Current role · Spindox, Milan
Leading design inside client projects
The work I do at Spindox is covered by client confidentiality, so there are no screenshots on this page. What I can describe is the part that actually transfers to another organisation: how I frame design work, how I run it with a team, and where I push back.
- Role
- Design Leader
- Company
- Spindox, Milan
- Context
- Digital products and services for enterprise clients
- Confidentiality
- Client work under NDA, method only
Why this page has no screenshots
Consultancy work belongs to the client. Publishing interface screenshots, research findings or roadmaps from those engagements would be a straightforward breach of the agreements I work under, and I’m not going to do it to make a portfolio look fuller.
So this page describes method and behaviour instead of artefacts. If you want to see how I structure a design process end to end, the case studies do that in full: they are briefs I am free to show. If you want to discuss the client work, I’m happy to talk through it at the level of detail confidentiality allows.
What the role covers
Design leadership in a consultancy is mostly about making design decisions legible to people who did not attend the workshop. Concretely, my remit spans four things:
Framing
- Turning a client’s stated request into a design problem worth solving
- Agreeing on what evidence would settle the open questions
- Saying out loud which assumptions the plan rests on
Team
- Leading multidisciplinary teams across design, research and delivery
- Splitting work so juniors own real decisions, not just screens
- Critique as a scheduled habit rather than an interruption
Method
- Design Thinking as an operating cadence, not a one-off workshop
- Research sized to the decision it needs to inform
- Design systems where consistency is cheaper than freedom
Business
- Connecting experience decisions to commercial outcomes
- Making trade-offs explicit before the estimate is signed
- Defending scope when the interface starts absorbing other teams’ problems
How I run a design engagement
The sequence below is the one I default to. It is deliberately the same spine you’ll see in every case study on this site. The difference in client work is that the research steps actually get funded.
- Audit first. Walk the existing product against heuristics and against the competitive set. It costs days, not weeks, and it converts opinion into evidence early.
- Reframe with the numbers on the table. Analytics and support data usually contradict the brief somewhere. That contradiction is the most valuable thing in the room.
- Decide what would change our minds. Then run the smallest research that could do it.
- Prototype at the lowest fidelity that can still be wrong. Paper, then structure, then interface.
- Test with real users, and write down what failed. A design process with no recorded failures wasn’t a process.
- Hand over something maintainable. Components and rationale, not a folder of final PNGs.
The part people skip
Most of the value in design leadership sits in the framing conversation, before anyone opens a design tool. If the team cannot state the problem in one sentence and name the evidence that would settle it, more screens will not help.
What I’m looking for next
A leadership mandate where design is accountable for outcomes rather than deliverables: Head of Design, Head of Digital, or Customer Experience Lead. The environments where I’m most useful have real users to talk to, a team worth growing, and stakeholders willing to be argued with.
If that sounds like the role you’re filling, write to me.