Originally posted to LinkedIn
Five months into my journey as Chief Design Officer, I can say we are building something truly different at Nubank. Different in structure, ambition, in how we actually work.
At Nu, customer obsession is a system
Everyone says they're customer-centric. At Nubank, we've operationalized it. We built Customer Connections, a program that's put over 1,000 Nubankers in direct contact with more than 400 customers so far. Home visits, store visits, watching people use our app in their actual lives.
I've done several of these myself in Brazil. When the CDO personally engages with customers, it signals what the organization should value. Sitting in someone's living room, watching them navigate our app, hearing about their financial lives. You can't get that from a dashboard. This proximity changes everything. And it's becoming a repeatable practice across the company.
Leading a multidisciplinary organization
Most Chief Design Officers lead design teams. Designers, researchers, maybe content designers. At Nubank, my organization also includes product managers, engineers, and data scientists. This isn't just an org chart quirk. It changes how you think about problems. When you only lead designers, you're constantly selling design in, negotiating for a seat at the table. When you lead the whole stack, those conversations disappear. Should we build this feature? How should the architecture work? What's the right quality bar? These become shared questions, not departmental debates.
It's harder in some ways. I've had to grow as a technical leader, learning to speak credibly about mobile architecture, platform strategy, and engineering trade-offs. I've had to put on my product hat, balancing priorities and establishing strategy. But it's the only way to move at the speed and quality this company needs and our customers deserve.
Design driving business outcomes
As a member of the Management Team, I'm not just advising on company-wide initiatives. I'm driving them. And this matters.
When a CDO participates in board meetings, leads strategic programs rather than just contributing design input, it signals something fundamental about how the company thinks. Quality isn't a technical concern that design comments on. Customer experience isn't a layer added after strategy is set. These are the strategy.
AI as infrastructure
Our design team has 99% active adoption of AI tools. But we've gone further. We're working on design-to-code pipelines that generate production-quality Flutter code from Figma. AI-assisted research workflows. Prototyping systems that compress weeks into days.
The goal isn't efficiency for its own sake. If we automate the routine work, our best people can focus on genuinely hard problems. How do we build a design system that scales globally, across languages and cultures? How do we maintain quality while moving fast? How do we make space and time to hone the details and nail the craft?
Building for global scale
In these five months, I've traveled constantly. Four trips to Brazil, one to Colombia, one to Mexico. I'm on the ground with teams, understanding local markets, seeing how our product works in different contexts. Our design system and content architectures need to work in São Paulo, Bogotá, Mexico City, and eventually the world.
How do you systematize banking UX so that its primitives can be adapted to markets with different financial regulations, capabilities, and sophistication? This is a pure synthesis of anthropology, business, and design strategy. This isn't a Latin American fintech story anymore. It's a global financial platform story.
What I'm most grateful for
The teams here are extraordinary. Designers who care deeply about craft. Researchers who keep us close to customers. Engineers who want to build excellent products. Product managers who think in systems. There's a level of ambition here that's rare. We're not trying to be a little better than competitors. We're trying to build the best financial experience in the world.
More to come in 2026. It's always Day 1 and we're just getting started.