Radu Vucea ⭐️

Leading AR/VR Design @ Reality Labs

Mento Design Academy

Our mission is to help young professionals and career-switchers transition faster and smoother to a career in UX, UI, or Product Design by teaching the right skills, the right way.

Founder

MYBENEFITS

Advisor & Investor

FlairMakers

ixperi

Building a Digital Product Design Studio has been a dream of mine for a long time.

In early 2021, I finally decided to give it a go, and I co-founded ixperi with the mission of creating an elite design team that could deliver exceptional quality and impact.

In just three years, completely bootstrapped, my team and I:

→ Grew the studio to 13 stellar Product Designers and Product Managers
→ Built a fantastic culture of learning, development, and excellence through mentorship and coaching
→ Went from $0 to $1M in yearly revenue
→ Designed and delivered for high growth start-ups like Fresha, FlowX and Jellysmack

Co-Founder, Exit in 2023

Actio

Chief Design Officer

VP, Product Design

Fitbit (now part of Google)

In my role of Product Design Manager at Fitbit, I was initially in charge of building from the ground up and leading the whole design team in Bucharest.

In my three years in this role I have:

→ Built the Product Design team in Bucharest, 15 strong, influencing the headcount strategy to bring in key roles such as UX Research and Design Ops.
→ Created an amazing design culture, recognized company-wide, based on transparency, authenticity, trust, and support, which enabled shipping successful products while maintaining a near-zero attrition rate.
→ Established processes and opportunities that enabled team growth, such as reviews, critiques, and knowledge sharing sessions and events such as Learning Friday and Friday Speaker Series.
→ Influenced the company roadmap and strategy to ship the first line of Fitbit products for kids.
→ Shipped several products that had a revenue and company strategy impact, such as Active Zone Minutes and Fitbit Premium, the latter bringing in over 1,000,000 subscribers in under one year.

Product Design Manager

While in my role as a Senior Product Designer at Fitbit I owned the development of the Fitbit App Gallery from the ground up.

Initially meant to support our first smartwatch, the Ionic, with custom content that users could download, it now supports almost a dozen Fitbit smart devices, counts over 12,000 apps, and watch faces, all of which have been downloaded over 245 Million times.

The Fitbit App Gallery also attracted a thriving community of over 1,000 developers, many of them creating a steady stream of income through creating content for Fitbit.

Senior Product Designer

Vector Watch

While in my role at Vector Watch I wore many hats, as any does in a startup.

From redesigning the company's website with a goal to increase sales — to creating marketing assets in partnership with our marketing department to create awareness, no day was the same.

My most significant achievement, however, has been creating the Vector Developer Portal from the ground up, an easy-to-use web-based tool anyone could use to create a custom watch face or app for their Vector Watch.

It was exceptionally received, gathering over 1800 content creators and over 3000 watch faces and apps in just a few months.

Vector Watch was acquired in 2017 by Fitbit, and I went to be a Product Designer and Design Manager for them.

Product Designer

Adobe

In my time at Adobe, I moved from a Graphic Designer role in the marketing department to a Visual Designer role for the same product and, ultimately, for the last two years, to a Product Designer role as part of the innovation team tasked with validating next-generation products for Adobe.

Through a Lean Startup methodology we were validating product ideas and opportunities, at a fast pace, employing user interviews, prototyping and usability testing, working within a cross-functional team of developers, product managers and designers.

The most notable achievement is validating the MVP for what would become Adobe Stock and the Libraries feature inside Photoshop, Illustrator and other five Adobe CC products.

Various

Freelance Digital Designer

I am a Senior Design Executive, Investor, and Advisor who began his career back in 2005. Since then, I had the opportunity to work for startups, design studios, and big brands alike, having built products and design teams from scratch for companies like Adobe and Fitbit.

More recently, I served as Chief Design Officer for Berlin-based start-up Actio. With a drive for entrepreneurship, I founded my own Product Design Studio back in 2020 and grew that to a 7 figure yearly revenue in less than two years, exiting in late 2023. I now serve as an advisor and investor for several tech start-ups across the world.

My happy place is helping other designers grow and create stellar work. Having hired and mentored hundreds of designers to date, I'm currently focused on scaling up my Design Academy, founded three years ago.

Feel free to contact me for the following:
* Public speaking opportunities (panels, podcasts, events, corporate training)
* Advisory roles on Product Design
* Opportunities on the level of Co-Founder or Senior Design Leadership

Make sure to check my recommendations on my profile here if you'd like to know what it's like to work with me.

