A psychologist working in design.
Product Design Manager · Porto, Portugal · ListenIn Labs
I'm Stefan Vilar Markiewicz — a Product Design Manager based in Porto, Portugal. I lead design teams inside tech companies. I sit in the messy meetings where features get funded, priorities get reshuffled, and good design work gets killed by bad communication.
But my foundation isn't in design. It's in psychology — a masters with a specialization in psychotherapy. I added a postgraduate in UX and design research later, but the psychology came first. That sequence changed everything.
That combination changed everything about how I approach my work. I stopped seeing stakeholder pushback as an insult to my craft and started seeing it as a cognitive bias I could decode. I stopped treating career stagnation as a skills gap and started treating it as an identity problem. I stopped reacting to the room and started reading it.
ListenIn Labs is the newsletter I wish I'd had when I was a mid-level designer getting steamrolled in meetings. It sits at the intersection of cognitive psychology, product strategy, and the messy reality of how tech companies actually work.
Every issue starts with something I've personally observed — in my own patterns, in my team, in the weird gap between how designers think and how the business thinks. And every issue ends with something you can use tomorrow at 9 AM.
"I stopped treating career stagnation as a skills gap and started treating it as an identity problem."
What I write about
The Autopilot Problem
The attention patterns and unconscious habits that keep designers reactive.
Stakeholder Psychology
Decoding how PMs, engineers, and leadership actually think and decide.
Business-Fluent Design
Translating design work into the language of business outcomes.
The Intentional Career
The psychological work of building a career on purpose, not on autopilot.
Work with me
Portfolio Teardown
You share your strongest case study. I tear down the narrative on my own time. Then we get on a 45-minute call to rebuild it together — from "aesthetic showcase" to "business reasoning." You walk away with a restructured document ready to use.
The Clarity Session
Two focused sessions (60 min + 30 min) to name the pattern that's keeping you stuck, deliver a written clarity document, and lock in one concrete move. €150. No subscription. No upsell.
Product Design Manager with experience across SaaS and tech. Psychology background. I've led teams, shipped products, lost arguments to PMs, won a few back, and learned that the gap between good design and respected design is almost never about the Figma file.