Context
When I joined Legalstart as a Senior Product Designer, the design team consisted of just two designers operating without any centralized structure, shared design language, or formal governance. Design was largely perceived as a reactive "service provider"—focused on making interfaces pretty rather than driving strategy.
I quickly realized that to scale, we needed to shift from tactical execution to systemic thinking. By pioneering a structured creation process and introducing operational frameworks, I demonstrated that design could drastically accelerate shipping velocity, bridge the historic friction between product and engineering, and deliver a seamless experience for both prospects and clients.
This immediate organizational impact and the ability to connect design metrics directly to business conversion naturally paved the way for my transition to Head of Design. From this new vantage point, I took full ownership of our strategic evolution: leading a comprehensive Rebranding to secure our market authority and engineering a high-velocity Growth Design framework to maximize revenue.
Infos
• Role : Head of Design
• Duration : Started in 2023
• Scope : Cross-product ecosystem (CMS, Acquisition funnels, Service app, Internal tools).
• Key focus : Design evangelization and ops, cross-functional governance, AI-ops, team mentorship and structuration.
• The result : 100% Design System adoption across engineering/product squads and a 30% reduction in design-to-dev friction.
Culture evangelization and cross-functional alignment
Design excellence cannot happen in a vacuum. It requires aligning PMs, engineers, and designers under a shared quality bar.
• The triad alignment (Design/PM/Dev) : I systematically integrated engineering and product management early into the design process. By establishing a shared language via our Design System, we transformed the culture from "building features" to "owning the system".
• Design critics & rituals : Established structured weekly syncs within the design team to foster radical candor, ensuring every layout aligned with our strategic vision while training designers to defend their choices using business metrics rather than subjectivity.
• UX advocacy at C-Level : Acted as the primary bridge to executive leadership, demonstrating how consistent UX health directly mitigates churn and lowers customer acquisition costs (CAC).
Journey governance and design system enforcement
A design system is useless if it isn't adopted. My role was to guarantee that our brand integrity survived the high velocity of product shipping.
• Bridging Figma to code : I led the implementation of a robust Design Token structure, establishing a strict "Single Source of Truth". I worked hand-in-hand with engineering leads to ensure that custom, "rogue" code could no longer bypass our established principles.
• End-to-End Cohesion : I audited and stitched together the entire user lifecycle. My focus was ensuring that the transition between a high-conversion marketing funnel and the deeply functional dashboard felt seamless, premium, and frictionless.
Process optimization and AI automation
To scale our output without adding headcount, I pioneered the integration of AI at the core of our corporate infrastructure, turning our design tokens and components into an automated production engine for both product and growth teams.
• Cross-department blueprinting : I structured our Design System to seamlessly integrate with custom AI tooling (Claude). By teaching the AI our exact component libraries and brand guidelines, we empowered designers and Product Managers to generate high-fidelity prototypes in minutes. Expanding this ecosystem to non-product teams, we enabled marketing to automate the creation of on-brand landing pages, ad creatives, and communication assets, effectively eliminating the historic bottleneck between marketing velocity and brand consistency.
• Automated QA & squad evangelization : Quality assurance is often the bottleneck of fast shipping. We built an AI-driven auditing framework to automatically scan staging environments for visual regressions, accessibility flaws, and design system deviations. Once proven successful in our squad, I evangelized and scaled this AI-QA methodology to other product squads, establishing a new company-wide standard for shipping speed and craft excellence.
Strategic proof points
This operational rigor and cross-functional alignment became the foundation for Legalstart’s biggest product transformations. Discover the concrete execution of this vision through two major case studies:
Deep dive into how we rebuilt Legalstart’s identity and deployed a multi-stack Design System from scratch. Explore the Rebranding case study
Deep dive into how we engineered a high-velocity experimentation engine that boosted overall CVR by +1.03 pts. Explore the growth design case study
