I started from the technical side: a bachelor in informatics engineering at Politecnico
di Milano. It gave me the habit of looking at how a system is actually built before having
an opinion about what it should do — something I still rely on.
What came next was a deliberate widening rather than a change of direction. In 2011 I
left Italy, spent time in London, and then settled in Lugano for a master in
management and informatics at USI. That programme is the reason my path
isn't a straight line from engineering to design: instead of going deeper into
engineering, I put technology, informatics, management and business side by side, and
started reading technical decisions as commercial ones too. An Erasmus year in Munich, in
business administration, pushed the same way.
Then came the working years that filled those studies in: research and project work at
USI's Institute for Public Communication, an engineering internship at Appway on client
onboarding for private banking, web and consulting work in Ticino. Different rooms,
different vocabularies, same recurring problem — the gap between what a system can do and
what people need from it.
That gap is what took me into design. A master of advanced studies in
interaction design at SUPSI, then UX and service design work — Netcomm
Suisse, a service design project with Frog Design Milano, UX design at Experientia in
Turin. This was the perspective I didn't have yet: how to understand people, how to design
an experience, how to find out what someone will actually do rather than what they say
they'll do.
Product management is where the three come together. At Cerved Group I moved from product
ownership and design inside the Service Design Team to product management on a B2B fintech
product; today I'm Product Owner at TeamSystem on shared platform services.
So the useful way to describe the path isn't engineering, then design, then product. It's
technology, then business, then user experience — three perspectives added
one at a time, which is why I can hold all three when a product decision has to be made:
- Business value — a product that doesn't pay for itself doesn't survive.
- User experience — adoption is never a given.
- Technical feasibility — a decision that ignores the system behind it
gets reversed three sprints later.
Most of the time those three answers belong to three different people. Having worked on
each side, I don't need a translator between them.