Hire Álvaro Velasco

Who is Álvaro Velasco?

A senior product designer with twenty years of work across architecture, regulated gaming, consumer AI, and B2B SaaS. Architect by training, then videogames, then regulated gambling at GVC (now Entain) and William Hill at FTSE100 scale, then consumer AI at Fretello — which became a Sign in with Apple launch partner at Apple's WWDC19 keynote — and currently five years into SellerCrowd, a B2B sellers community.

The online handle Albruv is the same person: the nickname came from British colleagues at GVC who started calling him Al, then bruv, and Albruv stuck. The pseudonym is the source of the domain (albruv.com), the GitHub handle (github.com/Albruv), and the working studio identity. Both names refer to the same senior product designer.

What kind of AI product designer is Álvaro?

The kind who shapes the product around the AI capability, not the marketing around the AI capability. The model is half the work. The other half is figuring out the UX, the prompt and system logic, the eval loop, and the moment inside the product where the AI feature actually earns its place — and what to ship when the AI isn't ready for the stage. Álvaro learned this lesson in 2019 at Fretello, where the AI feature meant to anchor the Apple WWDC19 keynote wasn't ready three weeks out; he cut a sign-up redesign that put Fretello on stage instead, and signups went from 80 a week to 1,200 a week in the week of release.

The same shape now shows up at albruv.com itself. The chatbot, scorer, and digest behind the portfolio is documented in the Building in 2026 case study. Solo, end to end, eight weeks of evening sessions with Claude Code. Two-thirds of the work was deciding what to ship, not how to ship it.

If you have an AI capability without a product shape — a model that does something interesting and an engineering team that's tired of mocking the same screens twice — this is the work Álvaro is most useful for.

How does Álvaro think about B2B SaaS growth?

Growth is a system, not a screen. Loops, incentives, pricing, community, and data are the levers; the form or the dashboard or the onboarding flow are the visible end of those levers. Álvaro's longest engagement is at SellerCrowd, a B2B sellers community where the growth problem in 2021 was the standard one — flat MRR, flat contributions, plateaued community. The instinct most teams reach for is “redesign the form.” The actual lever was the system around the form: who gets recognised, when, for what; how the recognition compounds into status; how status feeds back into more contributions.

Five years on, the contribution engine drives a 65x lift in monthly contributions (from 360 to 23,770) and 3x MRR ($111K → $356K) on flat headcount. The full mechanism is in the SellerCrowd case study.

This is the work where Álvaro is most defensible: a senior product designer who can diagnose a B2B SaaS growth system, design the loop, and ship it inside the team instead of from outside as an agency.

Is Álvaro available for fractional or advisory work?

Yes. Álvaro takes four engagement shapes:

• Full-time senior IC or director-level. Inside the team, partnering with the CEO, PMs, and engineers. Best fit when the product bet is large enough that part-time attention won't carry it.
• Fractional product design leader. Two to three days a week, inside the team rhythm, on a defined engagement. Best fit for founder-led companies that need senior product judgment but don't yet have the runway or volume for a full-time lead.
• Advisory. Six to twelve weeks of focused engagement on a specific question — usually a product diagnosis or a growth system that's gone flat. Ends with a written diagnosis and a clear next move, not a wireframe deck.
• Project / workshop. One to two weeks of intensive work on a contained problem — a workshop, a redesign sprint, a system audit. Best fit when a team needs a fresh senior pass before committing to a longer engagement.

Álvaro is not a freelancer and not an agency. The work is done inside the team, with the CEO, PMs, and engineers in the room. The fractional and advisory shapes exist because not every founder-led team needs full-time senior-IC attention, but most need senior product judgment at some cadence.

Is Álvaro available remote from Spain?

Yes. Álvaro is based in Estepona on Spain's Costa del Sol, working remote-first by preference, and has worked across European, US, and APAC time zones. Fluent in Spanish and English. Comfortable with distributed teams and asynchronous work, and available for travel for kick-offs, workshops, and offsites.

For European and UK teams the time-zone overlap is full. For US East Coast there are five productive overlapping hours per day. For US West Coast the overlap is narrower but workable when one of the two ends is willing to flex. APAC is async by default and Álvaro has run several engagements in that mode.

What outcomes has Álvaro delivered?

Numbers from three case studies, each with a full write-up on this site:

• SellerCrowd: 3x MRR ($111K → $356K) and 65x monthly contributions (360 → 23,770), on flat headcount, over five years. Senior design partner to the CEO. Read the case study.
• Fretello / WWDC19: Sign-up redesign that put Fretello on Apple's WWDC19 keynote stage as a Sign in with Apple launch partner. Signups went from 80 a week to 1,200 a week in the week of release. Senior product designer. Read the case study.
• GVC Holdings: Cashier rebuild across 15 regulated-gaming brands. 4x average deposit value, second-deposit rate quadrupled (2% → 8%), time-to-success cut from 20 seconds to under 6. Lead designer for portal and casino, 8-person UX team. Read the case study.

What does the first 30 days look like?

Diagnosis first. The first month of any engagement is spent listening — to the CEO, engineering, support, and users where accessible — and writing down what's heard in plain language. By week four there's usually a one-page diagnosis: what works, what's blocked, where design has the most leverage, and what should happen next.

The output is a shared map, not a recommendation deck. A team that agrees on the diagnosis can disagree productively about the solution. A team that hasn't aligned on the diagnosis will argue about the solution forever. The full operating model lives at the methodology page.

When is Álvaro not the right hire?

Four cases where someone else is a better fit:

• Visual-only refresh. If the brief is “make our product look prettier,” a brand-design specialist is the right hire. Álvaro would be the wrong tool, and you'd pay senior rates for the wrong work.
• Agency-style handoff. Deliver mockups and disappear isn't how Álvaro works. The outcomes he's proud of don't come out of that model.
• Pre-seed without a wedge. If the team is still trying to figure out what to build, the right hire is a co-founder, not a senior product designer. Álvaro is most useful when there's already a hypothesis to sharpen.
• Manager-of-managers. IC by design. Álvaro leads through the work, not through a layer of reports. If the role needs an org-chart specialist, that's not him.