Hire Álvaro
Hire Álvaro Velasco
Design Director · Senior Product Designer. A hands-on leader in the age of AI.
Twenty years across architecture, regulated gaming, consumer AI, and B2B SaaS. Currently senior design partner to the CEO at SellerCrowd, where my work helped grow MRR 3x ($111K → $356K) and monthly contributions 65x (360 → 23,770) on flat headcount. Full-time IC, director-level, advisory and fractional work for founder-led AI-native startups and B2B SaaS between Series A and C.
How we can work
Is Álvaro available for fractional or advisory work?
Not a freelancer and not an agency. The work happens inside the team, with the CEO, PMs and engineers in the room.
- 01
Full-time senior IC or director-level.
- 02
Fractional product design leader.
- 03
Advisory.
- 04
Project / workshop.
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.
Fit
When is Álvaro not the right hire?
Best fit
Founder-led teams between Series A and C.
Decisions still happen in one room. The CEO is in the product conversation.
An AI capability without a product shape.
A model that does something interesting, no clear story for users yet, and an engineering team that’s tired of mocking the same screens twice.
A product with traction but a system getting in its own way.
Growth has plateaued. Nobody can name the bottleneck cleanly. The roadmap is full but the metric isn’t moving.
B2B SaaS, consumer AI, regulated products.
Where my Entain, William Hill, Fretello and SellerCrowd years add leverage instead of starting from zero.
Not the right fit
Visual-only refresh of an existing product.
Find a brand-design specialist. I’d be the wrong tool, and you’d pay senior rates for the wrong work.
Agency-style handoff work.
I ship inside the team. Deliver-mockups-and-disappear isn’t how I work, and the outcomes I’m proud of don’t come out of that model.
Pre-seed without a wedge yet.
I’m best when there’s already a hypothesis to sharpen. If we’re still trying to figure out what to build, you want a co-founder, not me.
Manager-of-managers.
IC by design. I lead through the work, not through a layer of reports. If the role needs an org-chart specialist, that’s not me.
Outcomes
What outcomes has Álvaro delivered?
Each one has a full write-up on this site.
The first 30 days
What does the first 30 days look like?
The first month of any engagement is spent listening, and writing down what’s heard in plain language.
Weeks 1 → 3
Listen
To the CEO, engineering, support, and users where accessible.
ALONGSIDE
Write it down
What’s heard, in plain language. No deck.
Week 4
One-page diagnosis
What works, what’s blocked, where design has the most leverage, and what should happen next.
FAQ
Before you write.
How do you hire me? Full-time, advisory, fractional?
Senior IC, director-level, or advisory work for AI-native startups. Full-time and fractional both on the table. I’m not a freelancer or an agency; I ship inside the team and partner directly with founders, PMs, and engineers. Email alvaro@albruv.com or talk to the chatbot on this site.
What are you looking for next?
I’m open to chatting with CEOs and founders who need help shaping AI-first product bets. Senior IC, director-level, advisory, or fractional. All on the table.
How do you get in touch?
Three options. Email alvaro@albruv.com, direct and read fast. The chatbot on this site (Albot) answers questions in my voice and routes the conversation if it’s worth a meeting. LinkedIn for a quick handshake.
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: the AI feature meant to anchor the Apple WWDC19 keynote wasn’t ready, so Apple proposed showcasing what became Sign in with Apple. His sign-up redesign put Fretello on stage, and sign-ups went from about 80 a week to about 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 are documented in the Building in 2026 case study. Solo, end to end, about eight weeks of evening sessions with Claude Code. 2/3 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 (360 → 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 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 the US East Coast there are about five productive overlapping hours per day. For the 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.
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