TL;DR
TWAICE was a company built by battery engineers, for battery engineers. The initial instinct was "give us the data and we'll figure it out" — design was new to the organization, and the product development culture had not yet adapted to what a successful SaaS business really requires.
Over three years I earned trust by consistently delivering when it wasn't straightforward.
I shaped product strategy and experience architecture that became the foundation of TWAICE's current flagship product, built genuine cross-functional alignment across engineering, CS, and product teams, and delivered the design system and unified interaction model that the product runs on today.
The result is a platform that operators, asset managers, and maintenance engineers rely on daily — to make fast calls under time pressure, run deep root-cause investigations, and protect the uptime of large-scale energy storage systems.
My role
I joined as a Senior UX Designer and over time became the primary design voice shaping product direction — without a formal leadership title.
I operated with significant autonomy from early on, with the trust of two successive design managers and growing influence across product, engineering, and customer success teams.
For a period of several months I was the most senior designer in the company without a manager above me.
My work spanned hands-on product design, experience strategy, design system ownership, cross-functional alignment, and mentoring.
I was embedded in the energy team as the sole designer for the majority of my time there — owning design from discovery through to shipped product.
How it started
1. What I found when I arrived
TWAICE had one product when I joined
A basic State of Health chart embedded in its platform. The company was making its first serious attempt to build a SaaS product, but the culture around how products get built hadn't fully formed yet. PMs held the vision, engineers built toward it, and designers were new additions whose value wasn't yet clear to everyone.
I was allocated to the e-mobility team, which served mobility companies managing electric vehicle fleets. My starting point was that single SoH chart. Within my first year I turned it into a battery health widget ecosystem — designed to be embedded directly into third-party operational software. We closed deals with a software provider and two clients.
That work taught me how to move inside this organization
How to earn credibility with engineers, how to run product discovery in an environment that wasn't used to it, and how to deliver something real in a domain I was learning in parallel.
It also showed me where the friction was. Parts of the company were skeptical of design's role. The Customer Success team, in particular, had developed a wariness toward designers in client contexts after an earlier experience that had felt irrelevant to customers. That history created a quiet wall I'd need to dismantle later — carefully.
What I left behind
Product excellence and trust that made the product work possible.
In 3 years
Product architecture
The energy team had a product architecture built around how operators actually investigate problems.
Performance Manager
The company's primary product was structured around an experience logic that started with design.
Design system
The design system had reduced duplicated effort and given the team space to focus on harder problems.
Team collaboration
And CS, engineering, and design were collaborating in ways they hadn't before I arrived.
I never held a management title at TWAICE. What I held was trust — from my managers, from the product trio, from engineers, from CS, from designers navigating their own challenges who knew where to go for a useful conversation.
That trust was built one honest, useful interaction at a time. And it's what made the product work possible.
"Other designers in our team, including me, would often take his designs as inspiration. Leonardo brings valuable expertise in product strategy and user research."
Marlen BeckerSr. Product Designer