Individual contribution and leadership

I own the UI of BigFix, in a role that did not exist until it was created for me. That means the UI architecture, the accessibility standards and the governance of the design system, across multiple products in the BigFix family. It also means full responsibility for design readiness: nothing goes into development from my team until it is clear, complete and accessible, so developers get their answers before they have to ask.

I steer the effort alongside stakeholders and leadership across the United States, India and Italy, in several meetings every week.

One of the things I am proudest of is having built a team people are happy to be part of, where everyone collaborates. We all work hard, but if someone needs help, they can barely finish the sentence before someone offers.

I have interviewed candidates and reviewed portfolios and I run team meetings every week so that everyone has the context, the trust and the room they need to do their best work.

The designers are also strong on accessibility, and thoughtful about it. It is embedded not only in what they deliver but in how they think: they ask the accessibility question at the start of a design, not at the end. When security restrictions ruled out off-the-shelf Figma plugins, they built their own to speed up handoff. Nobody asked them to. It is a good example, and the clearest sign that the system works because people understand it, not because I enforce it.

My role has shifted from hands-on design to direction, review and final sign-off, and the team takes on more of the review every month. That way the quality of BigFix is carried by many people instead of resting on one. I keep the final sign-off and the standard it is held to. The judgement behind it is increasingly shared, which is what lets the work move quickly across multiple products.

The handoff framework is how that works in practice. It sets out how every screen behaves from large desktop to mobile, and every accessibility decision a designer controls: page regions, heading hierarchy, tab order, labels on icon-only buttons, alt text, spacing tokens and correct component usage. It gives developers a clear answer, gives QA a standard to test against, and draws a clean line of responsibility. Design guarantees accessibility on its side, and development and QA own it from there.

The team has made the framework their own, and they extend it on their own initiative.

I hold design authority on the system and make the final call on every decision in it. Three designers work with me on the Figma side and two developers sign the code off. None of us works on Mandala full time, because everyone has a demanding job alongside it, so the structure has to work without anyone being available all the time. Gates, written rules and a decision log carry that load. A person reviews the design and a person reviews the code, and that rule has never had an exception.

I designed and delivered a structured accessibility programme for HCLSoftware: 12 sessions, 18 hours, 25 teams and more than 700 people from design, engineering, QA and product. Sessions are timed against each team's own roadmap, so people apply what they learn within weeks. Several senior leaders asked for the recordings to be kept as a library for future hires. Nobody had to attend, and people kept coming back.

I lead distributed design teams across multiple countries and time zones, and I work natively in Italian, English and Danish. In practice that means writing things down clearly, making decisions visible to people in every time zone, and building shared standards so that no one needs to be in the room to do good work.

It also means writing in one language while speaking in another, and occasionally speaking to someone in the wrong language, because I often no longer know which one I am in.

Knowledge and experience lead, and AI augments that work. In Mandala I use Claude for work that does not need a human hand at every step, such as keeping Figma and Storybook in sync and checking contrast at a scale no manual process could match. Every gate, every decision and every judgement call stays human.

I also mentor the three designers working with me on Mandala as they take their first steps in the AI panorama. The same principle applies to leading people: I use tools to remove friction and keep the judgement with the people who have earned it.