About me
I'm Matia, a product designer who has worked on products from early stages through to funding rounds, successful exits and a few hard lessons from things that didn’t work out along the way.
I also spent four years at Apple, leading design for an internal platform used to launch new services (Apple TV+, Arcade, Fitness+ & more) across billions of devices.
About the way I work
I enjoy working in small, focused teams with high trust, clear ownership, and fast feedback loops. Years spent in 0-1 startups taught me to think beyond design alone: staying close to users, navigating ambiguity, making thoughtful tradeoffs, and taking products from early ideas through to production. I value clarity, good judgment, and people who care deeply about the quality of what they build.
About product
I believe the true measure of a product is in the impact it creates once it’s in the hands of its users. It’s not just about what we design, but about what gets adopted, delivers value, and evolves through real-world use.
Some of the clearest product opportunities come from simply staying close to users. Listening carefully, keeping an ear to the ground, and working closely with customer-facing teams often reveals things that metrics and roadmaps alone cannot.
About design
I care deeply about the way something works, feels, flows, and communicates.
I grew up in Italy surrounded by art, design, and architecture, and later studied sustainable architecture in Venice. That experience shaped the way I see design today. Whether it’s a building, a chair, or a digital product, I believe the fundamentals remain the same: creating things that are solidly built, useful, and beautiful to experience (firmitas, utilitas, venustas – IYKYK).
Design, to me, has always been an act of care. Care for the people using something, for the details, for the feeling a product leaves behind once it’s in someone’s hands.
Especially now, in the age of AI, when creating products has become faster and easier than ever, I believe human sensitivity, taste, and craftsmanship matter more, not less. Technology changes constantly, but the need for products that feel clear, thoughtful, and deeply human does not.
The 1968 break-switch, by Achille Castiglioni.
About AI
I see AI as a tool, much like many others that came before it. Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, and now AI-assisted workflows.
The important thing, for me, is to never fall in love with the tool more than the act of designing itself. Tools help us get somewhere faster, but they do not replace the fundamentals of good design: understanding people deeply, asking the right questions, aligning around problems before jumping to solutions, testing with users, and building things that genuinely improve someone’s experience.
I use AI every day as part of my process. It helps me prototype ideas faster, ship features to production more independently, and collaborate more closely with engineers. Since late 2025, I’ve been regularly shipping production code, learning engineering workflows, reviews, and guardrails along the way.
This has allowed me to pick up smaller engineering tasks that might otherwise sit in a backlog for months, while also helping teams move faster on new features and product polish. More importantly, it creates a healthier collaboration with engineers: I can help close the gap between vision and execution, while they stay focused on the larger technical challenges instead of spending time fixing 4px spacing issues.
Past year PRs shipped to production.