Back in 2013 I worked for a big Italian Design Agency as a UX/UI Designer and Art Director. To be honest, I can use the term UX/UI now, but in Italy, user experience was not even a thing yet. Things were changing slowly, but big and established agencies were still focused on old advertising roles such as Art Directors and Copywriters.

Coming from that background, but being into what was happening in Silicon Valley for years, I needed fresh air and new challenges. That’s why together with a colleague we founded our firm.

We wanted something new and fresh, far from the slow and complicated logic of the old companies we were used to working for.

Our core was Digital Design and User Experience. Our name, Fightbean (a play on words based on the Piedmontese dialect, meaning “well done”), was a statement for us to highlight our attention to detail and our dedication to our beloved work.

We started with a small team of 2-4 people, and we escalated quickly, reaching 10 people in a couple of years. We had a small Dev Team, a Design Team, and a Project Manager, being able to tackle a project from start to end.

After 4-5 years, we decided to externalize development, focusing only on strategic design, workshops, and UX/UI design.

I have been Creative Director and Head of Design of the company for 7 years, at first working myself on projects as a UX/UI designer, then managing my team, assuring quality checks, pitching to clients, managing projects, organizing events, and finally moderating workshops.

Work ethic and work-life balance were a big part of our culture. We strongly believed that, if well managed, the time you have from 9-6 is more than enough, with no need for extra hours or working weekends. That meant being extremely organized and focused during your working hours, but it also meant educating clients and partners about our beliefs and working style.

We built a culture around our brand, creating a kind of allure, offering benefits such as remote work a long time before Covid, and offering education and rewards based on personal goals and KR.

We organized and spoke at events, trying to share our passion for digital design and building a community around us of people in love with User Experience.

Based on Agile development methodologies, we established a series of rituals, such as daily standups, team retrospectives and project retrospectives, internal workshops, team building activities and 1-1 catchups.

For 7 years we worked for hundreds of clients, both startup and large organizations. Here are some snapshot of the work I did myself as a designer and I managed, thanks to a great team of professionals.

It took us a while, but finally we found something that helped us stand out from the crowd. We specialized in Design Sprint and workshop facilitation, adapting the Jake Knapp methodology to our working style and to our clients.

We built a scalable product that we could sell to clients, changing the original workshop from 5 to 4 days of full time work. Envisioning, Designing, Prototyping and testing a product quickly was such a pleasure for us, after years of long lasting projects.
We were able to apply this Design Thinking methodology to many startups, but also to some big companies such as Edenred.

Nonetheless, we specialized in other design thinking methodologies and workshops, definitively shifting the company from an all purpose design Agency to a User Experience Design studio.

To help the studio grow we always tried to be a part of the Italian design community, participating to events as speaker, organizing workshop nights and teaching in some of the most important design schools in Torino.

• I learned a lot. Being able to build a thing from scratch and managing different aspect of it it was a big plus for me
• I learned to be more than a Designer.
• I learned how not to be the shitty boss we all had once in a lifeitme, to value work and value time
• I learned that everything comes to an end, and that you can always start from scratch again. After 7 years I had different ideas and different life goals, so I took the decision to sell my part of the company, which still exist and it is doing great, check it out. It will always be a part of me and I will always be grateful to everyone that shared this part of the journey with me.