Design Leadership.
AI & Systems.

Hello, I'm Hugo. Designer by heart, manager by design.
15+ years building design teams, the standards they run on, and lately the way a company designs AI products at all.

Case Studies

Latest AI Projects

AI Design Playbook

A practical guide to designing AI features — jobs, agentic patterns, content rules, and an example design system. Includes a self-test quiz and an offline chat assistant.

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SSSSOURCED

A curation engine for designers and AI-curation professionals. Discover design and art inspiration from open collections, build mood boards, and turn them into ready-to-use image-generation prompts.

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Barcelona Sound Map

Find concerts and record stores around Barcelona by date, neighbourhood, radius, and mood. Built out of a long habit of digging for records in whatever city I'm in.

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Leading & Coaching

I lead through principles and culture, manage by outcomes, and give trust early.

Most of what I've built is the scaffolding a team needs before it can do its best work: the hiring bar, the design process, the standard people hold when nobody is checking. I've hired and developed more than fifteen designers across four companies, grown a team from two to eight, and founded a design function that started with a single designer. Outside the day job I mentor designers on ADPList.

Hugo Filipe Costa — mentoring on ADPList ADPList · Mentor
Design Mentorship

Whether you're growing into a new designer role, stepping into design leadership, or navigating a career change, I'd love to help. Schedule a free 30-minute session.

View on ADPList ↗

Speaking & Writing

Design is Dead. Long Live Design.

On design winning its seat in the room but not always the authority to go with it, and why AI is about to settle that argument for good. Part of Design is Not Dead, an ongoing Substack on design leadership.

Design is Not Dead · 2026

From Collaboration to Co-Ownership

Ran a sold-out workshop at Hatch Leadership Ateliers Barcelona on moving cross-functional teams from coordination to genuine shared ownership: decision rights, accountability gaps, and collective responsibility. April 2026 · Barcelona, Spain · 2-Day In-Person Event.

Workshop · 2026

Inside Talkdesk

An inside look at the product design process at Talkdesk, presented at Inside Talkdesk 2021.

Keynote · 2021

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Design Management MSc Thesis

Thesis on design impact in distributed and multicultural organisations. (Portuguese only)

Master's Thesis · 2021

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10+

Products shipped across ATS, risk intelligence, CX cloud, AI assistants and design systems.

15+

Years in design leadership across fintech, adtech, CX, HR tech and creator industries.

$10B

Talkdesk's valuation while I owned its enterprise platform surfaces.

0→1

Manychat's first AI products, AI Behaviour and AI Replies, shipped in eight months.

Let's talk.
Got a project, a role,
or an idea? I'm listening.