Vitor Botelho
Product Designer.
I design products end to end. I learned the craft without a safety net, and I work best where the problem is still being figured out.
The short version.
Most product designers learn the craft inside a structured company. Someone else has scoped the problem, written the brief, weighed the tradeoffs. The designer arrives after several people have already passed through.
I came up the other way. Every project I worked on was mine to figure out. I had to decide if the problem was worth solving, propose the direction, defend it in front of the person paying for it, and stay with the work until it shipped. There was no PM to set the priority, no research team to hand me the answer, no senior designer to review the file before it went out.
That was the constraint and the teacher. It taught me to start with the question before the artifact, to talk to the business in its own language, and to treat handoff as the middle of the project, not the end. The work I am proudest of is the work where I had to argue for the right thing.
Now I am looking for the next step: a product worth committing to, a team that takes design seriously, and a problem that is still being figured out. If that sounds like what you are building, I would like to talk.
A few things I believe.
A design that needs explaining failed before it launched.
If the case study has to defend the interface, the interface lost. The work argues for itself or it does not work.
The best design decisions are usually not design decisions.
Cutting a feature, changing a price, killing a flow. The biggest wins live upstream of the canvas.
Process is a tool, not a religion.
Frameworks are useful until they get in the way of the work. The goal is to ship something good, not to perform a methodology.
Handoff is the middle of the project, not the end.
Most of what makes a product good or bad gets decided after the design is approved. If I leave at handoff, I have not finished the job.
Want to work together?
Tell me what you are building. If it is the right fit, we will figure out the rest from there.