I'm Angela. I think like a journalist, design like a systems thinker, and know the difference between a problem worth solving and noise.

The shift happened in 2014, in Washington DC. I was working as a camerawoman and video editor for TV3's DC bureau, thinking about what came next. A friend had just finished a UX bootcamp in New York and something about that conversation clicked. I enrolled in the same program at General Assembly, kept working in TV during the day, and spent evenings learning a completely different craft. When I moved back to Barcelona, I made the switch.

I started in research, which made sense. Qualitative interviews, finding the thread that connects scattered information into something clear and actionable. Different domain, same instinct: the real story is almost never the obvious one. You ask, you listen, you follow the thread that doesn't fit.

From there I moved into product design, then into leadership. Not because I had a plan, but because I notice what's not working and I can't quite look away. Early on I learned something important: noticing what's broken isn't enough. How you raise it matters as much as whether you're right. That's a journalism lesson too — the story you can tell is only as good as the room you can get it into.

The most interesting work I've done hasn't been redesigning existing things. It's been building what wasn't there yet.

At TransPerfect I joined a team that had been without direction for a year. PMs preferred to work around design rather than with it. No research function. No design system. No shared sense of what the team existed to do.

My first move was deliberate: say yes more than no. I needed to demonstrate that design could be a partner — fast, useful, additive — before I had any standing to raise the bar. Earning trust isn't a detour. It's the path.

Four years later: every priority product has an embedded designer. PMs initiate conversations with design before a feature reaches the roadmap. There are two dedicated researchers. And there is Compass — a design system built from scratch, now being extended so AI agents can read it, generate prototypes from it, and improve the handoff between design and engineering.

That last part is intentional. Building infrastructure before it's obviously needed is one of the things I find most useful to be working on right now.

What I keep coming back to is the connection between the small detail and the bigger picture. How a single friction point in a user flow reveals a strategic gap. How a team dynamic reflects something in the org structure. How a PM who avoids design is usually responding to something design created. That systems-level thinking is where I feel most useful — and what I try to build into everything I touch.

The conversation about AI in design tends to focus on tools. Which platform just launched, which feature just shipped, which workflow just got faster. That's fine, but it's not where the interesting shift is happening.

What I keep coming back to is everything that happens before you open a tool. Understanding what you actually want to achieve. Thinking through what a prompt actually needs. Deciding what you want to communicate before a single pixel exists. That upstream thinking is what AI amplifies when you use it well.

Right now that includes running sessions on how we're actually using AI for around 120 product people across the company, 48 of them designers — how to prototype with it without losing craft, how to avoid the sameness AI output defaults to if nobody pushes back on it, which decisions still need a human in the room. Teaching it is where I learn the most about what I actually believe.

I find the uncertainty more motivating than scary. Most days.