Alberto Samaniego
Product Design & Strategy
www.albsama.me
Work Experience
Lead Designer & Educator / The Product Lab
Jan 2018 - Dec 2022
- Founded a small agency where I worked with over 30 startups and established companies to help them to bring digital product ideas down to earth by following a process inspired on the Design Sprint and Lean UX.
- Planned and facilitated more than 30 Design Sprints.
- Taught Product Design and Strategy training workshops for more than 100 designers, entrepreneurs, managers and front end devs.
- Mentored over 20 Junior Product Designers and Startup Founders.
Lead Product Designer / Eko Digital Bank • Contract
Nov 2020 - Sep 2022
- Lead the whole product design process from 0 to launch, reaching 100K users within the first year since launch.
- Lead the product design team composed of 2 visual designers and myself.
- Facilitated cross-disciplinary discovery processes and acted as the communication hub between designers, devs and stakeholders.
- Lead processes for new feature conceptualization, prototyping, user interviews and testing, dev handoffs and UI quality assurance.
Founder & CEO / Gurú de la Guitarra
Jan 2014 - Dec 2018
- Launched a startup that offered guitar and music foundation lessons to the Spanish speaking audience, and reached over 1,000 monthly active users on our website, and over 80,000 monthly viewers on Youtube.
- As a founder and manager of a small 3-5 person team, I had multiple roles: from video editing, to UX/UI Design, selling courses and even some development with AngularJS, Node.js and Wordpress.
Full Stack Developer / CBA Software Factory
Jul 2008 - Aug 2009
- Worked as a software developer to build a livestock management system.
- Responsibilities also included requirements gathering and software architectural design.
Other Relevant Experience
Founder • Lead Organizer / UX Paraguay
Feb 2019- Present
- Founded a local community of Product Design practitioners with the mission to elevate the professional field in Paraguay.
- We host monthly or bi-monthly open meetups for everyone who wants to learn about UX Design.
- We are building a living directory of UX Professionals to help practitioners find mentors and local recruiters find talented professionals.
Part-time Professor of HCI / Universidad Nacional de Asuncion
Jul 2015 - Dec 2022
- Opened and taught the first course on Human-Computer Interaction for Computer Science and Informatics students.
- Trained over 300 engineering students on human-centered design processes through practice, critique and reflection.
Design Sprint Instructor / Platzi • Contract
Aug 2019 - Sep 2019
- Taught an online pre-recorded course that has been taken by more than 1,200 students, where I teach how to prepare and conduct a Google's Design Sprint process.
Co-organizer / Google Developers Group • Chapter Asuncion
Jun 2015 - Dec 2015
- Co-founded and lead the first chapter of Google Developer Groups in Paraguay.
- Co-organized the first Google Dev Fest in Paraguay.
Education
MSc in Human-Computer Interaction Design • Fulbright recipient
Certifications
Skills
HMTL / CSS • Javascript • No-code / Low-code • Understanding of programming principles and software architecture