Founding design, product judgment, and building through ambiguity.

As a founding product designer and first employee, I’ve learned that some of the highest-leverage work I’ve done has barely looked like design.

At least not in the way most people usually mean it.

Early-stage startups make one thing clear: there’s no script, no clean boundaries, and often not enough infrastructure.

Sometimes the highest-leverage design contribution is not another interface.

It’s doing whatever it takes to make the product work.

A lot of 0→1 work is really ambiguity reduction.

Not just designing interfaces, but helping the team get clearer on what matters and turning product intent into something shippable.

That kind of clarity is often higher leverage than polish.

What has long been overlooked in the work may soon matter most again: the design process itself.

That way of thinking was a big part of what made our work as early designers at Nubank so impactful. It was never really about tools.

As AI gets better at producing screens and prototypes, more of the value shifts to what comes before production.

Framing the problem. Reducing ambiguity. Knowing what should exist, what shouldn’t, and why.

You’re not only designing what ships. You’re helping create the conditions for the team to move, decide, and build with more clarity.

When production gets cheaper, design matters more.

Not less.

One of the product engineering conversations I value most is when “can we build this?” becomes “what does this change structurally?”

I had one of those with Newton today around an incoming request we were evaluating, and later shared the thinking with Cassio too.

What first looked like a small adjustment turned out to touch one of the core assumptions the system is built on, with possible second-order effects across multiple areas.

It reminded me of something from Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows: a lot of complexity doesn’t come from the change itself, but from the ripple effects it creates.

Sometimes the idea is not wrong.

It just needs more time and care than the moment allows.

A lot of early-stage leverage comes from absorbing entropy.

No real layers. No extra budget to solve every problem. No clean handoffs.

Just loose ends, shifting priorities, missing structure, operational gaps, and things nobody owns yet.

As a first employee, I’ve learned that part of the job is helping absorb that chaos, reduce friction, and create enough stability for the product and team to keep moving.

I keep coming back to this: absorbing entropy is only part of the job.

Before you can create structure, you have to make sense of the mess first.

That’s one reason Abby Covert’s *How to Make Sense of Any Mess* has stayed with me for years.

Before clarity, there has to be comprehension.

Before direction, there has to be sense-making.

One of the most formative ideas I learned in our early days at Nubank was to think like an owner, not a renter.

It changed how I approached product work.

Ownership is not about staying forever. It is about taking responsibility while something is in your hands.

You may not keep a project or a company forever. But while you are there, you can still shape what it becomes next.

Good product work is not only about improving what is in front of you. It is also about leaving things in a better state than you found them.