Centauro had a design team of almost 30 people and a set of design principles that almost nobody was using. The principles existed in documentation, had been created through a cross-functional workshop, and were well-intentioned. But in practice, they weren't showing up in design decisions, critiques, or team conversations. As the team was about to double in size, the risk was clear: without a shared foundation, consistency would become impossible and alignment would depend entirely on informal communication.

Before proposing anything new, I wanted to understand why the existing principles weren't being used. Rather than assuming, I ran a structured workshop with the entire team to find out. Three root causes emerged: the principles weren't memorable: designers had to look them up to recall them. They weren't applicable: it wasn't clear how to connect them to daily decisions. And they were too broad: they tried to say everything and ended up directing nothing.

The problem wasn't that people didn't care about principles. It was that the principles didn't give people anything to hold onto. With the team about to grow, this was the right moment to start from scratch rather than patch what wasn't working.

I designed a six-stage workshop process that took the team from diagnosis to ownership. The goal wasn't just to produce better principles. It was to produce principles the team had genuinely built together, because participation was the only way to get real adoption. Stages moved from understanding what principles are, to individual creation, grouping, small-group refinement, a vote, and finally applying the chosen principles to real pages of the Centauro website.

That last step revealed something important: what the team had produced weren't principles yet. They were three broader concepts with a cluster of values underneath each one. Rather than forcing them into a format, I adapted the process. We added a refinement stage, writing and rewriting short sentences, testing different wordings, discussing what different people understood when they read the same sentence. Language turned out to be the hardest part of the work.

The final output was three design principles, each with a short memorable statement and a set of concrete "what this means" examples written by the team:

The principles were embedded into Figma templates, team pages, and critique documentation, bringing them into the places where design decisions actually happen rather than leaving them in a document nobody opens.

Three memorable principles replaced five abstract ones that nobody was using. The adoption wasn't instant. It never is. But the foundation was different: these were principles the team had built, tested, and written themselves, with all 30 designers involved in the process. That sense of ownership changed how people related to them. The principles were embedded into Figma templates, critiques, and documentation, brought into the places where design decisions actually happen.

Prime is eDreams' subscription program and one of the most important revenue drivers in the business. Acquiring new Prime members is a key goal, and the mobile funnel is where most of that happens. Through Fullstory analysis, I identified patterns of back-and-forth navigation, click rage, and high drop-off on the Prime page, signals that users weren't understanding the value proposition, or weren't encountering it at the right moment.

The team's instinct was to improve the existing Prime page: better layout, clearer copy, stronger visuals. A reasonable direction, but one that accepted the current mental model without questioning it.

The real problem wasn't how we were showing Prime. It was where and when we were asking people to commit to something they didn't yet understand. I reframed the opportunity: instead of asking users to navigate to a separate page and make a deliberate decision, what if Prime was introduced at the moment of checkout, in a way that felt low-friction and transparent? That shift changed the entire design direction.

Before proposing anything, I ran a thorough audit: Fullstory sessions, funnel metrics, Prime page performance, and a competitive benchmark. What I found was that users weren't rejecting Prime. They were confused by it. The value wasn't landing at the right moment, and the commitment felt too large too early.

Rather than benchmarking travel competitors, who were all making similar mistakes, I looked at a completely different sector: food delivery. Uber One had solved a similar problem elegantly: a simple checkbox at checkout surfacing an instant, contextual saving. No separate page. No forced decision. Just a transparent offer at the right moment. That cross-industry leap was the unlock.

Prime is a high-stakes touchpoint. The solution had to work across a complex matrix of user states: existing Prime members, expired members, users who had seen Prime before, users who hadn't. I mapped and designed for every relevant scenario, because getting it wrong for any of them would mean missing an acquisition opportunity or creating a frustrating experience.

The final solution introduced two connected components: a persistent checkbox in the sticky checkout footer, and an expandable drawer surfacing Prime benefits in a timeline format: clear, honest, and non-intrusive. Users could engage or ignore it without disrupting their booking flow.

After the proposal was shared, other teams started testing variations of it, adapting the checkbox mechanic, the drawer structure, or the acquisition logic to their own products and moments in the funnel. The proposal didn't just solve one problem. It changed how other teams thought about a whole category of problems.

