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.

Orange Services

Instructional Graphic Designer (with French)

BearingPoint

• Worked on two SaaS products (one enterprise, the other B2B) in parallel, being part of two cross-functional Agile teams, in a collaborative, fast-paced environment
• Executed product and feature design stages from concept to engineering hand-off, creating design artifacts such as: conceptual diagrams, user and process flows, information architecture, sketches, low and high-fidelity wireframes, interactive prototypes

Freelance (Self employed)

Created low and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes for websites and mobile apps.

Freelance UX/UI Designer

• Created high-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes for websites (including 
e-commerce, landing pages, contest platforms), web & mobile apps, with a keen eye for detail, a clean visual design and attention to typography and grids
• Contributed to improving website structures, layout and content
• Did heuristic evaluations of e-commerce and presentation websites, as part of redesign projects, to identify user pain points and to increase conversions
• Designed mobile and web app high-fidelity mock-ups and prototypes using Adobe XD or Figma, and collaborated with developers at multiple stages
• Built mobile-first, responsive web pages in WordPress, using Elementor Pro and other page building and templating plugins; implemented responsive web pages in HTML & CSS
• Presented design concepts and mock-ups, and articulated design decisions to clients
• Mentored and guided entry-level and junior teammates to learn, improve and grow, by sharing knowledge and by assisting them and steadily increasing their ownership for their tasks, and by promoting design best practices and more effective design tools
• Worked on brand & identity design projects, from research, sketching, exploring concepts and design directions, to creating the brand style guide and deliverables.

Senior Visual Designer

Digital Business Solutions SRL

• Created pixel perfect website design mockups for several websites.
• Implemented website designs using HTML and CSS, as well as collaborated with developers to ensure a quality UI implementation was met.
• Worked on branding design projects, and created guides and deliverables.
• Created and derived print materials, such as brochures and others.

Graphic & Web Designer

Vool Kan Graphics SRL

• Contributed with designs and DTP for several pages of articles for a few issues of ”MyBand” magazine
• Did video editing for some promo TV spots for Music Channel
• Worked as part of a graphic design team on various print deliverables, including brochures, flyers, business cards, letterheads.

Junior Graphic Designer

Visual Design professional with over 15 years of total experience across UX design, web design, graphic design, branding. Finding the sweet spot between user needs, business requirements, and technical constraints. Systems thinker, interaction designer, content strategist, information architect. HTML & CSS frontend designer with AI coding vibes, understanding the developers' language. Photographer, photo & video editor.

taplio

The Battle

Radu Vucea ⭐️

Cătălin Apostol

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