Pedro - Senior Design Leader

Pedro Ventura de Oliveira

👋 Hi, I’m Pedro, a thoughtful, caring and driven Senior Design Leader - currently leading the design organization at The StepStone Group

Previously, I've led the team behind a payroll revolution at Personio. I've helped scale the design org at Checkout.com a $40b fintech. Led an amazing design team at Elsevier building products for researchers and scientists. Led the efforts to design a better switching experience at Currys for 20m people and built the design function at Bytemark making transit better for 1.2m people.

Also, I run a product design subscription for some of the world's most innovative companies.

Helped scale a design org for a $40b business, from a small pocket of designers to a multi-disciplinary design org of +50, and led the team responsible for building one of the most critical business pillars, called Merchant Experience at the most valuable fintech in Europe

Latest thought

It's not about having a seat at the table. It's what you do with it that matters

As designers, we went through our whole career reading, learning and discussing this mythical experience, the holy grail of design maturity - the infamous seat at the table.

As I moved into my first senior leadership role, I came to the realisation that is not about having voice or being invited to certain meetings, it's actually what you bring to those discussions. It's how you use design insights to bridge decisions, it's how you champion the voice of your users to influence business decisions, it's how you help your cross-functional partners to prioritise based on impact and user needs.

You are no longer just a design leader. You are also a business leader, discussing ROI, budgets, roadmaps, OKRs & QBRs, and how the insights and experiences your team is designing actually increases the revenue of the business.

Completed post coming soon...

Managed a multi-disciplinary team, composed of product designers and UX researchers, across the Mendeley ecosystem of products, while building the next generation productivity tool for +4m researchers

Led a multi-disciplinary design team across the biggest technology retailer in Europe while building a scalable design system across 6 brands and a new seamless switching experience for 20 million people

Prior to that,

/ founded a design agency in Lisbon 12 years ago

/ co-founded a tech startup on the ride-sharing space before smartphones were widely adopted

/ built the design function at a tech startup in New York, later acquired by Siemens serving +2m users across multiple mediums