16+
Years of Experience
I know what's worth building, and what isn't.
I design enterprise systems that handle real complexity.
I'm Michel Velis, Lead Product Designer at Bitovi, where I run a team of 8 designers across 7 concurrent client engagements. For 16+ years I've designed inside some of the most operationally complex digital products in enterprise software: risk intelligence for a leading credit rating agency, contracting platforms for pharma, agricultural data systems used by farm managers in the field, and the first Paycheck Protection Program loan processing solution brought to market during the pandemic, designed under an emergency federal timeline.
My job isn't to make things look good. It's to decide what's worth building, shape how it gets built, and stay close enough to engineering that what ships matches what was designed. I write front-end code, so I understand production constraints before I start designing, not after. The results: faster design-to-dev handoff, fewer UI bug reports after standardizing the component library, and an idea-to-prototype cycle that dropped from days to hours with AI agents.
Before enterprise software I designed album art and merchandise for touring artists, where brand identity had to land in three seconds or not at all. That taught me design isn't decoration. It's how you earn trust before anyone reads a word. I've carried that instinct into every product since. Bilingual in English and Spanish. Figma-certified. And genuinely interested in what AI unlocks for design, and what it still gets wrong.
Core Design Values
UsefulConsideredBeautifulWell made
These four words are a filter, not a slogan. Useful means someone's workday got shorter. Considered means the edge cases were designed, not discovered. Beautiful means it looks like someone cared, because someone did. Well made means engineering can build it without guessing. If a screen can't pass all four, it isn't done.
I zoom out to company strategy and zoom in to token names, because the gap between those two altitudes is where products quietly fail. I think big and move fast, but I don't confuse motion with progress. A team pushing toward something none of us could build alone gives me energy, and the work has to connect to something deeper than the sprint. The goal never changes: leave it better than when I began.
Four disciplines. One standard.
Useful, considered, beautiful, well made: here's how those values cash out across strategy, systems, outcomes, and AI workflows. They only work when they're connected, and connecting them is where most of the real work happens.
Product Strategy
Leading product design for Fortune 500 enterprises and startups across FinTech, AgTech, and SaaS: 5+ discovery workshops and 12+ user interviews defining core product requirements for clients like a global quick-service restaurant brand and a major financial risk intelligence firm. On a specialty pharmaceutical contracting platform, design strategy secured executive buy-in and full funding for the build.
Design Systems
Co-led PwC's global design system: 150+ core components and a governance model adopted by 16 international product teams. At Bitovi, I set the component-library architecture standard now used across 5 client engagements, with Storybook and Figma Code Connect keeping design tokens and production components in parity. Design systems are trust infrastructure, not bureaucracy.
Outcomes-Driven Design
I measure what matters. Standardizing the component library cut UI bug reports 35% quarter-over-quarter. Consolidating 26 KPIs into self-serve dashboards replaced 37 ad-hoc data requests a month. On a specialty pharma contracting platform, my redesigned contract flow cut processing time from 21 to 7 days and hit a 97% task success rate in testing. Its patient portal went from ambiguous 0-to-1 concept to production. Post-launch design escalations: zero.
AI Workflows
AI is both accelerator and catalyst: it speeds up what teams already do and changes what they can attempt. I build the agentic infrastructure and the governance layer. At a major financial risk intelligence firm, MCP servers I built with Spring AI let internal AI agents pull live application context and scaffold prototypes on demand, cutting idea-to-prototype time from 2 days to 3 hours across departments. You get the velocity of autonomous tooling without the drift, because judgment never leaves the humans accountable for the system. Accountability doesn't transfer to a loop.
Skills, Interests & Education
Skills
Education
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Graphic Design
The Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale — 2010 – 2013
Associate of Arts and Sciences (AAS), Graphic and Web Design
Keiser University — 2008 – 2010
Certifications
Figma Professional Certification — 2026
Fullstory Certified — 2025
Tech Stack
When I'm not working
Outside of work, I prioritize time with my family, friends and being outdoors. To keep my creative spark alive, I lean into tactile hobbies like cooking and working with wood, and I love exploring the city at night. You'll also find me at the gym, or out walking my rebellious husky.
Family & friends
Being outdoors
Cooking
Working with wood
City nights
Gym sessions
Walking my rebellious husky
Open for work
Currently taking on new challenges
If you're building something ambitious, need a designer who ships, or want an agentic, AI-ready design system your tools can read as fluently as your team does: let's talk.
Get in touch