Some of the roles I've covered in the last years

Cerved platforms

Skills and tools applied

I started my work at Cerved as a designer focusing on the improvement of the main products of Cerved Group, in particular the Marketing Intelligence platform and Cerved Credit Suite.

Both products provide data and information about companies, markets, credit risk and financial analysis.
They are used by thousands of customers in Europe such as Accenture, PWC, Trenitalia and Poste italiane.

My contribution to these platforms was gathering customer feedbacks about the data visualization in order to define new and more accurate charts and indicators to represent the data.

From Sketch to Figma

Skills and tools applied

Isn't there a simpler tool to do this?

Since the design team had been using Sketch as their main design tool and there were many issues with it, I proposed to move our projects and operations to Figma in order to improve the efficiency and features available to all designers.

In order to achieve that I researched and planned a transition with the different project teams. I supported their organization and the rework needed in terms of files, resources, components and libraries to be moved onto the new tool.

After the initial phase of transition I supported the entire design team through publishing learning resources on best practices on how to utilize Figma, in the form of video pills, courses and template resources.

B2B corporate clients

Skills and tools applied

My main activity as a UX designer has been through the design and development of several digital products for corporate clients such as BNL, Banco Desio .
For each project I was part of a Scrum team composed by developers, data scientists, Product owner and Scrum master.

My role was evenly distributed throughout all the different phases of the projects. Starting from the business evaluation of the client requests, I would assist the product owner and business analysts in defining the requisites of the proposed solution.
In this phase I would perform customer and user interviews to gather insights and explore alternative solutions to propose to the board of stakeholders, leading workshops and meetings.

In the second phase I was tasked with designing user journeys, personas and service blueprints, in order to define a preliminary version of the product offered to the client.
In this phase I would also combine different requirements from developers and data scientists, regarding technologies implemented and variations to the client requirements.
After this I would create mock-ups and prototypes with Figma that represented the actual front-end flows the user would interact with. Also at this stage I would assist the Product Owner in defining user stories and managing the product backlog in Jira. I would also follow the development process through each sprint and gather user feedbacks with usability tests and analysing user interactions.

Cerved design system

Skills and tools applied

One of the biggest projects I was involved in was the development of the internal design system, following the transition to Figma tokens.

I was part of the design team tasked with the organization, design and maintenance of the Design System utilized by all the Product teams in Cerved to develop new products.
This project has been a direct collaboration with the development team, and involved more than twenty people.

The first step was clustering all the foundational elements of the company, such as: color styles, typography, UI elements, front-end frameworks and technologies utilised by all the different teams.

Subsequentially, we defined a common ground of practices and values that were shared between the various product teams. From there we planned a roadmap for the design and development of the various assets and foundations of the new design system.
We decided to structure the organization of the work with two teams, one composed by designers and one by developers. This in order to separate the activities of design and development and speed up the internal processes.
Each team would have a separate Backlog of activities, enabling designers to produce the assets that would drive the development of the actual components of the design system.

Problem definition

Since the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, it became clear that digital transformation and business process optimization was extremely important, in order to adapt to the new situation.
For this reason, I collaborated with Trentino Sviluppo in redesigning the internal processes of the companies located in their innovation centre, supporting them in a digital transition.
After a first phase of discovery and discussion with the companies, it became clear that the main pain point was the need of a digital tool that would track and orchestrate the production line of the companies.
From there I was asked to move forward the project and actively lead a professional scrum team, set up by Trilogy srl, in the actual realisation of the digital product for Metalworking srl.

Requisites and research

Skills and tools applied

We started the project by examining and researching the company's processes and user pain points. This was done by visits to the production site, interviews with employees and mapping key flows and documentation of the business.

As a first action we inspected the actual production line with the help of the business owners to get a deeper understanding and a first hand look at the company.
Through these visits we gathered material to help us define a streamlined model of the internal processes.
This would also prove important in order to have a direct contact with the potential users of our application.

• lack of communication between line steps
• improve consistency of documentation
• provide support for quality assurance

Backlog definition

Skills and tools applied

As for the planning phase, I set out with the scrum team to define the product backlog in terms of user stories and epics necessaries.
In this stage we also involved two main stakeholder of the company, in order to get direct feedbacks of the specifications and assure a shared understanding of the future developments.

Trello was the tool of choice for keeping track of requirements.
Each user story would follow a base template to keep consistency and simplify the review and acceptance process.
I would also write acceptance criteria, shared with the company stakeholders, to guide the internal reviews during which we would show the progress and completed tasks.
Each story would then be weighted by the developers and organised in the product backlog according to its priority in terms of value for the company.

Prototypes and development

Skills and tools applied

The development phase was structured in sprints with the duration of two weeks.
Following scrum framework, we would convene on a sprint goal for each sprint and define user stories to be completed. We held daily updates internal to the development team to track potential issues or blockers, while I as the product owner, had meetings with the stakeholders twice per week
This organization helped us keep a lean communication between all the parties involved.

At the end of the sprint, we held one internal review with the development team in a test environment, to check everything together and prepare a review with the company.
The official sprint review would be held the last day of the sprint, where we presented the stakeholders with the progress and user stories completed.
As a measure of completeness we would follow the Acceptance Criteria in each story, this helped us align the expectations of all the parties involved.
Once the sprint was completed each user story that passed the review would be pushed to the production environment, where the company could start interact with the final product.

As conclusion of the sprint we held a retrospective guided by the scrum master to outline potential improvements or blockers inside the team.
We would also plan a first draft of the following sprint to be shared with the stakeholders of the company.

