Resume

Forward-looking, generalist product designer, focused on enterprise and startup product direction.

Career timeline

  1. Leading design on enterprise engagements: product direction, discovery, design systems and the coaching of client design teams.

    Responsibilities

    • Owned multiple squad design responsabilities across multi-team enterprise programmes
    • Run discovery, framing and inception workshops with client leadership
    • Establish design systems and governance that survive team handover
    • Mentor designers and grow client-side design maturity

    Impact

    • Reduced discovery-to-delivery handover loss by making strategy artefacts part of the backlog
    • Introduced design system practices adopted across multiple client product teams
    • Coached designers into senior and lead positions
    • Figma
    • Design systems
    • Service blueprinting
    • Workshop facilitation

Skills & competencies

Project management

  • User story writing
  • Roadmap creation
  • Scope and trade-off calls
  • Estimation and delivery planning

Design system

  • Documentation
  • Maintenance
  • Variables
  • Design tokens
  • Component governance

Visual design

  • Expert-level proficiency with design tools
  • Mentoring, assistance and guidance
  • Maintaining visual identity and brand consistency

UX design

  • Methodologies, patterns, accessibility and information architecture
  • Advocating for higher design standards
  • Identifying data and research for goal alignment
  • Customer interviews and profiling around motivators and needs
  • Hypothesis definition and validation
  • Strategic and tactical decision-making

Communication

  • Confident presenting, with relevant and broader context
  • Leading brainstorming sessions
  • Communicating and debating design decisions
  • Open to ideas and innovation

Feedback

  • Advocate for transparent, constructive feedback
  • Giving balanced and constructive feedback
  • Proactively addressing feedback
  • History of acting on areas for improvement
  • Prioritising and assessing feedback

Stakeholder management

  • Proactive collaboration
  • Facilitating action-oriented discussions
  • Consensus-driven approach with stakeholders
  • Recognising and bridging communication gaps
  • Prioritising business objectives for organisational health

Interpersonal skills

  • Proactive personal growth and self-awareness
  • Strong emotional intelligence
  • Using insight to navigate conflict
  • Active listening and an empathetic mindset
  • Advocating for respectfulness, fairness and inclusivity

Ownership & shipping

  • Proven history of meeting deadlines
  • Accurate timeline estimation
  • Confident in making trade-offs
  • Skilled in delegation
  • Ship-fast mentality

Independence

  • Handling undefined projects
  • Task prioritisation
  • Proactively identifying areas for improvement

Strategy

  • Vision-led thinking
  • Aligning with business needs and objectives
  • Interconnected thinking across product, organisation, business and industry
  • Tracking competition and suggesting initiatives
  • Advocating for brand strategy

Capabilities

Product design

  • Product- and feature-level concept ideation
  • MVP definition and scoping
  • Information architecture
  • Navigation design
  • Interaction design
  • Micro-interaction design
  • Responsive and adaptive design
  • Prototyping and validation
  • Cross-functional development
  • Documentation writing and reviewing
  • Design review and critique
  • Agile mindset

Creative direction

  • Setting and holding a creative vision
  • Design team leadership and mentoring
  • Critique culture and review rituals
  • Hiring and portfolio review
  • Client and stakeholder presentation
  • Pitch and narrative building
  • Quality bar and craft standards
  • Multi-disciplinary team direction
  • Campaign and launch direction

Creative thinking

  • Problem reframing
  • Divergent concept generation
  • Workshop design and facilitation
  • Lateral thinking and analogy
  • Constraint-driven ideation
  • Rapid concept sketching
  • Storytelling and scenario building
  • First-principles reasoning

UI design

  • Layout and grid systems
  • Typography and type scales
  • Colour systems and contrast
  • Iconography
  • Data visualisation and dashboards
  • Complex table and form design
  • Empty, loading and error states
  • Motion and transition design
  • Accessibility (WCAG) and contrast checking
  • Pixel-level craft and polish

UX design

  • User research and interviews
  • Usability testing
  • Task and user flows
  • Journey and service mapping
  • Jobs-to-be-done framing
  • Wireframing
  • Content and UX writing
  • Heuristic evaluation
  • A/B testing and experiment design
  • Analytics-informed iteration

