I’m a product designer who treats design as a business tool: for revenue, leverage, and long-term market power.

I started building companies during university. The first was a small hardware refurbishment and repair business. We worked with tight margins and real operational constraints. A year after creation, we were selling the business to a competitor for a small profit. Later, during my master’s, I co-founded a password management startup for small and mid-sized businesses. This business went further. We raised funding, hired a team, and operated the company for two and a half years before eventually shutting it down.

These two experiences taught me how unforgiving early-stage work is. Speed wasn’t a preference, it was a requirement. We moved fast not because it was exciting, but because everything was scarce. We had to learn quickly what mattered and ignore what didn’t. I also learned about altitude: one day I was working on a multi-year narrative with investors. The next, I was deep in execution, designing flows to make a safety product usable for non-technical users. When the second company stopped, I learned about another reality: resilience. In early-stage environments, “no” is the default response, dead is the default state.

One year later I joined a venture studio that specialized in building startups while co-investing with large enterprises. There, my two biggest clients were Colgate and KraftHeinz. My time there taught me a structure for innovation: how to decompose business ideas and product into their different parts (desirability, viability, and feasibility), turn these components into hypotheses, prioritize and then test them cheaply.

Across all these experiences, an operating principle progressively emerged. The product designer’s role is not fixed, it changes depending on what the team is trying to validate: a problem, a value proposition, a feature, a business model, or a growth mechanism.

I spent three years at Meta. In my first year, I worked on Ads and helped advertisers create WhatsApp ads more easily. That work opened new use cases for close to 10 million advertisers. In my second year, I moved to the Facebook app and worked on a new way for people to discover subscriptions. We improved conversion to the payment page by 41% (the largest conversion win of my career). In my third year, I was promoted to design lead and moved teams to own a suite of products inside the Meta browser. Multiple of those products improved ad score, the core KPI my team ran on.

Those three years taught me a lot, but the biggest lesson was what working at scale actually means. Meta is large enough that even when you find a real problem to solve, it may not matter if the revenue impact is too small. An additional $10M a year barely registers when the goal is $2B. In that environment, you can’t follow startup advices like “do one thing really, really well.” You have to think differently and look for systemic problems, meaning issues that compound across Meta apps, advertising goals, advertiser industries, user flows...

I also learned how much process shapes outcomes. I saw strong processes that gave teams room to explore new ideas, kept products coherent, and acted as coordination mechanisms. I also saw weak processes that turned every decision into a co-building exercise and created inertia.

Finally, I learned how organizational structure impacts delivery. My last team was Meta’s Browser org, split across multiple sub-teams. Some were platform teams, focused on enabling others. Some were innovation teams, dedicated to riskier bets. Others were core product teams, responsible for incremental improvements on cash-cow features. That kind of structure isn’t accidental, it’s what allows different types of work to matter and different types of thinkers to thrive.