The proposal delivered a +12.49% uplift in Prime First new subscribers and a +3.17% improvement in Prime conversion rate. It was recognised as a finalist at the eDO Innovation Awards. Beyond the numbers, the mechanic was picked up and adapted by other verticals independently, a signal that the thinking behind it was clear enough to travel without explanation.

eDreams offers a wide range of ancillary products throughout the booking journey: insurance, seat selection, bags, cars, and more. Each had been designed in isolation, without a shared structure or logic. Every time a new product was added or an existing one changed, the team started from scratch. The result was a funnel full of disconnected experiences, hard to maintain and harder to scale.

The natural instinct was to standardise the look and feel. But visual inconsistency was a symptom, not the cause. The real problem was that nobody had a shared understanding of what each product was trying to achieve: for the user, for design, or for the business.

I shifted the question from "how should these look?" to "what intent are we serving?" That one shift opened up a completely different solution space, one based on purpose rather than appearance.

Before defining anything, I audited all 12 ancillary products across the funnel, mapping each by typology, composition, needs, and value proposition. The hardest part wasn't finding patterns. It was finding a solution flexible enough to cover the most relevant scenarios without becoming too complex to maintain or too inconsistent for users to follow.

The answer was a system of three variants, each defined not by appearance but by intent:

Each variant has defined UI weight, core elements, and optional elements: enough structure for consistency, enough flexibility to adapt across products and moments. The system connects to user personas and propensity models, so the right variant surfaces for the right user at the right time.

The system also introduced a shared language across design and product. Terms like "Deep Dive" and "Teaser" became shorthand for intent-driven decisions, not just visual choices, making it easier for teams to align on what a display needed to achieve before discussing how it should look.

The framework became the reference point for how ancillary products are designed and displayed across eDreams. Three variants replaced an endless cycle of one-off designs, reducing alignment time and giving teams a shared starting point. Product and design now share a common language: "Deep Dive", "Spotlight", "Teaser", making it easier to align on intent before discussing how something should look. New products can be added without reinventing from scratch.

Repricing happens when a hotel raises the price of a room between the moment a user selects it and the moment they reach checkout. At eDreams, 4.8% of users in the Hotels funnel went through a repricing. The data was clear: the larger the price increase, the higher the drop-off. Users experiencing a repricing of more than 30% converted 18.2% less than those who didn't encounter one at all.

The existing experience showed no repricing communication at all. Users would simply arrive at the payment page and find a different price than expected. No explanation, no context, no choice. Just a surprise at the worst possible moment.

The problem wasn't the repricing itself. It was that users felt deceived. The solution wasn't to hide the price change. It was to communicate it in a way that felt honest, contextual, and empowering rather than manipulative. Before proposing anything, I built a structured discovery document mapping what was known, what was unknown, and what was assumed, and worked with the data team to understand exactly where and why users were dropping off.

The data revealed that not all repricings are equal. A 0–5% increase had a much lower drop-off rate than larger ones, and eDreams could absorb changes up to 2.3%. A single message for every repricing scenario was the wrong approach. The communication needed to adapt to the situation.

I designed a contextual system with three distinct responses: small increases absorbed silently, larger ones communicated clearly with a modal or drawer showing the new price and a price trend chart, and unavailable rooms handled with a "sold out" message rather than a price change. A key insight was that the guest page, not the payment page, was the better moment to surface the message, when users hadn't yet committed their payment details.

The final solution covered three scenarios: sold out, higher-value repricing shown at the hotel details page, and lower-value repricing shown at the payment page. Each had its own communication logic, tone, and set of actions. The price trend chart was a considered detail: it reframed the repricing as a market reality rather than a platform problem, giving users context instead of just a number.

Results were measured approximately July 2024, after the MVP rollout. Drop-offs among users who encountered a repricing fell by ~50%, and overall conversion in the Hotels funnel improved. Showing the modal at the guest page, not the payment page, delivered better results, validating one of the key placement decisions made during the project.

The Hotel Details Page is one of the most critical moments in the booking funnel. It's where users decide. But the existing page had grown organically, accumulating information and features without a coherent structure. Almost all hotel details pages in the industry look the same: the same sections, the same order, the same amount of information regardless of who's looking or what they need. A solo traveller booking for tomorrow night sees the same page as a family of four planning a week-long trip.

