Why Design matters now more than ever
A perspective on why faster building increases, rather than decreases, the strategic value of Design.
01 — Horizon
The future rarely arrives with a brief.
02 — Signals
It starts as a signal.
A shift in behavior. A new technology. A changing expectation. An opportunity no one has fully framed yet.
03 — Systems
Seeing what is changing is only the beginning.
03 — Systems
The real challenge is deciding what to do about it.
04 — Direction
Turn uncertainty into direction.
Strategy creates value when it helps people make better choices.
05 — Making
Turn direction into something real.
Products. Services. Systems. Capabilities. New ways of working.
I turn uncertainty into direction, and direction into products, services and systems that move a business forward.
I'm an Executive Design Leader working across Experience, Product, Artificial Intelligence and Strategic Foresight.
For more than 14 years I have helped organizations through complex transformation: setting the future vision, framing where the opportunity is, leading the teams, and shipping experiences with business impact you can measure.
Head of Experience Design & Strategic Foresight at Capgemini · Former Group Design Manager at Itaú Unibanco
Proof of my process
Strategy focused on measurable results.
+73%
conversion in a core salary portability journey
+9%
promoters after the launch of Itaú Private Bank App
250+
opportunities mapped across 19 complex service journeys
>90%
efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction score across all digital journeys deployed in the biggest bank of Latin America
#1
first place at the Shared Experience Awards, most impactful journey for the customer and for the business
Top Voice
LinkedIn Top Voice, Product Design, 2024
Cases
Selected work
Relationships, scale, and what comes next.
01 · Relationships
Itaú Private Bank
Client intelligence
New business models
Designing relationships, not only interfaces.
At Itaú Private Bank, understanding who each client is and what the clients are worth to each other.
From one audience to eleven ways to be a client.
A clustering model built from behavioral and consumption data. It reached 11 clusters, and then the individual profiles inside them. That is how offers, service and communication stopped treating a base that was never one audience as if it were one.
View project · Client clusteringFrom a client base to a network worth belonging to.
A business model I built on the most under-used asset the segment had: the network already sitting inside its own client list. Encounters built around a shared interest, which generate business for the client and commercial occasions for the bank.
View project · Itaú Private Bank Conexões02 · Scale
Itaú Unibanco
Products, journeys and portfolio
8 product and service designers
Transforming complexity into performance.
At Itaú, shipping products and journeys that move numbers a bank can see.
From no app at all to the segment's own product.
I was the Product Manager: business prioritization, Design System integration, development and delivery against a date that would not move. +9% promoters in the first 10 weeks.
View project · Itaú Private Bank AppFrom a good screen to +73% conversion.
One card added to the journey's context screen, naming the customer's real situation, which is a salary sitting at another bank, and making the move short enough to take. First place at the Shared Experience Awards.
View project · Salary portabilityFrom hundreds of pain points to a prioritized portfolio.
Service Design Blueprints and portfolio-level prioritization linking experience, process and systems across 19 complex journeys. 250+ opportunities became a structure that teams and leaders could actually decide from.
View project · Itaú Daily Banking03 · What's next
Capgemini
Applied Innovation Exchange
Foresight · HCD · AI
Designing what doesn't exist yet.
At Capgemini's Applied Innovation Exchange, translating emerging technology and changing behavior into future visions, opportunity portfolios and products.
From sales training to an intelligent sales coach.
I led the creation of an AI sales coaching product for a Latin American telecom operator, built to support learning, product knowledge and commercial performance.
View project · Vend.AIFrom connected car to connected ecosystem.
I led the strategic visioning work on how mobility, data, connected vehicles, services and new business opportunities will relate to each other from here on.
View project · Connected mobility visioningFrom product catalog to personalized environments.
I managed the creation of an AI application that generates personalized rooms using the products the retailer actually carries.
View project · Arquitet.AIFrom opportunity space to prioritized opportunities.
I led the framing, the prioritization and the concept development for initiatives across internal tools and a high-income banking segment.
View project · Innovation initiativesDifferent industries, different horizons, one shape of work: make the uncertainty explicit, frame the choices, then build enough of the thing that a decision becomes possible.
Approach
The thesis
Complex organizations don't have isolated problems. They have interconnected systems.
Business
- Strategy
- Value
- Portfolio
- Prioritization
- Growth
Experience
- Human needs
- Journeys
- Products
- Services
- Behavior
Systems
- Technology
- Operations
- AI
- Organization
- Governance
Design connects them.
My work sits between these layers. I help leaders see where to focus, I help teams align around the right problems, and I help organizations turn insight into coordinated action.
The Altitude Model
Design leadership is the ability to change altitude.
30,000 ft · Horizon
What is changing?
- Signals
- Trends
- Future scenarios
- Strategic Foresight
- Experience vision
10,000 ft · Direction
Where should we go?
- Strategy
- Value proposition
- Opportunity portfolio
- Prioritization
- Roadmaps
3,000 ft · System
What needs to change?
- Customer journeys
- Service ecosystems
- Technology
- Operations
- Organization
- Governance
100 ft · Experience
What should we create?
