I'm Francesco design leader with focus on service design, research and product strategy.

Originally from the South of Italy, I’ve lived and worked in Milan, Shanghai, and New York. With a background in Industrial and Service Design from Politecnico di Milano and Tongji University, I spent five years in Shanghai taking my first steps into consulting and in-house roles. From there, I moved to NYC and joined frog, where I consulted for a variety of clients, primarily in financial services and healthcare. As an Associate Design Director, I also contributed to building frog’s North America Service Design practice.

Today, I’m a Senior Design Manager at Capital One, focusing on Treasury Management and loan origination. Beyond the day job, I’ve taught a Service Design course at Tongji, mentored students through programs at SCAD and Politecnico, and I currently co-lead the Service Design Network chapter here in New York.

Service Design is the orchestration of processes and touchpoints to bridge the gap between business value and the delivered experience. It takes an organization's core assumptions and maps them directly to real user behaviors, offering the physical or digital touchpoints needed to navigate that experience.

I view services through four lenses: they are integrated, moving seamlessly alongside regulations and technology; empowering, providing users with clear access and choices rather than rigid solutions; iterative, constantly evolving to manage human unpredictability; and measurable, generating data across artifacts and human interactions that can be rigorously tracked against success metrics.

I bring my true, authentic self to work, which helps me build deep empathy with my team and partners. I focus on setting clear, transparent goals, establishing regular feedback loops, and proactively removing blockers so everyone can do their best work aligned with their unique strengths and growth opportunities.

I care deeply about growing the team’s craft - whether that's coaching junior designers, building reusable frameworks, or raising the bar for quality through regular critique sessions. Leadership also means never standing still myself, so I make sure to keep learning from my own mentors and stay active in communities of practice like the Service Design Network.

True collaboration happens when user needs and business goals explicitly coincide. I like to bring cross-functional partners into the loop early and often, taking the time to really understand their agendas and constraints so we can build shared goals. By working across silos, design teams have the unique vantage point to spot technical or operational synergies and eliminate duplicative work across the portfolio.

My approach balances data-driven insights with qualitative human stories. Most importantly, I don't designs in a silo: I bring stakeholders directly into co-creation sessions so they become active authors of the vision.

Strategic impact begins with a bold, customer-centric vision - without it, execution loses its direction. I build cross-functional alignment by using visual storytelling to translate highly complex, multidimensional ecosystems into compelling, accessible narratives. However, a vision must remain adaptable; you have to stay flexible as new data and constraints shift.

To deliver real results, I break that big North Star down into smaller, iterative deliverables. This keeps roadmaps balanced, allowing the organization to make smart, long-term investments while locking in quick wins along the way.

I treat AI as a collaborative partner to accelerate and elevate different phases of the product-service design lifecycle. During generative research, I leverage AI to rapidly synthesize large volumes of findings, cluster dense data points, and uncover early user insights. In the strategic definition phase, it helps transition static artifacts into dynamic, interactive journey maps that represent complex ecosystems. Finally, when moving from strategy to execution, AI empowers me to quickly prototype solutions, generating user interface screens and interactive, clickable flows to facilitate rapid validation and feedback.