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.

Rada

Co-Founded Rada, to create insurance-related innovation for the MENA Region.

Rada received Central Bank's license and has generated $1 M in Gross Written Premium within 18 months of operations.

We have created off-the-shelf and intuitive solutions to help brokers and non-insurance players distribute insurance.

Our solution is an API-first approach which allows flexibility and scalability, and it's currently being used by several brokers and insurers.

Rada has now it's own dedicated tech and support team that looks over maintenance and onboarding.

Head of Product (CoFounder)

ProductTank Dubai

I joined the existing team in 2016, and then took the lead in 2018.
Helped grew the events from 10-15 attendees, to events with 350+ people.

Key achievements:
- hosted 35+ events since 2018;
- consistently hosted on average 5 events / year (including during Covid);
- during Covid, I initiated Regional ProductTank (a series of online events with neighboring chapters and international speakers);
- grew the community from 600 members in 2018, to 5,800+ members in 2024;
- created the LinkedIn group, and grew that to 5,500+ members;
- helped various members either transition into Product Management, or find a new role;
- found and signed 2 local sponsors.

Co-Founder

Modus Capital

Helping first-time founders cross the bridge from idea to problem validation, digital solution, go-to-market blueprint, MVP, and revenue generation, as a primary goal.

But focus on educating the founding partners in the process as a secondary goal, helping them navigate the complexities of building a healthy business, from a product perpective.

Made use of easy-to-understand frameworks and strong foundation that would help founders carry even after the program graduation.

Successfully built and launched 2 ideas to meet our company's internal KPIs.

Lead Product Manager

Fenix Outdoor

Supported a multi-country and multi-brand to streamline their B2B sales process.

Fenix Outdoor sell their products through a complex network of sellers to several hundreds of stores in each country, across the whole globe. And that in itself it's a major challenge.

I came on board to help build an internal tool in order to streamline the entire selling process. 

In the end, we would have saved hundreds of hours of data reconciliation, while providing a real-time insight for both the seller and the end-customer.

Key responsibilities:
- run discovery workshops with business representatives to understand the main problem, and find a common solution that fits across all existing geographies;
- focus on business validation of the approach, to get early buy-in and reduce waste;
- made use of pre-build HTML components to share short and incremental progress even before development started;
- reduced the onboarding process by embedding tutorials within the app (when you need it / where you need it).

Transportr

I came on board within the final stages of the product.

My main role was to align the business requirements with the development output, and to make sure the outcome is intuitive & bug-free.

Within 45 days from my arrival, we have upgraded the look and feel, established what are the main workflows and found & fixed all show stopper bugs.

This helped us have a successful launch, onboarding 7 Shippers and 50+ Carriers within the first 3 months, having exchanged 50,000+ bids after 9 months, upon the end of my contract with Transportr.

Key outcomes:
- launched a bug free & stable application within 45 days;
- reduced the onboarding time and cost by uplifting the look and feel so that non-tech related users can easily use the application;
- reduced the overall transportation cost by implementing a notification system to increase the number of bids for each offer;
- created a workflow to discover, validate, prioritize and implement features that bring value to the business;
- increased the overall value transacted through the platform by expanding into the ocean freight;
- initiated integration with WhatsApp to provide real-time location for each transport using the existing infrastructure while solving a major concern for the shippers.

Head of Product

AI·FOR

At AI·FOR, together with the CTO from my previous work, we've set ourselves a high target: to build the first Fashion Retail
Visual similarity Monitor.

So we both quit our comfortable jobs and jumped into the unknown. With the help of our combined knowledge of product + tech, we've managed to build our own AI tool to scan and find similar-looking items.

And in the fashion industry, that's no easy thing. 
We've built and iterated for 1,5 years continuously, but we were not able to find Product-Market Fit. And while we bootstrapped can take you to limited places, we've reached our end.

Key outcomes:
- research into other similar initiatives, study what went wrong and what can we improve;
- talk with a lot of customers from the fashion industry, and find out what their pain points are and how much would they'd be willing to pay to get a solution;
- overview of the product implementation;
- reached 500+ potential users through networking and cold reach.

Head of Product (Co-Founder)

Landmark Group

• Added 7% of incremental value added to the sales stats by
implementing Push notifications system across 7 mobile apps;
• Added 1% of incremental value on sales by reconnecting guest
users on mobile apps with their abandoned products (users
untraceable trough other channels);
• Implemented a handover procedure that helped the
organization to easily archive, and then access older projects,
which reduce friction and ultimately saved time & money;
• Reduced turn around for an E-commerce product to go live from 8 days to 24 hours by creating an internal tool for content management creation that supports different teams and external vendors to work together seamlessly;

Senior Product Manager

Hewlett-Packard

• Led projects through all phases from initiation to planning, execution, monitoring, resource balancing, delivery and closing, at EMEA level of distribution;
• Successfully managed high profile client and multiple stakeholders with different political and cultural background;
• Built strong business relationship that have led to the decision of extending ongoing contract and requested me to lead further implementations on a high visibility project;
• Managed project up to $5M traffic monthly, teams up to 20 across different time zones, and multiple projects concurrently;
• Developed a set of new internal procedures with the QA department in order to adhere to the best project management standards and reduce costs.

Lead Project Manager, EMEA

Reea

• Initiated and led 2 new products sponsored internally, one of which became the market leader for free educational resources - www.educatie.inmures.ro
• Introduced learning materials to new staff, which improved work efficiency and delivery and enabled newly created tasks to become ready to use from the first try;
• Advised clients on what new functionalities to add  and how to integrate them into their current applications in order to achieve predefined goals;
• Increased profit by proposing new functionalities to existing and on going projects and clients;
• Improved customer experience by introducing an effective complaints escalation procedure.

Kubis Europe

• Led project related teams in the delivery of client requirements from inception to completion, within scope, time and budget;
• Researched and changed external software contractors which increased profit margins;
• Trained staff in using Google Products more efficiently, which eased the internal communication and staff's time efficiency in producing reports;
• Decreased drastically number of software bugs reported by improving software quality through comprehensive testing and code inspection.

Project Manager

On several parallel journeys from idea to revenue generation.

My working experience spreads from web-houses, advertising agencies to multi-national corporations, across 3 countries.

My unconditional attachment sticks to building digital products for the world. 
I have this appetite for talking about, and building startups.

I run my own digital-boutique that is focusing on building our own internal startups, and supporting other commercial projects with their first steps into digital world. We can cover in-house small to medium projects.

When I'm not immersed into the digital world through the computer, I love building things with my hands, gardening, watching good movies and reading classic literature.

Always open for genuine conversations, and happy to help strangers (especially if it's related to startups) :)

taplio

The Battle

Radu Vucea ⭐️

Mihai Sava

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