hours, vacation, inventory and licenses usually live in separate tools, none of them built for small agencies, and all of them feeding payroll. i built the alternative alone, "your ops team, without the hire": discovery to shipped UI, with agents carrying the production work. live, bootstrapped, and still one person.
read the case
product design lead.
i build with agents, ship alone, and design
trust into systems where the wrong output is a real problem.
i design with the real thing: agents turn my specs into working software, so decisions get made on live flows instead of static mockups. the busywork goes to the system, the judgment stays with me.
based in Baden-Württemberg 10 years in design · 4 countries · 7 cities
selected work
when a market event worth repeating had occurred, traders rebuilt it by hand, every time. i designed the flow that turns a past event into a reusable template: loud about anything missing, explicit at the point of execution, so the tool does the rebuilding and the trader keeps the judgment.
read the casedesign systems drift, and a memo asking people to follow the spec doesn’t stop it. i rebuilt ours on a W3C token layer with a 165-assertion contract suite that fails the build the moment output leaves spec, so adoption holds without anyone policing it.
read the casehow i work
i design with AI at the core of the process, and i run the infrastructure myself. the point of all of it: take the work, never the judgment.
- spec to PR design specs become working pull requests, agents build, i review and ship
- prototypes functional prototypes over static mockups, decisions get made against the real thing
- model routing four tiers: Claude, AWS Bedrock, OpenRouter, and local Ollama on a Mac Studio over Tailscale. anything private never leaves the desk
- tools Claude, Cursor, Figma with Figma MCP, agent harnesses and MCP integrations i maintain myself
- accessibility WCAG AAA survives any canvas color you pick in the header, with color-vision simulation, text size and motion controls built in
the operating model is written up in working-with-agents, an open source guide and npx CLI for onboarding coding agents like senior hires.
timeline
ten years, four countries, seven cities, from startups to enterprise. grouped by role, some ran concurrently.
Now
Pistacio · Founder, designer and technical founder Jun 2025 – now
solo and bootstrapped. emerged from Redheart, my earlier consultancy (Feb 2025), which was absorbed into it.
8reasons Digital (iits Group) · DesignOps Lead Aug 2022 – now
client work across energy trading (data visualization, a component system overhaul, the template flow above), telecommunications (an internal decision-making tool for fiber rollout approvals, UX discovery and a deliberation feature), and automotive UX. client names sit under NDA, shared with the case-study password.
Earlier
Compera · Senior Product Designer May 2021 – Jul 2022
insurance and finance products: household, homeowners, car. a deterministic domain where one wrong number is a real problem.
TourRadar, Vienna · Digital Product Designer Jul 2017 – Dec 2019 · Feb 2020 – May 2021
developed the company’s visual identity, reported to the CMO.
v_Labs, Vienna · Product Designer Mar 2020 – May 2021
studio work from ideation to MVP, concurrent with the later TourRadar stint.
Bikemap, Vienna · UX/UI Designer Oct 2018 – Apr 2019
UX and UI for a route-planning app, concurrent with TourRadar.
contact
hiring for a senior or lead product design role? i’d like to talk.