Design systems

  • Design token architecture
  • Component library design and governance
  • Theming, dark mode and white-labelling
  • Multi-brand and multi-product scaling
  • Documentation and usage guidelines
  • Contribution and versioning model
  • Design-to-code parity with engineering
  • Accessibility baked into components
  • Adoption tracking and migration

Brand design

  • Naming and verbal identity
  • Logo and identity systems
  • Brand typography and colour
  • Visual language and asset systems
  • Tone of voice and key messages
  • Brand guidelines
  • Positioning and differentiators
  • Marketing and launch collateral
  • Brand-to-product translation

Art direction

  • Mood boards and visual territories
  • Photography direction and curation
  • Illustration direction
  • 3D and motion direction
  • Composition and image treatment
  • Campaign visual consistency
  • Working with external studios and freelancers
  • Brand personality spectrum

AI-assisted design & build

  • Vibe coding — shipping working products from prompts
  • Prompt engineering and prompt systems
  • AI-assisted UI generation and iteration
  • Generative imagery and art direction (Midjourney, Nano Banana, Flux)
  • AI video and motion generation
  • AI copywriting and tone calibration
  • LLM-powered product features (chat, summarisation, search)
  • RAG and embeddings-based experiences
  • Designing for non-deterministic output
  • AI agent and workflow orchestration
  • AI-accelerated research synthesis
  • Model selection and cost/latency trade-offs
  • AI ethics, hallucination and trust patterns
  • Evaluating and testing AI features

Strategic planning & foundation

  • Business goals and objectives
  • Short- and long-term goals
  • Brand mission (purpose)
  • Brand vision
  • Brand promise
  • Brand principles
  • Company values
  • Brand archetype
  • Brand narrative
  • Brand differentiators
  • Brand positioning
  • Art direction — brand personality spectrum

Research & analysis

  • Market research
  • Competitor analysis
  • Industry info
  • Market info
  • Persona definition & analysis
  • Customer profiling
  • Customer journey mapping

Branding elements & identity

  • Naming
  • Tone of voice
  • Key messages
  • Story brand — villain definition
  • Brand personality spectrum
  • Brand differentiators
  • Brand guidelines

Etc — this is a shortlist.

Languages

Hungarian

Mother tongue

English

C1

  • ListeningC1
  • ReadingC1
  • WritingB2
  • Spoken productionC1
  • Spoken interactionC1

Romanian

C2

  • ListeningC2
  • ReadingC2
  • WritingC2
  • Spoken productionC1
  • Spoken interactionC2

German

Learning in progress

Education

  • Babeș-Bolyai University
    Design and visual communication studies · 2009 — 2013

Awards

Brands I've worked with

What sets me apart

Award-winning designer with almost 20 years in digital product design — user-centric web and mobile products, and brands people remember. Fortune 500 companies, established businesses and startups.

  • Committed to crafting exceptional experiences and products — distinctive, with a competitive advantage and a culture of relentless innovation behind them.
  • Looking for clients who prioritise innovation above all else: partnerships that set new standards rather than meet existing ones.
  • Value across every step of product innovation — research, definition, UX, UI, strategy and branding.

Recommendations

It was truly a pleasure to have the opportunity to collaborate with Otto at Connatix. Otto played a pivotal role in leading the design process and was the driving force behind some of our fundamental products. Otto embodies the essence of a true professional, consistently staying abreast of the latest design trends, technologies, and methodologies. Otto approaches his work with a strategic mindset, always considering the long-term vision for our products, and is very dedicated to comprehending the needs of clients and the market. His attention to detail is remarkable, and in addition to his proficiency in UI/UX concepts, he holds a deep passion for Branding Design. Otto's creative genius shines brightly; he consistently delivers innovative solutions, fostering an environment of out-of-the-box thinking. Working with Otto was an inspiring and enriching experience, and I wholeheartedly endorse him as an exceptional design professional.
Dor Leitman
SVP Product and R&D at Connatix
January 10, 2024 — managed Otto directly