At Slovenská sporiteľňa, design had no shared way of working. Products, design files, and design systems were all fragmented — each team improvising its own approach. With a small team, we set out to build the way design works here from the ground up.

It began with the product. The internal SaaS was engineer-built, made to function rather than to be used — so we brought in UX where there simply wasn't any. We questioned the flows, pushed on usability, and kept making the case that even an old internal tool deserves good design. But fixing one product only got us so far. The real problem was that nothing we learned was written down anywhere. So the next step was documentation: a cookbook that captures our conventions, our libraries, and how design actually works here — so the next person doesn't have to ask.

The result is a shared foundation where there was none: documented conventions, common libraries, and a consistent way of working across the org. Still evolving — but the groundwork holds.

Pixel-perfect is a designer's obsession — not a client's concern. Over a couple of years at a software agency, I worked through a steady stream of client projects: small mobile apps, my first design systems, large SaaS platforms. Designers and developers shared one room, and I made a point of sitting with the front-end devs rather than handing work off to them.

The real lessons weren't about pixels. They were about budgets and trade-offs — a client paying for ten hours gets solid work, not the same finish as one paying for a hundred. Learning to match the work to the budget, instead of over-polishing everything, was the actual craft. And with little data on client projects, most calls came from instinct. Making a lot of those calls, across very different projects, is what sharpened instinct into taste.

Each project fed the next. I walked into every brief carrying what the last one taught me — and that compounding, more than any single project, is what gave me range and judgment.