Diego Ghiggi · Design & AI Strategy Leader · Porto Alegre, Brazil
I build Design organizations prepared for the age of AI.
A repertoire built across the layers that turn Design from a delivery function into an organizational capability.
I connect Design quality to business direction, decision systems and the conditions teams need to perform with autonomy.
Principal Product Design leader at Sienge, operating across a complex B2B ecosystem and 18 product squads.
years across visual design, digital products and organizational leadership.
professionals hired across businesses and product organizations—most of them designers.
people directly led through teams, transformations and different stages of maturity.
large ConstrUX workshops mobilizing teams, customers and product decisions across Brazil.
Three initiatives that show Design operating beyond delivery: as a method for alignment, organizational infrastructure and a force for transformation.
A program of 12 strategic workshops across Brazil, bringing customers, teams and leaders together to evolve products through the user perspective.
View detailsDesignOps, Design System and Research structured while the team grew from five to 15 designers distributed across 18 squads.
View detailsConnecting Design, Product and Technology to align initiatives, share criteria and bring coherence to AI adoption across an ecosystem of 18 squads.
View detailsOther initiatives
Another perspective · hands-on work
A selection of hands-on Product Design work, from investigation to the final experience.
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The case contains details and artifacts from a real product. If you need access, request it directly from Diego Ghiggi.
Request accessAI is not merely accelerating the old design process. It is changing what a designer is, where leverage lives and how organizations create quality.
Quality is shaped by incentives, decision rights and operating systems before it reaches the interface.
The opportunity is not faster production alone, but new ways to think, coordinate and build.
Judgment, standards and autonomy should compound through teams—not stop at the leader.
An organization grows stronger when judgment, autonomy and the ability to handle complexity are no longer concentrated in leadership, but become capabilities held by people and teams.
Development does not happen through guidance alone. It happens when someone is given room to tackle challenges beyond their current experience, with enough support to move forward without losing ownership.
In practice — Throughout my leadership career, I have supported professionals as they progressed through levels of seniority and entrusted designers with problems they initially felt unprepared to take on — supporting them until they could lead the work independently.
Much of the work happens beyond the team: aligning expectations, negotiating priorities, navigating conflict and creating the conditions people need to operate within complex organizations.
In practice — A recurring part of my work was helping designers navigate difficult situations with Product, Technology and other areas, stepping in when needed without taking away their ability to build their own relationships and influence.
The best outcome is not dependence on leadership, but stronger judgment and confidence, so that people and teams can make increasingly difficult decisions without having to escalate everything.
In practice — I developed professionals to take ownership of initiatives that had previously depended directly on me, including the evolution of cross-functional capabilities such as DesignOps and other leadership responsibilities within the discipline.
Before becoming a Design leader, I was always someone driven by curiosity and building. I have drawn since childhood, grew up surrounded by creative people and spent much of my life trying to understand how ideas become concrete things — images, interfaces, products, teams or systems. Technology entered that story early, not as an end in itself, but as a tool to create, experiment and expand possibilities.
I began building digital experiences when the web was still learning to become a medium. Two decades later, I design the systems through which entire teams build products — now with AI at the center of the transformation.
2004 — now · seven movements
My trajectory is not a linear sequence of titles. It is a continuous expansion of Design's object: from interface to product, from product to organization and now from organization to AI-mediated systems of work.
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I started as a freelance and independent web designer. Designing for digital meant bringing visual craft, interface and implementation close together — a practical education that erased the distance between idea and delivery early on.
Visual craft and the ability to build became the first two layers of my professional identity.
At Divex, Elastacloud Brazil and later as Design Lead at S7 Study, I moved into experiences with greater scale and international reach. At S7, I helped create and evolve more than ten destination portals.
Design, WordPress, PHP and JavaScript were part of the same repertoire — before “no-code” even existed as a promise.
As co-founder and Head of Design at Segundo Andar, I shared responsibility for an operation of up to 17 people and directly led 12. Design now lived alongside finance, hiring, team structure and the responsibilities of running a business.
The work included a legal ERP and web, mobile and app ecosystems for clients across different markets.
At Happy Code, I served as Managing Director and Design Strategy Lead. I led a team of up to seven and a unit that reached 120 simultaneous students, connecting brand, digital experience and Service Design.
This was when designing the operation became as important as designing the experience.
At KeyCash, I led a three-person design team through the complete redesign of a real-estate-credit acquisition journey. A complex, regulated and dependency-heavy problem — treated as one continuous experience, not a collection of screens.
Product maturity consolidated the link between experience, technology and business outcomes.
As Sienge's principal Product Design leader, I grew the team from five to 15 designers working across 18 squads. I structured DesignOps, Design System and UX Research while evolving our operating model and relationship with Product and Engineering.
I also founded the AI Committee, which grew from five to 12 members, and led experiments such as an agent for documentation.
Today I explore agents, automations, generative workflows and rapid software prototyping. The goal is not merely to accelerate the existing process, but to understand what Design becomes when thinking, coordinating and building begin to happen differently.
It is the natural continuation of a career that watched digital evolve from media, to product, to organizational infrastructure.
Leadership in other voices
Synthesized from public recommendations written by professionals who reported directly to me at Softplan.
Balances guidance and autonomy, creating an environment of trust and genuine development.
Product Designer · direct report at SoftplanAmid tight deadlines and high pressure, his calm made the weight feel lighter.
Product Designer · direct report at SoftplanConversations were honest and constructive, with real attention to each person's goals and path.
Product Designer · direct report at SoftplanThe person before the title
I am moved by the same thing that brought me to the web in the beginning: the urge to understand what is changing—and to build inside that change.
Outside organizational charts, I write, photograph, explore emerging tools and turn curiosity into experiments. It is less a parallel life than the source of the energy I bring to teams, products and conversations.
Facilitating rooms, developing professionals and helping leaders frame difficult decisions have been part of my work for years—not a new service added to a portfolio.
Structured sessions that connect customers, teams and leadership to turn ambiguity into shared direction.
Dozens of professionals supported in craft, career decisions, autonomy and the transition into leadership.
Diagnosis and practical evolution of teams, standards, DesignOps, research, AI adoption and decision systems.
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