About Fernando Ruiz

The lens, not the résumé

I’m Fernando, Product Designer and AI Builder. I work with founders, teams, and agencies on the gap between it functions and it feels inevitable.

I didn’t come to product design through a portfolio school. I came through three different ways of seeing how things hold together: architecture, content, and marketing. Each one taught me to look at products from an angle most designers never get close to. That’s the lens behind every product I touch, and it’s the reason a CTO once told me, three months in, “design wasn’t the problem, but you were the only one asking the right questions about what was.”

This page is the longer version of that.

Three lenses on the same product

Most designers learn one way of seeing, the visual, the user, the flow, and then layer business and engineering on top as constraints. I learned them in reverse, and not on purpose.

Architecture taught me systems. Before screens, I was drawing buildings. Architecture is the discipline of making invisible decisions visible: load paths, circulation, the difference between a room that feels right and one that doesn’t, even when both have the same square footage. You learn that the thing a user notices is rarely the thing causing what they’re feeling. A hallway that feels claustrophobic isn’t usually about the hallway. That instinct, the symptom is upstairs from the cause, is the single most useful thing I bring to a product. When the WTFast CTO said the design wasn’t the problem, I didn’t push back. I went looking for the load path. The fix lived under the UI. We found it together with engineering, and activation went 4×.

Content taught me audiences. I spent years on the other side of the screen, as a YouTuber, a streamer, a social media creator. Not as a hobby, as the job. You don’t survive that without learning the difference between what an audience says they want and what they actually click, return to, share. You watch a thumbnail underperform and learn more about your viewers in ten minutes than a year of survey data would tell you. Game founders kept handing me products built for the player they imagined. I’d been the player they imagined, for five years. At United Gamers, that gap was the whole problem. The redesigned MVP became the pitch deck, and €250k of seed money showed up because investors could finally see the product the founders had been describing.

Marketing taught me what a business actually pays for. I ran affiliate programs, then marketing at WTFast. I sat in pricing conversations, watched cohorts churn, negotiated sponsorships at zero cost for tournaments most brands would have paid to be in. When you’ve owned a funnel, you stop treating activation, retention, and revenue as someone else’s metrics. You start hearing the business case in every design review. You also stop tolerating the design that wins the Dribbble shot but loses the cohort.

Design is where these three converged. Not as a pivot, but as the place where the things I already knew how to do finally added up.

What this actually changes for you

Most designers you hire will polish what you handed them. I’ll tell you when what you handed me isn’t the problem.

That’s the difference, and it cuts both ways. If you want a contractor who executes the brief and ships the Figma, I’m not the cheapest version of that. If you want someone who walks in, talks to your engineers, your support team, and your power users for a week, and comes back saying “the screens are fine, the activation gap is in the second session, here’s where the product is quietly lying to its users”, that’s the work I do well.

The WTFast story is the canonical version. The CTO told me design wasn’t the problem. He was right. The product was telling users it was working when it wasn’t. No design pass would have fixed that. Diagnosing it did. We went from 45-second app closures to 4× activation and 3× revenue, and most of what I delivered wasn’t pixels. It was a clear read on where the trust was breaking and a redesign that didn’t pretend the broken part was a UI issue.

You hire that lens once and you stop mistaking polish for progress.

What I do, concretely

The three lenses sound abstract. Here’s how they show up in a week of work.

Product design and UX strategy. End-to-end product work: research, flows, interaction, visual, prototypes, testing. Case studies (WTFast, Party Parrot World, United Gamers, Digital Daylight) show the range. The common thread: I’m in the room with engineering and the founder, not handing files over a wall.

AI Builder, not just AI-curious. I don’t prototype in Figma and hope engineering ports it. I build with AI: Claude Code as a real dev copilot, Next.js, Supabase, the rest of the stack. I’ve shipped products of my own (PideFast for WhatsApp commerce, Design Binders, UX Nodes, ArturoMed for a doctor with 1.7M TikTok followers). Some of them broke in interesting ways. ArturoMed survived a cryptominer attack on launch night, which is the kind of thing you only learn by actually shipping.

Teaching this to other product designers. The designers who show up to my workshops come from teams at MercadoLibre, EY, Banco Guayaquil, and other companies across LATAM, including industries that don’t usually have a design team at all. The pattern repeats: once they’ve built and shipped one real thing with AI, they stop asking permission to do it again. That’s the outcome I care about: not seat-filling, but the moment a designer realizes they can ship.

Growth and conversion work. Funnels, activation, retention, A/B tests. The marketing background means I don’t need to be translated to. I read the dashboard with you.

The business-facing layer. Investor decks, sponsorship and partnership conversations, go-to-market positioning. This isn’t a side skill. It’s the layer that decides whether the design earns its place in the roadmap.

The philosophy, in one line

Find what’s actually breaking. Then design.

The longer version: most product problems aren’t design problems. They’re diagnosis problems wearing design clothes. Teams hire designers to make the screens look modern, the screens look modern, and the underlying breakage stays in place. Then six months later they hire another designer.

The designer worth hiring is the one who refuses that loop. The one who can sit with engineering and find the load path, sit with the founder and find the business case, sit with users and hear what they’re actually saying under the words. The screens come after.

That’s what the three lenses are for. Architecture so I can read the system. Content so I can read the audience. Marketing so I can read the business. Design is where they meet, and the meeting place is where the work that actually matters gets done.

Working together

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, in three shapes:

• Senior / Lead Product Design roles with founders or teams shipping something that matters.
• UX strategy and diagnostic engagements, usually 4–8 weeks, where the deliverable is a clear read on what’s actually breaking and a plan to fix it.
• AI build work and workshops for teams that want to ship with AI instead of just talk about it.

If any of those match the moment you’re in, the fastest way is email.

Email: hola@fernandoux.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/fernando-ruiz-ux