Alberto Calvo

Résumé

Cabify

Principal product designer, Design system Jun 2019 – Present

The design team reached a point where it was essential to define a shared design system that would avoid fragmentation and make us more efficient. I decided to pass the baton to someone else on the Web to continue the project, already on track, and step forward to help the team in this crucial area.

We took advantage of our previous experience in the Web to lay the foundations of typography, color, and layout for our apps. And with this, we began to create the basic components that were fundamental to migrate all our projects and workflow to Figma. The system’s coverage has not stopped growing since then, and little by little, we are taking it to other projects, aside from product.

I have worked intensively to improve communication between designers, focus on common goals, create appropriate rituals and channels, and distribute the system’s ownership among the entire team. And it’s giving us great results.

At the end of 2019, a Frontend engineer joined the adventure to bring everything we had created in design to production. Adoption is continually improving on internal and external projects.

Other significant tasks I have carried out

• Assumed the administration and organization of Figma among other Design Ops activities.
• Led the redefinition of the Design workflow, in order to be more organized internally and externally.
• Led the definition of a career path for product design.
• Redefined our vehicle asset architecture.
• Redesigned the information architecture of the Product handbook from scratch.
• Participated in the formalization of our design principles.

Senior design manager, Web Oct 2018 – Jun 2019

During this second stage, my focus shifted to driving the growth of the design team in general.

After having mentored her for nine months, I gave more autonomy to Marta, the designer I was supporting on the Web, intending to provide her space to grow and level up within the company, a goal she achieved a few months later.

On the other hand, I helped scale the design team, co-defining a hiring process according to the changes that were taking place in the company: from the challenge and its evaluation criteria to the entire interview process. We grew quite a bit that year, attracting highly talented people with great humility. For us, the perfect recipe.

In the Web team, we reached a point where the different countries in which we operated needed to communicate many nuances that we could not convey from a global website. For this reason, I promoted the creation of Prisma: a custom CMS that would allow us to mold it based on our own particular needs, and thus solve this significant content localization problem that we had, apart from other security, permissions control, and performance problems.

Senior product designer (Team lead), Web Jan 2018 – Oct 2018

When I came to Cabify, there was no Web team. A sole engineer was dedicated to reactively executing any requests that came to him from different departments—which worked in silos—and a part-time brand designer with no technical skills. Chaos reigned.

My first responsibility was assuming the role of Team Lead + Product Manager and assemble a team that would remake the web from scratch with quality. I set team dynamics, which helped us work in a more organized way and with clear objectives. I carried out 1:1s every two weeks with each team member to ensure everyone was okay and motivated. We had a rocky road ahead of us.

The most significant challenge was to channel our efforts towards things that generated the most value in the medium-long term. For this, I had to educate, convince, and help the different stakeholders finally align with each other. That was key to be able to define together a strategy and goals for each new section. The Web team had the mission to direct the course and cohesively shape those new sections.

In parallel, I began to define and train the team on the foundations of a new design system for the web, focused on typography, color, and layout. I promoted the use of semantic markup to improve accessibility and SEO.

We redesigned the main sections of the site: Home, Driver, and Business, moving away from the pure marketing and brand approach that until then had led the project and focusing the discourse on the product and our value proposition. We based all these on an exhaustive investigation of the company’s and our potential clients’ needs we conducted.

The team grew, and we brought in a Product Manager and an Engineering Manager to spread the workload.

Designer, Sketch Aug 2015 – Dec 2017

Please note some of these designs have evolved very nicely over time, built on top of the foundations I worked on.

Technical improvements

• Migration of the whole website from Cactus for Mac to Jekyll, alongside with Ale Muñoz. That allowed us to create a way more powerful static website, which opened the door to many things we did later.
• Complete refactor with new Liquid templates, improved HTML semantics, and modern SCSS and JavaScript architecture.
• Performance improvements, which included: minification, improved server caching and asset fingerprinting, font preloading and swap rendering, and serving per-resolution optimized assets, introducing WebP and new video formats.

Support section redesign

• Support home page, which serves as a hub for all the information and has a search input field as a central piece of attention. When you click in that field, you get the FAQ as suggestions before you start typing.
• That search engine was powered by Algolia, which allowed us to perform searches inside our Jekyll articles with JavaScript.
• Previously, the Support section was just a standalone page with a collection of all the questions and answers. But I decided to go further: created standalone pages for each, so the information was easier to browse and search, better for SEO, but, more importantly, paved the path for writing better articles with way more detail than before. We categorized the articles by one or several tags in the front matter.
• I improved the Contact form with smart Support article suggestions based on what you were writing as your subject—also powered by Algolia. I added contextual information depending on the topic you chose and defined some description templates to help people complete the form correctly, so we got better information from them.