Drata

Senior Product Designer 2

—lead in creating self-serve and onboarding experiences across the product
—core contributor to design system and documentation
—plan and lead customer research 
—establish new visual design and illustration for product
—lead design of setup and error resolution workflows for key integrations

Parsable

—Player coach role leading the design team through critical phases and roadmap launches.
—Product lead in discoveries with customers.
—Redesigned core UI of mobile execution application, contributing new design tokens, components, and patterns to the Bolt system.
—Design Lead of technical features—Data Pipelines, Webhooks
—Design Lead of Execution features on web and mobile

Staff Product Designer

—Product design team lead
—Implemented a user research process and documentation protocol.
—Authored product design career tracks
—Initiated product accessibility (WCAG) audit and remediation plan.

—Led design of democratized analytics feature
—Led design of admin user feature projects including RBAC models, single sign on, user management and profile, webhooks, data pipelines, and global navigation.
—Key contribution to Bolt Design System

Senior Software Product Designer

PortalMedia

—UX/UI lead of digital products for an enterprise-level eCommerce client, including responsive eCommerce website, eCommerce mobile application, and mobile point of sale application.
—Product design and UX/UI lead of a web platform application for Yale University Library with a focus on software preservation through emulation, documentation, and sharing of configured digital computing environments and resources.
—UX/UI feature and product design work for a robust media platform website including robust metadata interfaces and user-generated content.
—Design management with direct report.

Senior UI/UX Designer

Filament Games

—UX/UI/IxD lead on touchscreen 3D-environment-based learning game, in partnership with Amazon, that taught English through simulated conversation with characters, speech feedback, and targeted lesson mini games.
—UX/UI/IxD lead of an interactive web-based learning game for the Smithsonian that featured an interactive map-based interface and learning objectives centered around global water access.
—UX/UI discovery lead on an interactive mobile VR experience as a companion product packaged with Encyclopedia Britannica physical books sold at Costco stores nationwide. 
—UX/UI/IxD lead on discovery design for two educational mobile apps for Caterpillar Inc. including a sales soft skills game and an Ohm’s Law electrical circuit diagnosis training app.

UX, UI - Visual Interaction Designer

Weigel Broadcasting

—UI/UX lead for national TV network website MeTVNetwork.com
—UI/UX and visual design lead for launch of national TV network websites; Decades.com and MoviesTVNetwork.com
—Visual design of diverse brand and promotional graphics and campaigns across web and social for multiple national networks, and television shows.

Senior Web Designer

Chicago Producers

—Agency work designing 10+ websites per year.
—Interactive CD-ROM projects for the American Bar Association.
—Branding and packaging design.
—Live event photo editing onsite at Lollapalooza Music Festival.
—Art directing product photo shoots.

Lead Visual Designer

Distillery Marketing + Design

—Design lead on concept and design for National Library Week Campaign for the American Library Association.
—Book cover and branding design projects.
—Campaign design for Wisconsin Film Fest, Wisconsin Book Festival, and World Dairy Expo.

Graphic Designer

Wisconsin Public Television

HIGHLIGHTS: 
—Created award-winning graphics and visual design projects for the WPT television station, large-scale outreach events, and various satellite entities.

My background is diverse—I've been a design leader in-house and in agencies, collaborating with a variety of software development processes and lifecycles while targeting solutions to a wide range of users. I have a broad design experience in many industries and product areas, including security and compliance, educational games, augmented and virtual reality, ecommerce, SaaS, audiovisual, and broadcast. I am an adaptable and scrappy design collaborator—equally adept at leading design with fat-marker cross functional workshops, stand-alone design artifacts like prototypes, spec docs, video walkthroughs, research with users and customers, or presenting to a room of stakeholders.

I have spent the last couple years contributing to a B2B suite of productivity products called Parsable. In my time at Parsable I initiated, authored, and kicked-off a self-sustaining user research program with customer collaboration. One of my first tasks was to help the team transition their design system library from Sketch to Figma, expanding on patterns and components to align with the Storybook developer libraries and WCAG accessibility compliance. My interface contributions straddled several products, from technical admin interfaces for webhook, and data pipeline configuration, embedded analytics dashboards, and core workflows for a mobile work execution application.

In my next role, I am looking to join an established design team with a strong leader. I am happiest with a full plate of projects, some agency, opportunity for impact, and growth.

In my free time find me; in nature, hiking with my dog; on the trails, biking; at home crafting with my kids; in the kitchen cooking for my family; or  in the air, performing aerial arts in a local circus.

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Radu Vucea ⭐️

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