Hi! My name is Iker Fernandez, and I am a Lead Product Designer currently based in Barcelona, working at Softr.

With more than 10 years of experience, I have worked and collaborated with tech companies, agencies, startups, and entrepreneurs in Europe, America, and Asia.


Background

After studying Computer Science Development in Pamplona first, and Design at EASDi right after, I have a development and graphic design background. I am especially interested in interface design, design aesthetics, and user-centric methodologies, as well as in product strategy and vision, design-culture development within organizations, and mentoring and management.

Career

My design career started as an intern for a small Italian creative agency called Lirici Greci in 2010. I mostly worked on web and editorial design. I learned a lot from Francesca. After my internship in Ancona, I decided to move back to the city where I grew up, Pamplona.

Back home, I started to work as a freelancer for local businesses, agencies, and small tech companies, for which I built e-commerce projects and designed native iOS apps. I worked as a freelancer based in Pamplona, combined with periods in Madrid for 5 years. From 2010 to 2015. Some of the clients I worked for during that period were Kukuxumusu, PS21, You Media, and Lorem Solutions.

In 2015 I had the opportunity to move to New York City. I continued working as a freelancer from a coworking space in Astoria, Queens. It allowed me to meet young entrepreneurs like Cathryn Lavery, and Bryan Harris, who hired me as a product designer to work on Best Self and Growth Tools. I learned about Product Design, Business development, product releases, user experience, and modern design methodologies. During my time in the US, I also had the chance to start working as a contractor for Typeform.

By the end of 2016, and after a few months of working as a contractor for them, I moved to Barcelona to work at Typeform as a Senior Product Designer. I worked at Typeform for 3 years on various projects such as the developer portal, Typeform Mobile, the creation of a new Design System to apply the new brand created by Design Studio, and the overall building experience.

I joined Sage in 2019 to help them update their design methodologies and to work on the foundations of the redesign of the new Sage X3. X3 was a very successful ERP that was launched to the market 20 years ago, and that was fully redesigned and revamped during 2019 and 2020.

After the delivery of the project, I started working at Payfit as a Lead Product Designer. At Payfit I had the chance of working on the product vision for the Time vertical with the Director of Product and the Director of Engineering. I also contributed to the long-term vision of the team reporting to Lea Mendes, the VP of Design, with founders and C-level colleagues as main stakeholders, and representing my team on the global company keynotes in front of an audience of +600 people.

I am currently working at Softr, a no-code product that allows users to create web apps using data from multiple data sources, such as Airtable, or Google Sheets. My role as Product Design Lead consists of designing and shaping the product, but also establishing the hiring strategy, building the design team, managing it, and aligning with stakeholders.

I combine my full-time role at Softr with collaborations with Dribbble as a mentor, as part of their education programs.

Typeform, Sage, Payfit, Dribbble, and Softr are some of the companies I worked with during the last few years.

Skills

As an individual contributor, when designing, I like to handle the whole end-to-end design process. I like to be involved in business decisions, where I bring users’ needs to build delightful experiences that have a real impact on the company’s goals. I like to understand what users need and help solve real problems. I love to work on details, in high-quality design experiences that make a difference, with an eye on good aesthetics.

I am usually also involved in product vision development, roadmap definition, setting up project goals, and scoping iterations. I like to work closely with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders.