Jose Romero · Zaragoza, Spain

About

I've always been more comfortable
with hard problems than easy briefs.

I'm Jose Romero — a senior product designer with 12 years of experience across digital products, conversion strategy, and design systems. I work in English and Spanish at professional level, and I'm currently based in Zaragoza, Spain, working as an embedded senior designer on IKEA's New Business Platform — part of the team building two peer-to-peer marketplaces from their early stages through European expansion.

Before that, I spent three years at Flat 101, one of Spain's leading digital consultancies, running UX and CRO work across four to eight concurrent enterprise accounts simultaneously. Santander Nordics, Meliá Hotels International, Mapfre, Mutua Madrileña, AXA Spain, IQOS, XTI — different industries, different team structures, often at the same time.

That arc — over 120 projects spanning print, branding, digital product, and CRO, then a sharp narrowing into harder, longer, more complex engagements, and now full embeddedness inside a single product team — was not planned. But looking back, each phase earned the conditions for the next. The systems thinking that made complex engagements legible is the same thinking that makes it possible to design AI into a workflow — not use it as a shortcut, but treat it as a process layer to be architected.

Career

Brands I've designed for,
across twelve years.

Earlier Breadth

120+

Projects across disciplines — branding, print, video, digital, and campaigns

Then Complexity

13

Enterprise accounts at Flat 101, across banking, insurance, hospitality, and retail

Now Depth

2

Products in active design, embedded inside IKEA's product team

Clients

Garaje de Ideas 2025 — Present: IKEA (Ingka Group)
Flat 101 2022 — 2025: Meliá Hotels International·Santander Nordics·Mapfre España·Mapfre Internacional·AXA Spain·IQOS Club Spain·Mutua Madrileña·Bankinter·BNP Paribas·XTI·Subaru Spain·GNP·Affinity Petcare
Factor Común 2016 — 2021: IGP·CIPIMM·ETA·CNDIG·Universidad de Moa·ISMMM·Adypel S.A.·Hidroenergía·Spanish Embassy in Cuba·Amappzing·American Force Music·Industrial Dynamic Control
Independent 2014 — 2021: CubaMax·AlaCasa·MVPicks·NimbusPC·Gartour·Geominera S.A.·Spanish Consulate in Havana·Aires de Fiesta·Envametal

Experience

Tenures in digital product design
& strategic CRO.

Garaje de Ideas / Groupe EDG — IKEA New Business Platform

2025 — Present

Senior Product Designer (Implant)

Zaragoza, Spain (English environment)

Embedded full-time within IKEA's New Business Platform — an internal startup unit within Ingka Group, tasked with expanding IKEA beyond furniture into adjacent markets across Europe.

IKEA Home Services

A peer-to-peer marketplace connecting homeowners with verified professionals across 50+ home improvement categories. Launched in Madrid in September 2024, expanded to seven Spanish cities by mid-2026. Published figures: 500,000+ downloads, 21,000 service requests completed, 57,000 new or reactivated IKEA Family members, 4.9/5 customer satisfaction rating. I work across user flows, prototyping, in-store user research sessions at IKEA locations, and accessibility auditing — alongside product owners, service designers, engineers, content designers, and business developers.

IKEA Second-hand Marketplace

Peer-to-peer resale of IKEA products, with IKEA's catalog as a data backbone for listings. Piloted in Madrid, now live in five European countries, with full European expansion committed. I contribute to product design and cross-functional collaboration as the platform matures and scales.

Design operations

Built the team's ways-of-working system from scratch — a cross-tool framework spanning Figma (source of truth), Jira, Confluence, and Phrase — replacing an informal, person-dependent process with something documented, teachable, and designed to survive personnel change.

AI workflow design & facilitation

Facilitating Shape Up methodology sessions for the product team — and designing the AI layer on top. The facilitation work led to a parallel body of work: designing AI-assisted workflows for the shaping process itself, including multi-agent orchestration approaches that distribute complex product features across specialized agents (problem decomposition, constraint mapping, solution evaluation). Outputs are structured to flow directly into the team's established Confluence documentation format.

Running AI literacy sessions for senior design professionals at Garaje de Ideas, focused on workflow design rather than tool use.

Flat 101 (Digital consultancy) — flat101.es

2022 — 2025

Senior UX/CRO Designer

Spain

Flat 101 is one of Spain's leading digital consultancies. I worked across 4–8 concurrent enterprise accounts — each with different teams, different methodologies, and different definitions of success — simultaneously.