- Product
- Service
- Interaction
- AI experience
- Prototypes
- Experiments
Ground · Impact
What moved?
- Adoption
- Behavior
- Usability
- Conversion
- Efficiency
- Business value
My job is to know when to change altitude.
I don't only design products. I design how teams design.
AI is changing not only what organizations can build, but how teams understand challenges, explore possibilities, prototype and decide. That is what led me to build tools that put Design with AI to work day to day.
01
AI Sprint Canvas
From ambiguity to structured exploration.
An AI-assisted evolution of the Design Sprint process designed to accelerate:
- understanding of challenge context
- problem and opportunity mapping
- generation of contextual solution directions
- exploration with synthetic personas
- diagnosis and proposal support
- solution tangibilization
02
AI Design Checklist
Better questions for better AI experiences.
A practical framework for evaluating AI-enabled journeys and helping teams make more deliberate experience decisions.
03
Innovation portfolio
Running everything in parallel is not the same as moving fast.
When I took over the area I listened to the team and followed the flow before changing anything. Effort was not the problem. Initiatives ran in parallel with no shared way to decide which deserved the capacity, which left the team one commitment away from overload.
I institutionalized RICE so prioritization stopped depending on who argued best, and mapped a funnel of approaches by client maturity: the type of challenge, the openness to innovate, the accountability, and how far a client can carry a proposal on their own. Both feed one innovation portfolio. We now generate five times more AI assets than in the same period last year, and the team works with more focus.
Leadership
Leadership creates leverage.
Great design leaders don't scale themselves. They scale people, clarity and decision quality.
My career has progressively moved from designing interfaces and journeys to designing direction, systems, teams and capabilities.
I operate across executive strategy and hands-on experimentation, creating enough distance to see the system without becoming disconnected from the work.
- Led Product and Service Design teams
- Direct interface with executive leadership
- Cross-functional work with Product, Technology, Business, Marketing and Strategy
- Strategic facilitation across four countries
- Built new internal design capabilities
- Developed high-performing designers
- Led complex innovation portfolios
- Continued hands-on prototyping and experimentation
With executives, I create choices and alignment. With organizations, systems and priorities. With teams, context and the conditions to do great work.
AI is making building easier.
That makes judgment more valuable.
When almost anyone can generate an interface, prototype or software experience faster than before, the most valuable questions move upstream.
- 01What problem deserves to be solved?
- 02What should exist?
- 03What should AI decide?
- 04What should remain under human control?
- 05How should humans and intelligent systems work together?
- 06How does the experience create value for people and the business?
This is where I believe the next generation of Design Leadership will operate.
About
About
Design at the intersection of business, technology and human experience.
I am an executive leader in product and service design and strategy. That is more than 14 years spent driving innovation and delivering results a business can measure.
What I usually get called in for is the same situation: a multidisciplinary group, at every level of the organization, stuck in collaborative chaos. My job is to get that room out of it and onto a problem worth solving.
I run discovery end to end. Human Centered Design and AI are how I get to the business need underneath the request, align people around it, then prototype, test and scale what holds up.
I work in agile, data-driven ways, because the distance between a strategy and its execution is where most of it goes wrong. I have closed that distance in financial services, automotive, retail, startups, consulting and the public sector.
The work covers the whole innovation cycle: immersive research, systemic analysis, journey mapping, strategic facilitation, prototyping, and testing with real users.
I move between strategic leadership and hands-on work. I align teams from different areas, build growth that lasts, and lead business transformation with a human-centered and future-focused view.
My mission: help organizations anticipate what is coming, design experiences that mean something, and unlock new value by putting Human Centered Design and Artificial Intelligence to work together.
Recognition
Selected recognition and context.
- LinkedIn Top Voice, Product Design 2024
- 1st place for leading the most impactful digital journey for customers and business at Latin America's largest bank, CX Awards 2024
- 3x High Performance Employee at Latin America's largest bank
- Mentor for NASA® Space Apps 2021, the world's largest hackathon
- Invited Alumni Coach for IDEO.org, fostering global impact through HCD education
- Strategic facilitator in 4 countries
- 14+ years across financial services, automotive, retail, startups, consulting and public sector
Certifications
- Innovation Leadership · MIT
- Human Centered Design · IDEO.org
- UX · Interaction Design Foundation
- Design Sprints · AJ&Smart / Udacity
- Business Administration & Marketing · IBMEC
- Capgemini
- Itaú
- Global automotive
- Telecom
- Home improvement retail
Contact
One question
My career has been about one question:
How can Design help organizations become more prepared for what comes next?
Sometimes the answer is a better journey.
Sometimes a new product.
Sometimes a new operating model.
Sometimes an AI system.
Sometimes a future vision.
Increasingly, it is all of them at once.
What should we design next?
I'm interested in leadership challenges where Design, Product, Technology, AI and Business Transformation converge.
Open to selected Design Leadership opportunities.
- Based in
- São Paulo, Brazil
- pedroo.email@gmail.com
Head of Design · Design Director · Experience Design Director · Strategic Design Director