research end to end.
Mostly I have been the designer who starts things. The sales product, the community product and the affiliate marketplace were each a new product I took from nothing to shipped, and each one I handed to another designer when it stabilised. I have never sat on one fixed team for long — at ablefy I have worked with almost all of them.
I believe design judgment sharpens when you build the thing yourself. I don't replace engineering — I shorten the distance between an idea and the evidence for it. My prototypes run in production code on the design system and get WCAG-AA contrast passes; my research claims carry counts and denominators; my AI work ships behind evals. Most recently that meant building an AI customer-insights platform solo — seven feedback channels, an LLM pipeline, a Slack agent — by directing AI coding agents as the engineering team I didn't have.
I've also managed a user researcher and a UX writer, mentored the designer who took over my sales product line, and run internal workshops that get non-engineers shipping reviewed front-end changes with AI.