Release process: Automation and awareness

• Sketch release process automation, alongside with Sam Deane. The script (among other things) automatically generated one markdown file per release with all the categorized release notes pulled directly from Github. It saved us lots of manual work on each release.
• With these markdown files, I could populate the new Updates page with Jekyll. We had special categories for the highlights, and I added filtering thanks to the front matter metadata.
• A slightly different version of that markdown file was used to feed the Sparkle update window, which we styled a bit.
• I created a brand new Beta page, on which you can see whether there is a current active beta or not, alongside with better information and context, as we were getting low usage and almost no feedback from them.

Licensing and sales

• License Manager, alongside with Jelle de Laender. It was a rudimentary tool that helped the company software license owners administrate their licenses.
• Add seats and Renew license pages (both deprecated), alongside with Jelle de Laender. We better explained the value proposition of the subscription model, added a few FAQ (pulled automatically from the Support articles), and improved the purchase experience.
• Education licenses form, to help students and institutions get a discount.
• When the subscription model came in, we needed to explain better its value to prevent losing clients, as it was somewhat risky at that time. That’s why I worked on a new Pricing page (now superseded), which helped our potential new customers make a more informed decision.

Documentation section enhancements

• As Docs were essential for us, I spent time making significant text style enhancements to enhance readability and visuals.
• Automatic article heading link generation, so we could link to specific sections of an article from Support or Community.
• Sticky navigation, alongside with Carlos Gavina.

Extension ecosystem and Developer documentation

• I created a new Extensions section on the site to increase the community awareness of our plugin and integration ecosystem (one of Sketch’s competitive advantages back in the day). We gave space for featuring plugins and helpful integrations, and a search engine.
• Developer site redesign, alongside with Ale Muñoz.

Significant app improvements I contributed to shipping

• v3.6: Text rendering improvements.
• v3.7: Symbols redesign.
• v3.9: Symbol resizing.
• v41: Sketch rebranding, WebP support, and Presentation mode.
• v48: Color management.
• Several versions: Improving SVG support.
• SVGO compressor official plugin.
• Bitmap compressor official plugin (deprecated).

Senior product designer, Jobandtalent Nov 2014 – Aug 2015

I helped the company to improve its processes, learn to formalize product definition properly, and started a shared design system for all the platforms, which were severely fragmented.

Freelance designer Jun 2014 – Oct 2014

I worked on a couple of projects. The most significant one was the Flexibits’ website redesign, which has evolved quite a bit from what I left.

Designer (Contract), Sketch Nov 2013 – Apr 2014

I was part of the team that brought you Sketch 3, which revolutionized the design app industry.

As a contractor, my role was to design and develop a whole new website to introduce the latest version to the public. The goals were to sell more copies of the product by giving the brand a more professional look and providing a cohesive and consistent experience throughout the site. We expanded it with new content.

At the same time, I participated in the app design process with feedback, ideas, and testing. The rest is history.

(Sabbatical) Mar 2013 – Nov 2013

After experiencing two consecutive company closings within six months, I decided to take some time to breathe, travel, and clear my mind.

Product design lead, Spartanbits Sep 2012 – Feb 2013

I helped the company with the internal organization, defining the design process and the operability between the Product Design and Engineering teams.

Simultaneously, I participated in product strategy decisions and started defining deep interaction and user experience changes inside the Go!Chat application, both on Android and iOS. Sadly, the company closed shortly after I started.

Senior product designer, Youzee Dec 2010 – Sep 2012

Member of the founding team, I worked on defining the company values, culture, the brand, and the product from the concept to the final state, participating in all kinds of top-level strategic decisions.

Shared responsibilities

During that time, I learned how to define and shape products properly, and I did it with a fantastic team: Fran Pérez as director, and Sergio Ruiz. Jorge Correa joined us later and brought fantastic ideas and experience to the team. Apart from shaping, we periodically made design critiques, on which we together improved the visuals, interaction, and words of the product.

Direct responsibilities

• Conducted the initial research, which we used to make more informed decisions.
• Defined and built the HTML5 + CSS3 code base for the web.
• Conducted all user testing.
• Before the company closed, my latest responsibility was to design the mobile apps, creating a consistent experience among all the devices, but taking advantage of each of their specifics. I was in charge of the iOS app (both iPhone and iPad), which was the starting point for the rest of Youzee’s mobile experience.

User Interface designer, Tuenti May 2010 – Dec 2010

Tuenti was the biggest social network in Spain, with 9.1 million users when I left. I worked with excellent professionals from 15 different countries and learned a lot from the experience. My time there was short, as the opportunity to join Youzee as a founding member came in, and I couldn’t say no.

I took care of the Games platform and improved the overall UI, HTML, and CSS with the rest of the team.

Arnold 4D (Havas worldwide)

Senior frontend developer Jul 2009 – May 2010

I was still a one-man-department, taking care of all the HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript. I had direct contact with clients, explaining our work and technical strategy. I also coordinated freelance work.

Frontend developer Mar 2008 – Jul 2009

I was a one-man-department for more than a year.

I coded several huge sites from scratch and also tweaked and changed a lot made by others. I developed a bunch of top-level coding skills and the ability to work under pressure.