Meliá Hotels International

Three-year engagement on the design and optimisation of an internal marketing campaign management platform, built from scratch. Conducted multi-hour workshops with senior directors from multiple international departments at Meliá's headquarters to define requirements and validate direction. Worked with a team of up to 5 designers and 8 engineers (rotating over time) to deliver a platform managing dozens of live campaigns across all of Meliá's international markets.

Santander Nordics

Lead UX/CRO designer on an ongoing conversion optimisation programme across consumer loan, credit card, deposit, and car loan funnels in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. A multi-country, regulated environment requiring both precision and adaptability.

Mapfre

UX design for AFIN, Mapfre's self-service financial management app (investments, savings, pension plans). Also part of the digital platform scaling programme for Mapfre's international brands: Verti Italy, Germany, and Spain — a major cross-border design and localisation effort.

CRO & E-commerce Optimisation Programmes

Contributed to and led various optimization and redesign initiatives:

Mutua Madrileña: CRO programme contributing to a +41% increase in leads (published by Flat 101).
AXA Spain: Part of the CRO programme contributing to +18% increase in insurance contracts (published by Flat 101).
IQOS Club Spain: Project lead for ongoing CRO on Philip Morris's loyalty platform. Fast-cycle experimentation under limited traffic and shared resources.
XTI Store: Full e-commerce redesign within a Magento platform migration.
Audits: Experience, CRO, and behavioral audits for Bankinter, Subaru Spain, and Affinity Petcare.

Tools: Optimizely · AB Tasty · ContentSquare · VWO · Hotjar · Google Analytics · Optimal Workshop · Figma

Factor Común

2016 — 2021

Co-founder & Design Lead

Havana, Cuba

I co-founded Factor Común at 23 — a registered design and communications studio in Havana — while completing a five-year degree in Visual Communication Design. What started as a freelance collaboration with two colleagues grew into a formal studio covering branding, editorial design, digital interfaces, audiovisual production, and campaign design, for institutional clients across Cuba.

Running that studio meant handling more than design: client relationships, project planning, supplier coordination, and new business — across disciplines and under significant resource constraints. The scale was different from anything I've done since, but the operational principles were the same. It gave me a foundation in structured thinking and commercial reality that preceded any formal training in design methodology.

"I had the privilege of reporting directly to him — his capacity to inspire and guide our team was evident in our project successes. His acumen in UX/UI elevated our products, combining functionality with aesthetics seamlessly."

Erick Hernández Pino Product Designer · Factor Común

"A great communicator and a flexible professional, capable of moving comfortably from one area of knowledge to another. His capacity to work with and lead teams made my experience working with him gratifying."

Luis E. Lázaro García Architect & Interior Designer · Factor Común

ISDi / Universidad de La Habana

2018 — 2021

UI Design Professor

Havana, Cuba / Remote

Taught UI design at the Instituto Superior de Diseño, affiliated with the University of Havana — developing curriculum, facilitating studio sessions, and building shared understanding of complex concepts across students at different levels of ability and experience.

The habits formed here — making the implicit explicit, adjusting communication based on who's in the room, building consensus around ambiguous problems — have proven more transferable to enterprise design work than I would have expected. The same skills that make a good teacher make a good facilitator. I've drawn on them consistently ever since.

Capabilities

Skillsets shaped in
real-world environments.

Product Design

End-to-end digital product design across web and mobile — from research and flows to high-fidelity prototypes and handoff-ready specifications.

Conversion Rate Optimisation

Data-driven experimentation across e-commerce, banking, insurance, and loyalty platforms. Hypothesis generation, A/B and multivariate test design, analytics interpretation, and results communication to stakeholders.

Behavioral Economics

Applying behavioral science frameworks — cognitive bias, loss aversion, social proof, friction analysis, defaults — to design decisions that affect how people think and act online.

UX Research

Moderated and unmoderated user research, in-store testing sessions, heuristic evaluation, accessibility auditing (WCAG), and synthesis into actionable design direction.

Design Operations

Process design, cross-tool workflow architecture (Figma, Jira, Confluence, Phrase), ways-of-working documentation, and team facilitation.

AI Integration in Workflows

Designing AI-assisted facilitation processes for complex product shaping. Building and demonstrating multi-agent orchestration workflows. Running AI literacy sessions for senior design teams.

Stakeholder Communication

Operating effectively within complex enterprise environments — across product, engineering, business, and client teams, in English and Spanish — to move work forward despite incomplete information and competing priorities.

Tools & Platforms

Figma FigJam Jira Confluence Miro Hotjar ContentSquare Optimizely AB Tasty VWO Optimal Workshop Phrase Notion Google Analytics AI Orchestration Platforms

I've always been more comfortable with hard problems than easy briefs.

Brands I've designed for,across twelve years.

Tenures in digital product design & strategic CRO.