The overall progress of the development phase was tracked through metrics using mainly burndown charts. This was a tool for our team to always refer to, both to evaluate our efforts and maintain our commitment to the customer.

Feedbacks and user testing

Skills and tools applied

The entire development phase took around 10 months. Once the majority of the features were released we started implementing a feedback system for additional improvements and evaluating usability.
As for tracking requests, bugs and improvements we used various tools such as ybug, hotjar and user tests.

For this task, we involved specific users in different sectors of the company. With them we planned a serie of usability tests of their activities and tracked how much time would take them to complete.
In the subsequent releases we tried to optimize those metrics and increase the overall productivity of the users in their operations.

The project was completed on schedule in 12 months, delivering a new information system that helped the company document and track the activities in the production line.
From there the company asked us to extend the project in order to integrate other parts of their information system in our solution, such as customers orders and external purchases.

Problem definition

Skills and tools applied

One of my colleagues had been working in the marketing and advertising industry for several years, particularly in close contact with content creators.
Noting the difficulties of communication between brands and influencers he decided to come up with a more effective solution, one that could leverage digital tools and ease the steps required for brands to market their products through influencer marketing. With his expertise we started analysing the actual market need and possible solutions of this challenge.

Market analysis

Skills and tools applied

As a first step we decided to analyse market trends and the actual space in the segment. Although market data are not always easy to come by, nor provide an ultimate source of truth it was interesting to note how the market expanded and was expected to grow in the next years.

After this initial step, we set out to look for the competition in the market and find new insights.

We realised that the major investments in the influencer marketing industry were mainly between big corporate brands and extremely popular content creators or influencers, which have millions of followers on their social media pages.

This kind of collaborations comprised the production of sponsored contents or advertising from the influencer, in exchange of a high monetary compensation from the brands

Two main problems emerged from this analysis:

• Brands would have to pay top dollars in order to reach top influencers
• Top influencers tend to underperform in terms of engagement with their followers

User research and idea validation

Skills and tools applied

The main activity we performed during this stage was contacting as many as possible small-medium influencers (from 1k to 100k followers) on the principal social media platforms.

Thanks to our co-founder that had previous connections in the industry, we managed to create a consistent group of content creators that were interested in the project and were eager to answer our questions about their work.

After gaining insights from interviews, observations of their daily work and group meetings we developed our hypothesis on the needs, pain points and possible solutions that our tool should provide in order to be successful.

Business model and competition

Skills and tools applied

During the initial 2 weeks of our first acceleration program we were able to define our first business model and elaborate a differentiation strategy from the competitors already in the market.

In particular we decided to focus our efforts on providing a simpler and much more efficient way for small and medium enterprises to collaborate and create marketing campaigns with emerging influencers.
As we developed our business model we had the opportunity to analyse the competitors already in the market, in particular in the Finnish and Baltic region. The main competitor was a startup based in Helsinki, Boksi, that had raised a couple of millions in funding and that operated with a similar business model, but focused on much bigger customers.

Another competitor was Promoty, a platform for marketing campaigns that focused on providing consulting services to corporate companies.

As a result we decided to focus on the top right sector of the competition matrix, delivering services to a specific niche (small sme's and emerging influencers) and making our product very easy to use and start making marketing campaigns.

MVP - Minimum Viable Product

Skills and tools applied

After this first validation we started developing our product and defined all the features and characteristics emerged while talking with the potential users.

In this phase I prototyped different mockup versions of the platform, both mobile and web. Consequentely I evaluated them with the influencers and brands, in order to get feedbacks on the main features and the overall journey through the service. Thanks to the expertise of our technical co-founder Kelvin we were able to develop a first version of the platform and have a minimum viable version online in a couple of weeks.

From here we started validating with real customers and opened the signups to our service.

Market validation and bootstrap

With our platform up and running we started actively engaging customers and users that we had been in contact previously.

Here we ran our test campaigns with a couple of brands and fine-tuned the process through our service. We made small adjustments around features and simplified the signup process.

The first campaigns were a huge success both in terms of engagement, metrics evaluated and customer satisfaction.
With only a few influencers creating content our first customers were able to reach more than ten thousand people and increase traffic to their social media pages and physical stores. All of this only by offering sample products to the influencers, that they reviewed and posted about on their social media accounts. Also the engagement of each post was extremely successful, with hundreds of comments each.
From these first campaigns we learned how sample products could replace in part monetary rewards for emerging influencers and thus make sustainable for small brands to collaborate with them.

Agile and Open innovation

Skills and tools applied

The Open Italy program started out with 8 weeks of intense training through classes, workshops with corporate experts and live meetings about co-innovation.

During these period I had the opportunity to understand from a busines perspective the actual work of a Innovation manager.
The workshops with experts from BIP, AWS and other big corporates helped us gain real life experience on the structure of innovation projects and management.

At the end of this period we were ready to move onto the collaboration phase with corporate clients and startups.

Corporate challenges

Skills and tools applied

For the second phase of the project we were tasked by several corporates to generate and validate innovative solutions for their business problems.

I was part of a team of 5 brilliant young professionals from different fields, from development, engineering to design and sociology.
Together we worked on the business requests by corporates like A2A, ENI and TIM.

Each project revolved around:

• gathering business requisites and understanding the problem statement
• formulate innovative solutions through design thinking practices
• explore and validate the most promising ideas
• generate mockups and flows and present to the stakeholders