About
Álvaro Velasco
Turning ambiguity into products that move numbers.
Design Director · Senior Product Designer
Estepona, Spain · Remote-first
Availability
Always interested in meaningful product challenges, especially at the intersection of UX, strategy, and AI. This quarter I have room for one or two selective advisory conversations or collaborations.
Quick facts
- Álvaro Velasco is a senior product designer who ships with AI.
- Álvaro Velasco is also known online as Albruv (the source of albruv.com).
- Álvaro Velasco is based in Estepona, Spain, working remote-first.
- Álvaro Velasco is currently senior design partner to the CEO at SellerCrowd, where his work helped grow MRR 3x on flat headcount.
- Álvaro Velasco has twenty years across architecture, regulated gaming (Entain/GVC, William Hill, Sportingbet), consumer AI (Fretello, WWDC19 launch partner for Sign in with Apple), and B2B SaaS.
- Álvaro Velasco is best engaged for senior IC or director-level product/design work at AI-native startups.
I help figure out what we're building and then I actively help shape it and build it. Most recently: 3x MRR at SellerCrowd with flat headcount, as the senior design partner to the CEO.
Twenty years across architecture, regulated gaming, consumer AI, and B2B SaaS. Led an 8-person UX team at GVC; shipped as core designer at William Hill, Fretello, and SellerCrowd today. I've done both; I'll do either. I love shipping with AI; the proof is the chatbot I built for myself.
In my spare time, you can find me painting miniatures and chairing my local community. Detail-obsessed in every context, apparently.
How I work
- Diagnose the business and the product system. Before pixels, the question is which behaviour matters.
- Shape the smallest thing that teaches us something. Big bets get cheaper when the first iteration earns the right to the next one.
- Design the system, not just the screen. Loops, incentives, pricing, community, data — the screen is the visible end of the system.
- Prototype fast with AI. Claude Code, prompt specs, eval loops. Shipping is the new thinking tool.
- Ship, measure, tune. The work isn't finished when it's pretty. It's finished when the numbers move.
Methods I keep coming back to
Two methodologies do most of the heavy lifting on how I run the work. Both have their own case study with worked examples from Fretello.
Hypothesis-driven design turns assumptions into four-line claims (We believe that… For… We will… We'll know this is true when…) so a cross-functional team can disagree productively, not philosophically. Less spec, more learning.
Benchmarking with SUM compares two designs on a single standardised score combining completion, time on task, and satisfaction. The way I break ties when two prototypes both look great.
Both methods exist to push the human conversation upstream of the build. Shipping to prod is the easy part of the job now; AI handles most of it. The hard part, the part AI can't do today, is shadowing real users, sitting in interviews, turning what I see into something the team can act on, and having the conversation about why something should ship one way or another. That's where I keep adding value: the looking, the listening, and the calls only humans can make.
Read the full methodology page → for the five-step operating model, both named methods in context, and a note on workshops.
How I partner with teams
How I work
I'm most useful when the challenge is still ambiguous: shaping product direction, simplifying complex UX systems, designing AI-assisted workflows, or helping teams turn scattered ideas into a clearer product experience.
First 30 days
The first month is usually about clarity. I work with teams to understand the product, users, business goals, current decision-making process, and where design can create the most leverage. The output is typically a focused diagnosis: what's working, what's blocked, where UX can have the most impact, and what should happen next.
Typical engagement length
Most advisory collaborations run for 6–12 weeks. That's usually enough time to diagnose the problem, align the team, shape a product/design direction, and create practical next steps. Longer partnerships can make sense when the work involves deeper product strategy, design leadership, or ongoing support through execution.
What I won't do
I'm probably not the right fit for pure production design, visual polish in isolation, one-off landing pages, or projects where design is expected to “make it look better” after the product direction is already fixed. My best work happens when design is involved in shaping the problem, not just decorating the solution.
Selected work
- The SellerCrowd contribution engine → Five years turning a stalled B2B community into a compounding engine. 3x MRR, 65x monthly contributions, zero new headcount.
- Bringing Fretello to WWDC19 → How a guitar-learning app landed on Apple's keynote stage as a Sign in with Apple launch partner.
- Building in 2026 → The day my portfolio started answering back. From Claude Code to a lead qualifier that scores conversations.