Founding Designer · Product Designer Engineer · London

Luiz Ottino

Product designer and founding designer at Zuba. A decade making complex, regulated systems feel simple, now building AI-native products.

View Projects → About Me

£14.4M

Revenue Impact

AI-native

Practice

8M+

Users Served

How I work now

AI-native practice

Designing in the same medium the product is built in. AI as part of the craft, not a shortcut. Routines that turn context into infrastructure.

01 Code

Designing in code

I work directly in the codebase using Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, and MCP. The stack is React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui. Idea to working interface in the same medium the product is built in. No Figma files, no handoff drift, no static mockups that drift from what ships.

Expect: production front-end shipped alongside engineering, multiple variants tested per journey, validation from the first iteration.

02 System

Design system as context

A design system designed for AI, not for a Figma library. The entire system lives in Markdown, structured around the design.md approach from Google's Stitch project, and exposed to the team through Claude Skills. Not a library to reference, but context any AI tool can load and reason against.

Expect: machine-readable tokens and patterns, single source of truth across product and company, design leverage that scales without scaling headcount.

03 Cadence

Agents on a cadence

Agents that run on demand are useful. Agents that run on a cadence are infrastructure. Daily routines for sales context, post-interview synthesis, market and competitor pulse, product usage delta, decision sweeps, documentation drift, and regulatory scans. Context that's current, synthesised, and ready every morning.

Expect: ambient competitive intelligence, continuous user research synthesis, decisions captured before they evaporate, and a team that starts every day with context already mapped.

Recent Work

Personal Projects

Personal Project · 2026

AI Use Tracker

Designed and built a native iOS app from scratch using Claude Code. Live Activities, Dynamic Island, dual-provider auth — from first prompt to a working build on iPhone in seven hours. Then discovered it couldn't ship.

About

About Me

Designer of impactful products in complex, regulated environments.

Currently founding designer at Zuba, an AI-first, stablecoin-native fintech building cross-border payment infrastructure for emerging markets. Working directly with the founding team across product, design system, engineering, and research. Designing in code, treating AI as part of the craft, and turning routines into infrastructure.

Over the past decade, I've built my career at the intersection of complexity and scale, payment systems processing over £50 million weekly, KYC and KYB flows that need to satisfy regulators while not losing the user halfway through, AI tools designed for messy real-world use. The common thread is environments where design decisions carry weight: a confusing checkout means millions in lost revenue, a broken compliance flow means a company can't operate.

Before Zuba, at Evoke, a FTSE 100 company operating across the UK, EU, and US, I led the redesign of payment systems across three brands and multiple markets, driving a 23% increase in checkout conversion and £2.3M in additional monthly revenue. I also co-led the company's AI initiatives, exploring how LLMs can generate context-aware content and streamline internal workflows at scale.

Before that, I designed AI-powered product discovery tools at Google using Gemini technology, and led eSIM activation design at Truphone across iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in partnership with Apple.

Earlier in my career, I worked across consultancies like McKinsey, R/GA, and Ogilvy on financial products for some of Latin America's largest banks, including helping build Bradesco Next, a digital bank for Gen Z users at Brazil's second-largest financial institution. I also co-founded a DeFi protocol that reached the finals at ETHDenver 2020.

What ties all of this together is a focus on making complex systems feel simple, whether that means navigating regulatory compliance across three jurisdictions, designing AI-native flows that work in production, or helping someone in an emerging market activate cellular service on their watch.

I'm currently based in London, exploring senior design roles where I can bring this experience to products that operate at the intersection of regulation, technology, and scale.

What I Deliver

Capabilities

Strategy, design execution, systems, research, AI, and the design engineering that ships them.

01 Strategy

Strategy & Discovery

I start by understanding the problem before jumping into solutions. That means mapping user journeys, identifying where the business is losing money or users, and aligning stakeholders around a shared direction. I've run discovery workshops with teams.

Expect: problem framing, journey maps, competitive analysis, stakeholder alignment workshops, and a clear design strategy that connects user needs to business outcomes.

02 Execution

Design Execution

I work end-to-end, from low-fidelity flows to production-ready designs. I prototype at the level of detail the project needs: sometimes that's a quick clickable in Figma to test a hypothesis, sometimes it's a fully specced interaction with motion, edge cases, and responsive behaviour documented for engineering.

Expect: user flows, wireframes, high-fidelity UI design, interactive prototypes, interaction specifications, and detailed design documentation ready for development handoff.

03 Systems

Design Systems

I've built and scaled design systems that serve millions of users across multiple brands, markets, and platforms. At Evoke, I architected the unified system post-acquisition that brought three brands under one governance model. I think about systems not as component libraries, but as shared languages between design and engineering.

Expect: component libraries, design tokens, multi-brand theming, contribution guidelines, and governance frameworks that scale with the organisation.

04 Research

Research & Validation

I design experiments, not just interfaces. Whether it's moderated usability testing, A/B tests on checkout flows, or analysing drop-off data to find where users struggle, I use evidence to make design decisions and measure their impact. The £2.3M revenue figure didn't come from intuition, it came from testing, iterating, and measuring.

Expect: usability testing plans and facilitation, A/B test design, data analysis and synthesis, actionable insight reports, and clear before/after metrics.

05 AI

AI & Emerging Technology

AI-native designer and design engineer. I work in code, not in Figma, using Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) across the full product lifecycle. I've built design systems exposed as Claude Skills, agent-driven design intelligence, and routines that turn AI into infrastructure rather than a tool. Before Zuba, I designed Gemini-powered product discovery at Google and led LLM-based internal tools at Evoke.

Expect: AI-native interaction design, design-to-code with AI partners, machine-readable design systems, agent cadences for synthesis and competitive intelligence, and a realistic perspective on what AI can and can't solve for your users.

06 Design Engineering

Design Engineering

I ship production front-end alongside the engineering team. The split is clean: I own everything the user sees and interacts with, engineering owns the backend and infrastructure. We design the contract between front and back together, but the boundary lets each side move at its own pace without bottlenecking the other. The stack is React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, and shadcn/ui.

Expect: production front-end implementation, design-to-code workflow, accessible and performant UI, component architecture aligned with the design system, and continuous shipping in lockstep with engineering.

Trusted By

ZubaGoogleWilliam Hill888Mr GreenMcKinseyR/GAOgilvyNTT DataTruphoneBradesco

Outside design, I shoot 35mm film, spend too much time in specialty coffee shops, and I'm developing an early-stage incense brand built around natural raw materials and considered design.

I do my best work in environments where designers are trusted to think commercially and ship: close to engineering, close to the data, close to the customer. If that's how you operate, I'll feel right at home.