I started with research: user testing sessions, past usability data, and competitive benchmarking. The findings confirmed what the data suggested: the page wasn't failing because of any single broken element. It was failing because it couldn't adapt.

The central question I kept returning to was: how can we anticipate what the experience is going to be like for the user, before they even arrive at the hotel? If we know a user is searching for a stay for four people, two of whom are children, we should surface child-friendly amenities prominently. If we know from past behaviour that they consistently book hotels with exceptional breakfast reviews, that should be highlighted. The page shouldn't just display information. It should prioritise the right information for the right person at the right moment.

Before any visual work, I ran a usability study with 15 participants. Users found the page informative but identified real friction: Prime membership benefits were unclear, promotional discounts overshadowed key information, and pricing wasn't always legible. These weren't cosmetic issues. They were hierarchy problems. The page was saying too many things at the same volume.

I then built an information model before touching any designs, mapping every element that could appear on the page and classifying each by type, relevance, requirement, goal, and state. This was essential because hotel data is messy: some hotels have certain information, others don't. The model gave me a shared language for making decisions about what to show, when, and why.

The proposal wasn't a redesign from zero to one. I designed a full future vision and broke it into a modular delivery sequence: spacing and typography first, then gallery, then section by section, so improvements could ship and be validated without waiting for a full rebuild.

The final vision was a page that adapts to the user rather than presenting the same experience to everyone. A family with young children sees family-friendly amenities surfaced prominently. A user who consistently books hotels with high breakfast ratings sees that highlighted. The structure stays familiar. It doesn't change enough to disorient, but it works harder for each individual.

Because the work was delivered modularly, there is no single consolidated metric for the full vision. The first module to ship, map improvements, delivered a +6.63% CVR uplift and a +6.18% LTV improvement. The vision has been adopted as the team's reference for the full page revamp, with modules continuing to ship and be validated incrementally.

In July 2021, PicPay acquired GuiaBolso, one of Brazil's most well-known personal finance apps. GuiaBolso had over 6 million users and had been offering personalised financial management tools based on shared data even before Open Banking formally existed in Brazil. I joined at the beginning of the integration process. There was no brief, no plan, no playbook. Just a newly acquired product, a team to lead, and the question: how do you take a full financial management app and bring it inside a completely different one, without losing what made it valuable?

The obvious challenge was technical: different brand, different structure, different logic. But the harder problem was the audience. GuiaBolso users had actively chosen to manage their finances. PicPay users were a completely different population: millions of people who had a bank account but had never tracked an expense in their life. We weren't just migrating a product. We were introducing a concept to people who had never asked for it.

On top of that, Open Finance was brand new in Brazil. Getting users to connect their bank accounts from other institutions required building trust around something most people didn't understand yet. And every fintech in the country was racing to be first. Whoever got users to link their accounts first would almost certainly keep them. The whole company was watching.

I led a team of three designers, working alongside researchers, content people, and a manager. We started by questioning everything GuiaBolso had built. Some of it was right for GuiaBolso's users but wrong for PicPay's. The category system had grown bloated, so we had to simplify it without losing granularity. Every decision required holding two very different users in mind at the same time.

The Open Finance consent flow was one of the most critical pieces of work. Users needed to understand what they were agreeing to, feel confident their data was safe, and see immediate value in connecting their accounts. We had to design not just a flow, but the trust around it. Tone of voice was another challenge: GuiaBolso spoke to financially aware users, PicPay's audience was much broader, so everything from error messages to onboarding copy had to be rethought.

The vision we were designing toward was PicPay as the "Conta das Contas", an account of accounts where users could see and manage all their financial relationships in one place, regardless of which banks they used. The MVP alone was substantial: getting to something clear enough for a first-time user, complete enough for a GuiaBolso veteran, and trustworthy enough for Open Finance to work required sustained design thinking at every layer.

I left the company before the product launched. The foundation my team and I built carried through to the final release in October 2022, when "Minhas Finanças" went live for all PicPay users. By launch, PicPay's Open Finance marketplace had surpassed 1 million consents, with a consent rate above 80%, well above market average in Brazil at the time. By November 2022, GuiaBolso was officially shut down, with over 6 million users fully migrated to PicPay. The product established PicPay as the central financial hub, positioning it ahead in Brazil's Open Finance race.