A psychologist's field notes on working in tech.
For designers who know what they should be doing but can't seem to start. A weekly newsletter on the patterns underneath — and 1:1 sessions and a small cohort for breaking them.
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Field notes on psychology & product strategy. No fluff. No Figma tutorials.
Every issue follows the same structure: a 3-minute video from the trenches, then a tactical essay you can use tomorrow at 9 AM.
Stakeholder Psychology
How PMs think, why engineers resist, and the behavioral science behind getting buy-in without formal authority.
Business-Fluent Design
Translating design decisions into the language of retention, risk, and revenue — the vocabulary that gets you heard in strategy meetings.
The Intentional Career
The psychological work of deciding who you want to become professionally — not just collecting frameworks, but building the identity to use them.
The Autopilot Problem
How attention gets hijacked, why decisions happen before you notice you're making them, and what it takes to actually catch the moment of choice.
Who writes this
I'm Stefan Vilar Markiewicz — a Product Design Manager in Porto with a master's in psychology and a postgraduate in UX research. I lead design inside a tech company. I'm not a coach who left tech to talk about it from a distance. I'm a practitioner still in the room — doing the inner work with structured data, including a personal ACT logging tool I built to track my own attention patterns over time. What I write here is what I'm actually noticing as I do the work.
Work with me
Everything here runs on one lens: the behaviour is downstream of the pattern. Some of this work is inner — seeing what's actually running you. Some of it is outer — the reps that change how you operate. Most people need both.
FLAGSHIP · PRIVATE COHORT
The Shaping Course
An eight-session rehearsal program that turns UI designers into product designers — on the work already on your plate. One rep per session, on your live project. Currently running as a closed pilot.
1:1 · OPEN
The Clarity Session
Two focused sessions with a psychologist who still works in tech. We find the pattern underneath the stuckness — the one you can't see because you're standing inside it — and build the single move that interrupts it. €150.
ENTRY POINT · OPEN
The Positioning Session
One hour with a hiring manager who reads these for a living. I review your CV and portfolio beforehand, we work out what role you're actually going for, and you get written takeaways after. €120 founding rate.